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India plays Buddha diplomacy to woo East Asian nations

Realising the power of Buddha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately after assuming office made Buddhist Bhutan his first foreign destination, and in August last year, travelled to two major Buddhist shrines in Kyoto during a trip to Japan.

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India has planned Buddha diplomacy to showcase its Buddhist past over the next seven months by hosting 26 seminars in these countries, with scholars, monks and policy makers as its target audience. The task, aimed at reaching out to the East Asian countries, has been assigned to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, cultural arm of the ministry of external affairs, whose new president Lokesh Chandra is himself an authority on the religion. The ICCR will offer travel grants to Chinese monks to visit the Indian monasteries.

Realising the power of Buddha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately after assuming office made Buddhist Bhutan his first foreign destination, and in August last year, travelled to two major Buddhist shrines in Kyoto during a trip to Japan. In September, visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping was greeted in Ahmedabad with an exhibition on ancient Buddhist links between China and Gujarat -- including a visit by the 7th-century traveller-monk Xuanzang. The same month, the Modi government also began a series of symbolic gifts -- saplings of the original Bodhi tree in Gaya -- to East Asian nations. In November, Modi took a sapling to Nepal. The prime minister also carried the saplings as gifts during his visits to China, Mongolia and South Korea in May.

Experts, however, say the campaign abroad would not yield big gains unless the government also promotes and protects the Buddhist sites in India and encourages research within the country. Fudan University in Shanghai has been chosen by ICCR to host next month a conference on India-China Buddhist links, the first such meeting of its kind. In Ladakh, the ICCR will host a "festival" where scholars and representatives from China, Mongolia and South Korea will be invited.

The ICCR has also got on board India's premier science research institutions. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) will host a conference on philosophical similarities between Buddhist thought and quantum mechanics in November.

The abbot of the prestigious Shaolin monastery in China's Henan province will visit India to attend a conference on Zen Buddhism, and speak to scholars. He will then visit Kanchipuram, the birthplace of Theravada Buddhism, a strand that then spread from there to Myanmar and Thailand. India also invited Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to attend one of the conferences the ICCR will host in India, but he is instead expected to depute a cabinet minister, officials said. In New Delhi, the ICCR will host an exhibition of Chinese Buddhist paintings, while the Modi government will hold a conference on the concept of non-acquisitiveness known as aparigraha that Buddhism shares with Hinduism and Jainism.

The decision by the ICCR, which has traditionally focused on mainstream dance and cultural forms and on their exhibitions overseas, to place such a thrust on Buddhism follows a series of symbolic gestures by Modi over the past year. Like many elements of Modi's foreign policy, the focus on Buddhism as a diplomatic tool began under his predecessor Manmohan Singh, with the project to recreate the Nalanda University in Bihar.

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