The Battle for the Buddha

The seminars organised by the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) are regarded among the most prestigious conferences for the discipline. Founded by Tibetologist Michael Aris, who would later become better known as Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, at the University of Oxford in 1979, IATS’ conferences, held once every three years across the world, are one of the foremost international forums for academic research on Tibet and the Himalayan region.

Jigme Yeshe Lama, assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Calcutta, was excited about the then-coming conference in August. Scheduled to take place in Kathmandu, only the second time an Asian country had been selected as host, all that Indian scholars like Lama needed to do was hop on a short direct flight to Kathmandu on the appointed date.

Lama knows the conference well. He had attended the 2016th edition in Bergen, Norway, and enjoyed the rare opportunity to interact directly with Tibetan scholars from Tibet and China. “It’s a wonderful opportunity because you get to interact with scholars from around the world. You also get to have a dialogue with Tibetans who are from Tibet, and who have studied and are now teaching in different universities inside China,” he says.

Given China’s influence over Nepal nowadays, some participants initially worried if it might try to influence the conference. But they reasoned that was probably not going to happen. IATS is known to be a non-political academic forum. Besides, there was a delegation of around 100 scholars from China, and even a Tibetan scholar from China’s Sichuan University on the IATS board.

As the date of the conference approached, something strange began to happen. China’s ambassador to Nepal, Zhang Maoming, met Nepal’s Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai on July 21. The topic of discussion, according to reports, was the conference, and that Maoming had told the secretary about the need to stay ‘vigilant’ about participants who might make pro-Tibet statements. Soon after, a think-tank of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamshala withdrew its researchers from the conference. A week later, Venerable Master Yinshun, a high-ranking political monk from China who is also the abbot of the Zhong Hua Chinese Buddhist Monastery in Lumbini, landed in Kathmandu, reportedly to keep up the pressure. Nepal’s Home Minister Sudan Gurung would go on to tell journalists that apart from some vetting of participants, the conference would go ahead. But just days later, the government would reverse the public assurance given by its own home minister and get Kathmandu University to cancel the conference altogether.

The exhibition of Chinese leverage is not a surprise. Indian governments have been keenly aware of Beijing’s use of ‘Buddhist’ heritage studies to rally theological and political opinion to its cause. In 2011, under the mentorship of then National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, the New Delhi-based Ashoka Mission organised a global Buddhist conference to commemorate 2,600 years of Buddha’s enlightenment. While China objected to the Dalai Lama’s presence, senior monks from the Ashoka Mission had travelled as far as Mongolia and Siberia to invite leading Buddhist religious figures. The turnout of Buddhist leaders showcased India’s significance as the font of Buddhism.

In the case of Kathmandu, a prominent international conference in another country now lay abruptly cancelled because Beijing was reportedly displeased.

Lama was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. About a year ago, he had witnessed a large delegation of Chinese scholars pushing a very pro-Chinese narrative at another seminar in Nepal. “But the other thing they were also emphasising was, and you see that a lot now, is the view that Buddhism inside Tibet is something that China contributed to immensely. They downplay the contribution from India, which is historically true, and play up theirs,” Lama says. “It is a type of Sinicisation campaign going on right now. A Sinicisation of Buddhism itself.”

On the face of it, the cancellation of the IATS conference may appear to be about controlling an academic forum’s discussions on Tibet. But it is also tied to China’s decades-long campaign to shape Buddhist discourse globally. While internally it keeps Buddhist temples and monasteries under strict surveillance, aligns teachings with its own communist principles, and picks its own pliant high lamas, externally, it has been spending a lot of money building Buddhist temples and centres in other countries, hosting Buddhist conferences that draw thousands of scholars, and sending sacred Buddhist artefacts to those countries to wield its version of the faith as a tool of soft power.

Particularly high on its agenda is appointing the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, something China hopes will strengthen its control over Tibet and Buddhism globally.“Beijing has weaponised this controlled version [of Buddhism] as soft power by hosting the World Buddhist Forum since 2006, dispatching relics on high-profile loans to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, funding temples and academies, and linking Buddhist exchanges to the Belt and Road Initiative in order to project China as the centre of the Buddhist world,” says Sriparna Pathak, professor of China Studies and founding director of the Centre for Northeast Asian Studies at OP Jindal Global University. “The explicit aim has been both to improve China’s image amid criticism of repression in Tibet and to cultivate influence among Theravada and Mahayana communities across Asia, where it seeks to outbid India’s civilisational authenticity.”

In recent years, India has begun doubling down on promoting its own historical links with Buddhism and leveraging it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes it a point to visit Buddhist temples or invoke the Buddha on his visits to nations with Buddhist ties. India also intervened to get an auction of the sacred Piprahwa relics stopped in Hong Kong and then, working through a unique public-private partnership with Godrej Industries Group, securing the relics and having them returned to India. It has stepped up its own relic diplomacy, sending sacred Buddhist artefacts to Buddhist countries to generate goodwill; has granted Pali, the primary language used to popularise Theravada Buddhism, classical status; worked on reviving Nalanda; and has been developing the ‘Buddhist Circuit’ and rejuvenating pilgrimage centres like Sarnath and Kushinagar.

An important element in India’s Buddhist outreach is its International Buddhist Confederation (IBC). Seen as a rival to China’s World Buddhist Forum and conceptualised back in 2011, it today organises multiple Buddhist conferences and events throughout the year, including large international conferences such as the Global Buddhist Summit, whose second edition earlier this year witnessed hundreds of Buddhist leaders and scholars from across the world converging to discuss Buddhist dialectical matters in New Delhi.

