India to Host a Summit on Buddhism
Context:
On April 20 and 21, India will hold an international Buddhist conference. Delegates from 30 countries will attend, with China being the conspicuous exception. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, is also unlikely to attend the two-day conference.
Points to Ponder:
- The inaugural Global Buddhist Summit will be held in New Delhi, India, on April 20-21, 2023, and will be launched by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
- The Summit is being organized by the Ministry of Culture in partnership with the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC), a Ministry grantee body.
- The Summit’s goal is to bring together famous Buddhist monks, researchers, and Dharma practitioners from around the world to examine contemporary difficulties and investigate how Buddhist philosophy and ideas might be used to address them.
- The Summit’s subject is “Responses to Contemporary Challenges: From Philosophy to Praxis.”
- The Summit will feature four discussion topics: Buddha Dhamma and Peace, Buddha Dhamma: Environmental Crisis, Health and Sustainability, Nalanda Buddhist Tradition Preservation, Buddha Dhamma Pilgrimage, Living Heritage, and Buddha Relics.
- For the Sangha and academic sessions, respectively, keynote remarks will be delivered by His Holiness Thich Tri Quang, Supreme Patriarch of the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, and Prof. Robert Thurman.
- The Summit is scheduled to draw 173 international attendees, including 84 Sangha members, and 151 Indian delegates from outside Delhi, including 46 Sangha members, 40 nuns, and 65 laities. The meeting will also include about 200 people from the NCR region, including more than 30 ambassadors from foreign embassies.
- The Summit’s mission is to investigate the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha and to create a platform for lay Buddhist scholars and Dharma Masters to work towards Universal Peace and Harmony following Dharma’s essential objectives.
- The Ministry of Culture and the IBC recently hosted a successful international meeting of experts from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) nations on Shared Buddhist Heritage to re-establish trans-cultural links and seek out commonalities between Buddhist art of Central Asia, art styles, archaeological sites, and antiquity in various SCO museum collections.
- The GBS-2023 is a similar endeavor to engage global Buddhist dhamma leadership and researchers on Buddhist and universal challenges, to develop policy inputs to solve them jointly.
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