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Buddhism new obstacle between India, China
21 Jun, 2007 l 0030 hrs ISTlIndrani Bagchi/TIMES NEWS NETWORK
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NEW DELHI: India and China are engaged in a competition for soft power
supremacy in Asia - the battlefield is ownership of one of the world's
oldest religions, Buddhism.
At stake is not only India's civilisational space but, on a more temporal
note, it will determine how Asia is defined - with China or India is the
mother civilisation.
It's no coincidence that India built a Buddhist temple - in the Indian style
- in Luoyang in China in 2006. The message, said senior MEA sources, was
simple: Buddhism travelled from India to China over 2,000 years ago and made
its first landing in Luoyang.
The Baima temple complex, which is generally regarded as the cradle of
Chinese Buddhism, was built after a Chinese emperor of the Eastern Han
dynasty welcomed the first Buddhist monks from India - She Moteng and Zhu
Falan - and a white horse which carried the sutra and the figure of Buddha.
This week, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee followed up on the Nalanda
University initiative by setting up a Nalanda Mentor Group in Singapore,
headed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Singapore foreign minister George
Yeo.
Nalanda is at the heart of the Indian soft power push. It's where China's
greatest Buddhist traveller, Hiuen Tsang, came to study Buddhism under a
Bengali teacher called Shilabhadra in the 7th century BC.
It's the ancient fountainhead of Buddhist teaching and India's reclamation
of its past is the new story. The significance of the Indian initiative is
not lost on the Chinese or on any of the Asian countries who practise
Buddhism.
China has been the entrenched Buddhist power in Asia, and even the Communist
revolution failed to dislodge it from its perch of being the arbiter of
Buddhism.
Beijing hoped the physical control of Tibet would enhance its stature, which
is why the Dalai Lama's presence in India is such a sore point.
In fact, it is Beijing's unfinished Buddhist agenda that is behind its loud
claims to Arunachal Pradesh. Needless to add, it's for exactly the same
reason that India cannot give up its claim on the state.
In East Asia, China's Buddhist pre-eminence resulted in India being regarded
as an interloper. India was anyway a latecomer to the south-east Asian
region, and burdened with the legacy of British imperialism, the reigning
impression of Indians was of "coolies", quite apart from the Chinese elite.
Therefore, when the issue of the east Asian community came up, there were
many takers for the Chinese contention that the Indians were "outsiders" and
the community could only be ASEAN+3, not ASEAN+6 as India was trying to
push. China is trying hard to keep India out of this grouping claiming it
was the "periphery" of Asia.
In the past five years, India has fought back, to reclaim what the
government believes is India's by right - that it is India which is at the
heart of the Asian civilisation, that in many ways, India has been the
cultural trendsetter.
The Indian contention is that the cultures of Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam,
Thailand and Myanmar are all derivatives of Indian culture and history. Many
freedom movements in south-east Asia were inspired by Indian leaders like
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
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