At the end of this month, it will be helping organise a grand public exposition of the Buddha’s relics across three locations in Arunachal Pradesh for nearly a month, along with a conference that will see the attendance of many important Buddhist lamas and scholars from India and abroad.“We are expecting a massive turnout,” says Tseten Chombay, an MLA from Arunachal’s Kalaktang constituency who has been looking into the preparations of the event. “We will have the exposition in Tawang for a week, followed by Bomdila and then Namsai. There is already huge excitement, because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be able to pray to the holy relics of Lord Buddha Shakyamuni.”

“India has real assets, and it has started to use them,” says Kate Saunders from Tibet Watch, a human rights research and advocacy group that focuses on Tibet. “The IBC emerged from a global gathering in Delhi in 2011, which the Dalai Lama attended, and India hosts gatherings of Buddhists from across the world. At the Global Buddhist Summit in Delhi in 2023, Prime Minister Modi reminded the world that India gave it ‘Buddh, not Yudh’.”

One of the most contested spaces in this geopolitical fight over Buddhism is currently taking place in Lumbini in Nepal, the birthplace of the Buddha. A China-backed foundation has proposed to inject $3 billion to develop temples, an airport, hotels, and a Buddhist university to train young monks at the site. Some see in these attempts an effort to develop a place to rival Bodh Gaya in the Buddhist imagination. India has responded by starting construction of its own International Buddhist Culture and Heritage Centre in Lumbini.

Then there are the manoeuvres behind the scenes. Back in 2024, Nepal and Dharamshala began to swirl with news of the Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama being invited to Lumbini. China has been trying to build up the profile of its Panchen Lama, historically only second in line after the Dalai Lama in the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is someone many believe will be used by China to pick its own Dalai Lama in future. But so far, apart from a trip to Hong Kong in 2012 and another to Thailand in 2019, he has never stepped out of mainland China. Having him address a religious round table at the Buddha’s birthplace could have meant a major step up. But the trip was suddenly cancelled. According to rumours, India and the US exerted pressure.

China has tried to get back in its own way. According to Saunders, its approach is to use a combination of money, institutions and pressure to hold sway, from using its World Buddhist Forum to promote its own Panchen Lama to funding Buddhist organisations across Asia. “China has founded the Nanhai Academy of Buddhism to ‘offer the world a Sinicised Buddhist system’, positioned as a rival to India’s revival of Nalanda. Its head has described a Xi Jinping report to the Party Congress as ‘contemporary Buddhist scripture’… It presses governments to refuse the Dalai Lama visas and to block publication of his books. It has had Tibetan and Indian scholars removed from international Buddhist initiatives. In Thailand, Tibetans were eased out of a major Buddhist translation project and Tibetan sources were reduced to footnotes… Nepal shows the strategy most clearly. Beijing seeks to make Lumbini a rival in the Buddhist imagination to Bodh Gaya in India,” she says.

Just to what extent these measures have achieved their goals is another matter. Pathak believes that while Chinese funding and forums attract participants from dozens of countries and generate some goodwill, the strategy is undercut by the party’s official atheism, the well-documented destruction and Sinicisation of Tibetan monasteries, and the exclusion of the Dalai Lama, rendering the effort more sharp power than genuine soft power. “India’s deeper legitimacy as the land of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and first teaching, combined with its hosting of the Tibetan exile community and initiatives such as the Buddhist Circuit and IBC, continues to confer a spiritual and historical advantage that money and managed spectacles cannot fully erase,” Pathak says. “In the end, China’s state-managed Buddhism remains a tool of political utility rather than living faith, while India’s connection rests on the irreplaceable sacred geography that first gave the world the Dharma.”

Nowhere is the contest over Buddhism going to involve higher stakes than the approaching battle over the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation. Last year, the Dalai Lama formally vested exclusive authority in the Gaden Phodrang Trust, a private trust registered in India, to pick the next reincarnation. China, expected to select its own candidate, reacted with opprobrium. Although New Delhi hasn’t explicitly stated what it thinks on this issue, what kind of environment it provides the trust to pick the next Dalai Lama, who could perhaps even be someone born on India soil, will be crucial.

There are some who believe Delhi should take a more explicit stand on the matter. Saunders points out that Beijing has been preparing for this moment decades ago when it installed a two-year-old as the Reting Rinpoche, a lineage that historically acted as regent while a Dalai Lama was a minor. “It [China] cultivates the anti-Dalai Lama Shugden sect. The possibility that the sect could be used to put forward a rival candidate in exile cannot be ruled out… Beijing will press Nepal, which has already declared Tibet China’s internal affair, as well as Mongolia and Bhutan, to endorse its choice. It will also seek to make India’s position part of the bargaining over trade and the border. The current thaw in relations increases the pressure on Delhi to remain silent,” Saunders says. “India can become the centripetal force safeguarding the sanctity of the process, and can refer to the Dalai Lama as the leader of the Tibetan people rather than merely an honoured guest… What is missing is India’s voice, which matters most.”

Others like Pathak believe that given the practical risks of Chinese retaliation, strategic ambiguity serves India better. “While India must protect the linguistic and cultural identities of Tibetans in exile, it also has to safeguard its own national interests,” she says.

The high-stakes moves unfolding in the corridors of power in New Delhi and Beijing may seem far removed from the idyllic hills of Arunachal, but they aren’t entirely lost on the minds of locals. The sixth Dalai Lama, much loved across the Tibetan Buddhist world for his poetry and his eccentric lifestyle, was born in Tawang. It could very well be that the 15th would be found here.

Referring to the exposition set to take place soon, Chombay recalls the time the relics were last brought to the state in 2013, and the devotion he witnessed then. “Earlier, Buddhism was a bit neglected,” he says. “But today, the government is addressing that. I feel grateful that it is finally happening.”