As for the book, the articles compiled in it seek to institute cultural link of Buddhism with China and throw light on Nepal-China relationship. The program and the book, to me, appear to be an unequivocal gesture of China to assert its cultural proximity with Buddhism. And this is a counter-gesture to India’s claim that Buddha belongs to India. It looks like the rivalry between two Asian superpowers has begun to impinge on the cultural and religious realms too.
China’s desire to seek cultural ties with Buddhism reminds me of India’s painstaking undertaking to establish new truths on Buddha and Buddhism. India has been appropriating Buddhism to its advantage in all the ways possible. It has been reiterating that Buddha was born in India and that Buddhism has its roots in India more than anywhere else in the world. It inculcates this knowledge on billions of school children through textbooks. In case, this fails to win people’s conviction and disseminate “Indian Buddhism,” it has also built fake Lumbini and Tilaurakot in Aligadhawa, which is in the Siddharthanagar district of Uttar Pradesh and which is an adjoining town of Kapilbastu. To add credence to the falsity of false Lumbini, India has christened Piparhawa of that region Kapilbastu.
Everything is made to seem so real that it is hard to distinguish the copy from the real and vice versa. The places look so deceptively real that anyone who has never visited Lumbini of Nepal may mistake the fake one for being real and believe, to India’s advantage, that Buddha was indeed born there and the fact that he was born in Nepal was an invented story. India has been manipulating the historical truths merely on the basis of the fact that Siddhartha Gautam had attained Buddhahood in a place called Bodhgaya of India. Considering this, one can say that India has already started cultural and religious invasion in Nepal. I take liberty to understand non-presence of officials from the Indian authorities in the book launching ceremony as an expression of displeasure by the Indian establishment on Chinese claim over the cultural sphere that India had assumed booked for itself.
At one level, all these efforts from India, and recently from China, to reserve some rights on Buddhism is just an act of creating discourse, which for the French postmodern theorist like Jean Baudrillard does not amount to anything but making of simulacrum. In the post modern culture, he says, nothing is real. The real disappears with simulation. India’s making of fake Lumbini and establishing the fact that Buddha was not born in Nepal is a mere simulacrum. So could be said for China’s creation of discourse as well. But the danger in the play of simulacrum is that what is the replica of the real starts to be so vigorously manifested in the realm of culture and discourse that the fake asserts itself to be more real than the real. And the simulacrum becomes truth. This is something that we must save Buddhism from becoming. And this is something to which we must respond with urgency.
What alarms me is the proliferation of (false) discourses from the locations other than Buddha’s birthplace and the threatening truths these discourses are creating.
We may not be able to stop India from making fake Lumbini and falsely disseminating discourse of Buddhism. It would be equally naïve to be displeased with China for its fondness to discover its cultural affinity with Buddha and Nepal. China has as much right to claim its cultural affinity with Buddhism as any nation that has endorsed or not endorsed Buddhism as the principal/national religion of the land. Buddhism as much belongs to China as it does to Japan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. This scribe is not in the least ruffled by this. What alarms me is the proliferation of (false) discourses from the locations other than Buddha’s birthplace and the threatening truths these discourses are creating to deconstruct unquestionable truths about Buddha’s birth and Buddhism.
This is not to say, however, that we are quiet even when truth about Buddhism is distorted. We have not been. In fact, we have, sometimes foolishly, risen against the claims contrary to our conviction. For instance, when, in 2008, the university students in the Central Department of English, Kirtipur detected in Charles Van Doran’s A History of Knowledge that Buddha was born “to a princely family of northern India” they fumed at this discovery triggered by rude awakening and, in fury, demanded with the department authority that such a book should be proscribed in the curriculum. Students’ anger was listened to and the authority removed otherwise a very good book from the MA syllabus. Such a move alone does not contribute to establishing truth of Buddha.
One surest weapon to fight the “false” claims as that of Doran’s or India’s, for me, is writing even if that means making of yet another simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms. We can create discourses on Buddhism. It is true that India owns more intellectuals and their discourses are listened to and accredited by the rest of the world. But Nepal is also not poor in intellectuals. In fact, Nepali academia, media, and perpetually unstable politics have produced so many intellectuals, writers and journalists in the last two decades that they have almost become the emissaries of knowledge. So, now, we do not have to depend much on foreign scholars to know about ourselves, our culture and religion (read Buddhism). But for that, writers and scholars should wage war to reaffirm origin of Buddhism by writing in the newspapers, by publishing books, by launching researches and by disseminating the findings and thereby by telling the world what has always been and will always be true. And this academic battle must begin from home and now.
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com
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