At the first-ever international exhibition in India titled ‘Exhibition of the Holy Relics of the Tathagata: Peace Beyond Borders’, Union Home Minister Amit Shah bowed before the sacred Piprahwa relics at Jiwetsal in Leh on May 1. Addressing the gathering of monks and devotees, he said that “It is as if the Buddha himself is present here today.” This statement is a powerful but civilizationally based expression that India is the home of the soul of Buddha.
After 127 years, the repatriation of the Piprahwa remains was truly historic and a journey of its own. In May 2025, Sotheby’s Hong Kong auctioned ‘The Piprahwa Gems’, which was discovered in 1898 by the British colonial surveyor William Claxton Peppe at Piprahwa in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Brahmi inscriptions on it were identified as belonging to Gautama Buddha himself, along with bone fragments and offerings placed at the time of his Mahaparinirvana. India’s Ministry of Culture soon intervened to stop the auction and repatriated the remains to India on July 30, 2025. To celebrate this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the international exhibition titled ‘The Light and the Lotus: Relics of the Awakened One’ at Rai Pithora Cultural Complex in New Delhi on January 3, 2026. “After 127 years of waiting, India’s heritage is back, and the country’s treasure is back. The heritage is back home,” he said.
For this Buddha Purnima, the selection of Ladakh as the venue for the first domestic exhibition of Piprahwa relics is not accidental. This is important; It is the land of four active Tibetan Buddhist sects (Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug), whose monasteries are older than most countries, with a history stretching from Emperor Ashoka’s emissaries to Gandhara and Kashmir to the Silk Road. Notably the Silk Road was not just a trade artery, it was a corridor of ideas, monks, manuscripts and artistic traditions.
Buddhism emerged in the Gangetic plains of present-day India in the 5th–6th century BCE. The life of Lord Buddha spans across India, from his birth in Lumbini (in present-day Nepal) to Bodh Gaya (enlightenment), Sarnath (first sermon), and Kushinagar (Mahaparinirvana). These sites are centers of global Buddhist pilgrimage. And India exported Buddhist philosophy to Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan through traders, monks, and scholars.
Ashoka was considered one of the first great practitioners of what we today call Buddhist diplomacy. He sent his son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka in the 3rd century BCE, and shared the teachings not as an act of conquest but as an offering. For centuries, scholars from across Asia made pilgrimages to Indian universities. Even Chinese scholars like Hiuen Tsang and Yijing traveled to Nalanda, Takshashila and other places for study. Mahavihar. Nalanda was an Indian institution, founded in present-day Bihar in the 5th century CE, which historian William Dalrymple called “the undisputed scholarly center of the Mahayana Buddhist world”. And today, India is reorganizing and reviving this heritage not as revivalism, but as civilizational continuity.
The relic exhibition is the most emotionally and symbolically influential element of India’s Buddhist strategy. The Government of India facilitated two major exhibitions in the last two years. In Thailand, between February 22 and March 19, 2024, relics of the Buddha and his disciples were displayed in four locations, attracting more than 4 million devotees. In Vietnam, from May 2 to June 2, 2025, the remains of Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh were displayed at nine locations during Vesak celebrations, drawing an estimated 18 million visitors.
Similarly, India’s Buddhist diplomacy has deep institutional roots in Mongolia also. From 1990 to 2000, India appointed Ladakh political leader Bakula Rinpoche as its ambassador, a decision that deepened India–Mongolia relations through cultural and spiritual channels. In Russia’s Buddhist republics of Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva, the route of the relics produced similar scenes of deep reverence. The Ladakh exhibition builds on this, attracting global devotees and promoting spiritual tourism and people-to-people ties.
Complementing this is the Buddhist circuit connecting the holy sites of Lumbini and Kapilvastu with Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Nalanda and Kushinagar. In 2025 alone, the Buddhist circuit of Uttar Pradesh received more than 61 lakh tourists in the first nine months alone. Kushinagar’s international airport now provides direct connectivity to Buddhist-majority countries in Southeast Asia. Also interesting is how the Northeast is being integrated through a dedicated Buddhist circuit across six states, positioning the eastern part of India as a civilizational bridge to ASEAN. The year 2025 was designated as the ASEAN-India Year of Tourism, with India pledging $5 million from the ASEAN-India Fund to support cultural and tourism initiatives across the region.
Under the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation framework, the Ministry of External Affairs organized a nine-day familiarization visit for 50 travel industry representatives to Buddhist sites in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. A high-level Thai delegation visited Gujarat in June 2025, deepening cultural ties dating back to the era of Ashoka’s own missions. Additionally, the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, the Bodhi Yatra Initiative, and the restoration of the Ananda Temple in Bagan are not separate development projects. They are a Buddhist corridor architecture, connecting the birthplace of the Dhamma with the regions where it developed.
The second Global Buddhist Summit was organized by the International Buddhist Confederation and the Ministry of Culture in New Delhi in January 2026. Attended by diplomats and monks from nearly 40 countries, the summit provided a platform for India to articulate its custodianship of Buddhist wisdom at the highest multilateral level. These initiatives/efforts are instruments of Dhamma diplomacy, a civilizational strategy that India has been slow to name but is finally implementing as cost-effective pillars of soft power.
For more than two decades now, China has been promoting Buddhist diplomacy by hosting international Buddhist forums, funding the restoration of monasteries in Southeast Asia, attracting Theravada communities, and engaging Buddhist outreach in the Belt and Road Initiative. China has presented itself as the global headquarters of the Buddhist world. But it is ironic that the state has repressed domestic religion, destroyed the institutional foundations of Tibetan Buddhism, and incarcerated thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns during the Cultural Revolution.
And as scholar Sana Hashmi has said, China is trying to build religious diplomacy with countries whose main religion is Buddhism, but its real goal is to achieve political objectives. The Buddhist Association of China is overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which mandates that all clergy must pledge allegiance to the Party and socialism. A 2007 regulation requires state approval for all reincarnate lamas, which directly interferes with the centuries-old Tibetan religious tradition. Since 2020, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the CCP has intensified a formal Sinicization campaign, a policy designed to bring Buddhist doctrine into line with CCP ideology.
India needs to reaffirm its Buddhist roots and pursue its Dhamma diplomacy very vigorously and claim its rightful place as the cradle and custodian of Buddhist heritage. Under the leadership of Modi, 642 antiquities have been brought back to India. Each repatriation is a small act of civilizational recovery and remains diplomacy linking countries across different geographies.
Even the presence of the Dalai Lama in India is actually India’s greatest asset. Since 1959, India has been the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile and one of the great surviving centers of Tibetan Buddhist learning, scholarship and practice. It has attracted students, practitioners and seekers from all over the world. In many ways India has provided a home to the Dhamma.
Apart from this, Buddhist Circuit is being built, strengthening India-Nepal relations. The Northeast is being considered as a civilizational gateway. What can be done now is to set up an institutional machinery to coordinate efforts under a coherent principle, which clearly positions India as Dhammabhumi, the land of Dhamma, at every multilateral forum where Buddhism is discussed. This is soft power. This Act is in line with the Act East Policy, Neighborhood First and global outreach to Buddhist countries.
(Views expressed are personal)
This article is written by Chhavi Vashishtha, Associate Fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.
