India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is inaugurating the first Global Buddhist Summit on 20 April in New Delhi. This Summit (20-21 April) hosted by the International Buddhist Confederation, will have the participation of Sanghas (religious hierarchies) from 30 plus countries and will represent the three major traditions of Buddhism. The participation of academics in this Summit is expected to add a contemporary dimension to discussions on the theme “Responses to Contemporary Challenges: Philosophy to Praxis”, aimed at finding solutions to global disharmony and conflict caused by wars, pandemics, climate change, poverty, corruption, by applying foundational principles of Buddha Dharma.
Far more significant than the theme of this Summit is the fact that it is a natural continuum of New Delhi’s strategic and soft diplomacy outreach through Buddhism to countries that fall within the ambit of India’s foreign policy priorities of Neighbourhood First and Act East, along with its ongoing presidency of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). India’s early outreach through Buddhism can be traced to the 2011 Global Buddhist Congregation in New Delhi, a meeting that resolved to set up the New Delhi headquartered International Buddhist Confederation, the umbrella organization of the current Summit.
Since then, India’s Buddhist diplomacy has been nuanced, focused, and holistic. It covers everything from security and upgraded infrastructure for tourists, especially pilgrims, like the opening of an international airport at Kushinagar in eastern Uttar Pradesh where the sacred Mahaparinirvana Temple is located, to soft diplomacy, when it held the SCO’s ‘Shared Buddhist Heritage’ virtual exhibition in New Delhi in December 2020.
What underpins India’s pole position and its enduring influence in the Buddhist spiritual sphere are the facts that it is the holy land of Buddhism and is home to its most sacred pilgrimage sites. India’s ambitious outreach to nations with a shared Buddhist legacy, like in the present Summit, can achieve regional and global objectives. It also segues seamlessly with the Indian government’s 2016 plan to develop a “Buddhist Circuit” predicated on having world-class infrastructure to attract overseas tourists to India.
The two-millennia-old, shared Buddhist religious and cultural legacy between Buddhism’s holy land India, and her neighbours like Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, the Central Asian Republics (CARS), and further afield China, Japan, and the ASEAN nations, is an important historical narrative that connects all, however politically and culturally at odds they may be today. India is already leveraging this astutely through people-to-people diplomacy, as mentioned above. This must now be followed up with a deeper story of Buddhist history, trade, and student exchanges, to become truly impactful.
First, India’s internal Buddhist Circuit can connect to the larger circuit of developing Buddhist tourist sites in the Muslim-majority Central Asian Republics (CARs) and those that are part of China’s Belt & Road Initiative. This will require tracing back Buddhism’s living legacy and its archaeological remains in the SCO nations to its roots in India.
More than physical connectivity, it is the dissemination of a historically factual and holistic narrative connecting these widespread ancient temples, monasteries, and grottoes, that will counter ongoing Chinese attempts to Sinicise the Buddhist narrative, not just in the maritime Belt & Road Initiative countries like Sri Lanka, but also in Himalayan border monasteries in Leh, Arunachal Pradesh, and India’s neighbours Nepal and Bhutan. India’s centrality to this history lies in not just being the Buddhist Holy Land but in its role of introducing Buddhism across its neighbourhood, further east and to South East Asia, and then continuously disseminating new ideas into this network for circulation, assimilation and, at times, transformation.
An outstanding example of this process is the spread of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism — based on the concept of “mindfulness” or Dhyana — founded in India around the 6th or 7th centuries. This became the foundation for Chan (Chinese), Zen (Japanese) and Tibetan Buddhism. In turn, it is largely Tibetan Buddhism that travelled into the Russian provinces bordering Mongolia and the only European region where Buddhism is practised by a majority of people, Russia’s Republic of Kalmykia. Often, it is the reframing of original Indian beliefs and knowledge into locally-acceptable idioms that popularised Indian Buddhist beliefs abroad.
Second, highlighting this transnational narrative and its continuum even today is urgent as India is home to the Dalai Lama and the heads of major sects of Himalayan Buddhism. This is pertinent as Bhutan has about 75% Buddhist Lamaist population, while Nepal has 10%. It is well-known that China leverages the soft power of Buddhism in these countries to achieve its strategic geopolitical goals. In the case of Bhutan, it favours particular sects for endowments and attention, while in the case of Nepal, it is known to intervene in the appointment of high-ranking monks in an attempt to curb any restiveness among Nepal’s resident Tibetan population, which is likely to spill over into the Tibetan Autonomous Region. India’s Buddhist Circuit including Lumbini in Nepal as a pilgrimage site holds out tantalising potential — given that Lumbini’s international airport opened in May 2022 — of seamlessly extending this circuit to India’s neighbours. This ties together India’s soft diplomacy in SCO with its Neighborhood First and Act East policies. India hopes to attract Buddhist pilgrims and tourists from South Asia, South East Asia, and the Far East to Buddhism’s Holy Land. Already, Buddhist studies programs centered on Bodh Gaya attract international students to India.
Last, the spread of Buddhism, whether through conquest or trade, also coincided with the transmission of secular knowledge from the Indian subcontinent – like traditional Indian medicine (Aayush), manufacturing (sugar) and the astro-sciences into these regions. Most monasteries along the Silk Route during the first millennium were often headed by Indian monks. They hosted merchants, travellers, and tended to the sick using traditional Indian medicine. Even today, among the CARs, there is an interest in traditional Indian medicine, like Ayurveda. Exchanges (research and students) for studying this would be of great interest to these countries.
The idea of common cultural roots between people from these very diverse nations can be the bedrock of future planned institutions, like the proposed SCO University. It will have a virtuous influence on other dimensions too like building networks of trade, knowledge exchange, tourism, and, most importantly, jointly tackling global conflicts by applying the precepts of Buddha Dharma, like the present Summit hopes to achieve.
Sifra Lentin is Fellow, Bombay History, Gateway House.
More on the subject in our report, India and the SCO: Bound by Buddhism.
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