Story highlights The Dalai Lama will attend the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday with President Obama Buddhists were viewed with suspicious by the U.S. government during World War II

Yet it might also serve as a reminder that a religion now considered universally benign once endured suspicion, vocal protest and even government surveillance -- much as Islam has in recent years.

Already, 2015 has seen threats of violence canceling a call to prayer in North Carolina, anti-Muslim demonstrations in Texas and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal comparing non-assimilating Muslims to an "invasion."

All of this would have been familiar to some Buddhists not so long ago.

Today, Buddhism is the model of a minority religious tradition that exerts an influence far beyond what its numbers would suggest. While the Buddhist population of the United States is not much larger than a million -- less than 1% of the population -- the number of Americans inspired by the Buddha is estimated to be more than 10 times that size.

The cultural position of Buddhism 73 years ago could not have been more different.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the evacuation of all those of Japanese descent from the West Coast to war relocation centers, the Buddhist faith practiced by many Japanese Americans was itself regarded as a potential threat.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the formal entry of the United States into World War II, the FBI compiled a list of suspected collaborators that included not only members of groups with political ties to Japan, but the leaders of Buddhist temples.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's Custodial Detention List used a classification system designating the supposed risk of individuals on an A-B-C scale, with an "A" assigned to those deserving greatest suspicion. In Hoover's system, Buddhist priests were designated "A-1": "dangerous enemy aliens" whose arrest was considered a matter of urgent concern.

Even before the war, Japanese Buddhists were thought to be less "Americanized" than their countrymen who had converted to Christianity, and in some ways this was true.

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When Buddhists were Public Enemy No. 1