Sri Lanka
Anagārika Dharmapāla, 1864 to 1933, founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 to recover Bodh Gaya for Buddhists, campaigned for Buddhist schools and temperance, and invented a role for himself between monk and layman, the anagārika, because neither existing role fitted the work.
Around him grew a lay Buddhist infrastructure: schools that taught Buddhism alongside English and science, a Buddhist press, the Young Men's Buddhist Association, and a confident public Buddhism tied closely to national feeling.
Burma and Thailand
Ledi Sayadaw, 1846 to 1923, wrote Abhidhamma and meditation manuals in Burmese rather than Pāli, for farmers and clerks rather than for monks, and argued that lay people could and should practise insight meditation themselves. Nearly every worldwide vipassanā movement today runs back to that decision.
In Thailand reform came from the throne instead: Mongkut's stricter Thammayut order, then a national sangha administration. Reform as royal policy produced a very different shape from reform as lay movement.
China, Japan and India
Taixu, 1890 to 1947, pressed for what he called Buddhism for human life: monastic education, social work, institutional reform, Buddhism answerable to the present. Japanese Buddhism, attacked after 1868, rebuilt itself partly through scholarship and overseas mission.
In India, B. R. Ambedkar's conversion in 1956, with hundreds of thousands of Dalits, created a new Buddhist population in the land where the tradition had almost disappeared.
Why it matters
These movements shape how Buddhism is taught and organized in many countries today.
History and tradition
What historians can say
These movements were genuinely creative rather than simply restorative. Lay meditation at scale, Sunday schools, youth organisations, catechisms and flags were new, and several were borrowed from Christian missions and turned against them.