Nepal’s Cancelled Tibet Seminar Opens a Door for India’s Buddhism Diplomacy
Last month, the Nepal government cancelled the 17th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (IATS) – four years in the works and due to be held in Kathmandu from 23-29th August – under pressure from the Chinese government.
Days after Nepal’s home minister had said that the seminar would proceed as planned, with vetting underway for more than 750 scholars who were expected to attend from across the world, the government’s chief secretary ordered Kathmandu University to shut the event down.
With this move, Nepal has signaled that it is not and cannot be the global centre of learning in Buddhism and Buddhist studies that it claims to have become.
While China’s $3 billion investment in Nepal’s Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha Shakyamuni, and other such infrastructural building projects related to Buddhist sites and tourism may have bought it leverage over the small Himalayan country, it will do nothing to promote Nepal as the global hub for the institutional learning and practice of Buddhism.
On the eve of the BRICS summit in New Delhi this month, what should India's takeaway be from this development? As China and India go head-to-head in laying claim to Buddhism's soft power, India has a significant head start in this arena due to both its deep historical association with Buddhism and the presence of the 14th Dalai Lama in the country for the past 65 years.
To understand this, one one has to understand the history of lived, studied and practiced Indian Buddhism in contemporary times and how it relates to Tibetan Buddhism.
Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism are the same
Buddhism took root in Tibet in the 8th century with the help of Indian Nalanda masters such as Acharya Shantarakshita, who established the Samye Monastery and ordained the first monastics in the Mulastravastivadin tradition, as well as Guru Padmasambhava, who is said to have subdued local spirits to actually fructify this vision of the Tibetan choegyal (religious kings).
After the demise of Nalanda University and the destruction of its magnificent library, which is said to have burned for weeks, Tibet became the key and only knowledge holder of this living and archival treasure house of the entire corpus of the teachings of the Buddha, as well as commentaries on it by Indian and later Tibetan scholars.
In the intervening centuries (8-12th CE), thanks to the intense intellectual labour of great lotsawas (translators) such as Rinchen Sangpo, Tibet painstakingly back-translated everything from Sanskrit into Bhoti. Bhoti, Bhod or the Tibetan language, was founded in the 7th century with Buddhist philosophy in mind. Thonmi Sambhota, who is credited with its creation, based it on ancient Brahmi/Devanagari style scripts.
Therefore, in all these ways, Tibetan Buddhism is the Nalanda Buddhism of India and the Nalanda Buddhism of India is Tibetan Buddhism.
Cutting straight to the last century, the modern history of Indian Buddhism has two significant figures: Babasaheb Ambedkar, whose contributions are well-known, and the 14th Dalai Lama. The latter arrived in India in 1959 after famously escaping the occupation of Tibet by China. With Nehru’s help, he commenced a critical project – preserving and promoting Tibetan education.
Tibetan educational infrastructure in India
The modern arm of Tibetan education – in the form of schools, vocational institutions, libraries, archives, cultural centres and later colleges – were to become the renowned Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) and Sambhota schools; Norbulingka Institute; Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts; Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and Tibet House, Delhi among others. Many of these institutions also teach Buddhist philosophy, allied subjects and arts in depth to a vast number of international students on a regular basis.
The traditional arm of Tibetan education includes two streams. First, famed non-monastic scholastic institutions teaching Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy and affiliated subjects, inter alia, the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics; the College for Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarah; the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath and so on. Their student body is very cosmopolitan, including students from the west and east, no small feat given they stay for 22 years to complete a Geshe degree (equivalent to a doctorate).
Second, it includes scholastic monasteries and nunneries. These include both Tibetan monasteries freshly recreated in exile – outside of Dharamshala and the mountains, with many built in Karnataka – and Himalayan ones, which, due to the aforementioned history between India and Tibet, got rejuvenated with the arrival in India of the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959.
Numerous students from as far afield as Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, and the entire Himalayan belt, as well as some westerners and increasingly mainland Indians study at the Tibetan monasteries. Together, they constitute more than 60% of their entire student body. This is also in part due to China’s crackdown on any Tibetans trying to escape to India since 2008.
As anyone who has ever been to a boarding school and lived with others for the purposes of education knows, there can be no closer bond created for life than that created in such institutionalised settings. This translates into a formidable and close-knit alumni network criss-crossing the entire Buddhist world.
Travel to the remotest monastery or nunnery in the Himalayas and Trans Himalayas — such as I did recently in the Spiti Valley – and you will see the image of the 14th Dalai Lama on the throne. It may not be an exaggeration to say that practically every single abbot and abbess and great monastic or lay teacher of the last 65 years in any sect of the Nalanda Buddhist tradition anywhere in the world has some debt and connection to the institutional structure created and nurtured by the present Dalai Lama in India.
India must preserve this legacy
This is an extraordinary and unequalled legacy bequeathed by the Dalai Lama and Tibetans to India. To realise and preserve it, for India’s own soft power and claim to being the foremost home to Buddhist study and practice today, India must act now by taking the following measures without delay.
It must officially declare its allegiance to the 15th Dalai Lama that is chosen by the Ganden Phodrang Trust, as is the declared wish of the 14th Dalai Lama, for in any case, real adherents of Buddhism will not be diverted to state-selected alternative political candidates declared by China.
India must also recognise Bhoti as an official language of India, as former Indian ambassador to Mongolia, Kusho Bakula Rinpoche, unsuccessfully lobbied for, given the linguistic commonality across the Himalayan and Trans-Himalayan belt.
India should also encourage affiliations and accreditations with Indian universities and boards for as many of these institutions as possible
These steps are vital for India to be able to preserve this painstakingly created institutional inheritance in Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist studies – an increasingly sought after domain globally – and one of great strategic and soft power importance to India.
Professor Kaveri Gill is non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Excellence in Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.
This article went live on September second, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-nine minutes past ten in the morning.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
