Dispute exposes India-China contest over Buddhism
This article talks about the on-going competition that India and China have with each other over Buddhism. What sparked this article was the recently designated location of the headquarters of a new international Buddhist organization, the International Buddhist Confederation. All around the world, Buddhists chose India as the location of this organization over China. A plausible reason for this is the fact that Chinese officials do not agree with the Dalai Lama, nor do they welcome him to speak. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, says, "The Dalai Lama is not a purely religious figure but one who has been engaged in separatist activities for a long time, under the pretext of religion. We oppose any country that provides a platform for his anti-China activities in any form." However, this does not mean that China is against Buddhism. China is the leading country for number of Buddhists, they have hosted two major international Buddhist forums in the past four years, and they are planning on spending close to three billion dollars on building a major tourist complex at Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal. The article goes on to talk about how India is where the Dalai Lama spent five decades and where the Buddha gained enlightenment, taught and achieved complete nirvana. I find this article really interesting because it shows how different each countries' views are on Buddhism. They would rather compete than come together through their religion.
This article is interesting, I think this illustrates one of the biggest global problems of our time. This intersection of religion and politics seems to be leading to all the major wars of our generation -which seems like an avoidable problem! Its interesting to see this theme expressed in the context of Buddhism, because I think that Americans are mainly bombarded with this in the context of Islam. Seeing this in another setting really shows the difficulties we as humanity have with being accepting and understanding of diversity. Cool article, good find! :)
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