Famous People Who Are (or Were) Buddhist

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Plenty of well-known public figures have practised Buddhism — but the honest list is shorter than the internet suggests, and it pays to separate a committed practitioner from someone merely “influenced by” the dharma. Below are people with a well-documented Buddhist practice or self-identification, organised by tradition, with each claim drawn from reputable sources. Where someone is better described as Buddhist-influenced, we say so plainly.

A note on how this list was made

It is very easy to wrongly call a celebrity “Buddhist.” A single yoga retreat, a meditation app, or a quotable line about impermanence is not a religious commitment. So this page applies one rule: a person appears here only if their practice or self-identification is documented in credible biographical sources — and we distinguish the committed (a sustained, openly described practice, often within a named tradition) from the merely interested or influenced. We have also left out anyone whose Buddhist label rests on rumour alone.

For the great teachers and masters — the Buddha, Nagarjuna, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and others — see our companion guide to the most influential Buddhist teachers in history. This page is about public figures who practise or practised, not about the lineage founders.

Zen practitioners

Steve Jobs

The Apple co-founder is the most famous lay student of Zen in the tech world. As a young man Jobs read Shunryū Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and for much of his life he studied with Otogawa Kōbun, a priest of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school who had come to teach in California. Kōbun was close enough to Jobs to officiate his wedding to Laurene Powell according to Zen ritual. Biographers consistently trace Jobs’s obsession with simplicity and clean design back to this Zen training. The fair description is long-time student, not monk — he was never ordained — but the influence was deep and lifelong.

Leonard Cohen — with an important caveat

The singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen went further than almost any celebrity: in 1996 he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen monk and given the Dharma name Jikan (often rendered “silence”). He spent years living at the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles as personal assistant to his teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, rising before dawn to meditate.

And yet Cohen is the clearest case of why labels need care. He repeatedly insisted he had not converted. “I am not a Buddhist,” he said. “My old religion is fine. I still feel like a Jew.” He described his Zen practice not as a religion but as “a tuning fork for consciousness” — a discipline for the mind — and he remained an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath. So Cohen was, in his own words, a Jew with a serious Zen practice: ordained, devoted, but not a convert.

Gary Snyder and the genuinely Buddhist Beats

Among the Beat writers, the most committed Buddhist was the poet Gary Snyder, who lived in Japan studying Zen for years and is widely regarded as the real article. The poet Allen Ginsberg also formalised a Buddhist commitment, taking refuge and bodhisattva vows under the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and helping found the Naropa Institute. (Their friend Jack Kerouac is a more complicated case — see below.)

Nichiren / Soka Gakkai Buddhists

One particular tradition — Nichiren Buddhism, in the form of the lay movement Soka Gakkai International (SGI) — accounts for a striking number of famous practitioners. Its central practice is simple and portable: chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of the Lotus Sutra, understood not as a prayer to an outside deity but as a way of awakening one’s own buddha-nature. That accessibility is part of why it took root among performers.

Tina Turner

The rock-and-roll legend Tina Turner is perhaps the most moving example. Introduced to the practice in 1973, she chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo daily for roughly fifty years, crediting it with giving her the strength to leave an abusive marriage and rebuild her life and career. “Buddhism literally saved my life,” she told USA Today, “and I’ve been happily chanting every day for about 50 years now.” She remained a practising SGI Buddhist until her death in 2023.

Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter

Two giants of jazz were lifelong SGI members. The pianist Herbie Hancock has said he chants Nam-myoho-renge-kyo every morning and evening — and three times before stepping on stage, “to get in sync with the moment.” His longtime collaborator, the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, practised Nichiren Buddhism for half a century; by accounts of his final days, he was still chanting near the end of his life when he died in 2023. Both spoke often about how the practice shaped their music toward compassion and human connection.

Orlando Bloom

The actor Orlando Bloom discovered Nichiren Buddhism as a teenager and is a practising member of Soka Gakkai. He has spoken openly and repeatedly about chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to steady himself — before auditions, on set, and through the ordinary difficulties of life — describing it as the through-line in much of what he does.

Tibetan Buddhists

Richard Gere

Probably the world’s best-known lay Tibetan Buddhist, the actor Richard Gere has practised for over half a century. He began in Zen as a young man, then, after meeting the Dalai Lama in India, became a practitioner of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. Gere refers to the Dalai Lama as his teacher and has spent decades as an outspoken advocate for Tibet — a commitment that, by his own account, cost him roles and standing in Hollywood. His Buddhism is not a private hobby but the centre of his public life.

Adam Yauch (Beastie Boys)

Adam Yauch, “MCA” of the Beastie Boys, became a serious Tibetan Buddhist in the 1990s after travelling in Nepal and attending teachings by the Dalai Lama. He founded the Milarepa Fund and co-organised the Tibetan Freedom Concerts to support Tibetan independence, and he kept a daily meditation practice until his death in 2012. His activism did as much as any celebrity’s to put the Tibetan cause in front of a young Western audience.

k.d. lang

The singer k.d. lang is a practitioner in the Nyingma lineage — the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism. She took refuge as a Buddhist in the early 2000s under the teacher Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa and has supported Tibetan cultural-preservation work. (She is sometimes loosely called a “Shambhala” Buddhist because of an interview that ran in Shambhala Sun magazine, but her own practice is specifically Nyingma.)

”Influenced by,” not “a convert to”

Some famous names belong in a different category — genuinely shaped by Buddhism, but not committed practitioners of it. Honesty means keeping them distinct.

• Phil Jackson, the NBA coach who won eleven championships, is famous for a “Zen” approach and studied Zen under Roshi Bernie Glassman. But Jackson, raised by a Pentecostal preacher, has described himself as a “Zen Christian” who also drew on Lakota spirituality — a personal synthesis, not a conversion to Buddhism.

• Jack Kerouac studied Buddhism intensely in the mid-1950s and wrote The Dharma Bums, which introduced a generation of Americans to the dharma. Yet he drew back from it: by the late 1950s he was writing to friends that “I’m not a Buddhist any more,” and a raised-Catholic Kerouac increasingly framed himself in Catholic terms — in his last interview, in 1969, insisting “I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.” He is best understood as a Catholic writer profoundly influenced by a few Buddhist years — unlike his friends Snyder and Ginsberg, who stayed the course.

The honest takeaway: real, lifelong Buddhist practice among public figures is genuinely there — Tina Turner’s fifty years of chanting, Richard Gere’s decades of Tibetan practice, Wayne Shorter chanting to the end. But it is also frequently overstated. When in doubt, the careful question is not “Is this person Buddhist?” but “What, specifically, do they practise, and how do they describe it themselves?” Unfamiliar terms on this page are explained in the glossary; for the teachers and masters behind these traditions, see the most influential figures in Buddhist history.