China gets its own
Nalanda, shames India
Yatish Yadav 04th
June 2017 The New Indian Express
NEW DELHI: China has scored a major victory in
soft power diplomacy by quietly launching its own Nalanda
University while the original Nalanda campus in Bihar, planned
almost a decade ago, is still stuck with 455-acre dead
space.
China’s education ministry had managed to keep
the plan a secret till a few weeks ago when it formally announced
the enrolment for Nanhai Buddhist College in Hainan province in
May. The first batch is set to take off from September with a
strength of 220 students to occupy the vacant Buddhist diplomacy
space. Nalanda in 2014 had started with just 14 students and 11
teachers. Sources said the secrecy is baffling since China was part
of the global team, which first promoted the idea of reconstructing
Nalanda University in the ancient Indian city in 2006.
Nalanda was hit by the careless approach of
its mentors, including Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his team,
since the beginning of 2007 when the Manmohan Singh government
appointed them to work out the plan for the institution.
“In 2011, China had given a million-dollar
cheque as donation for reconstruction of Nalanda. It appears now
that Chinese were working in parallel to create the Buddhist
university. Such sprawling campus cannot be built in one or two
years. They must have started construction in 2012,” sources
said.
The Chinese Nalanda version is a sea-facing
structure located on scenic Nanshan Mountains spread across 618.8
acres. Chinese have rechristened the university’s coastline as
“Brahma Pure Land”, a concept borrowed from ‘Yoga Vashistha’ and
Mahayana Buddhism. The Chinese Nalanda will offer courses in three
languages—Pali, Tibetan and Chinese in six departments—Buddhism,
Tibetan Buddhism, and the Buddhist Architectural Design and
Research Institute.
The Chinese Buddhist university is closely
linked to the Buddhist centres in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal and
Cambodia, which is seen as an attempt to completely sideline the
Indian side in soft power diplomacy. The China has appointed monk
Yin Shun as the dean of the university, who is interestingly abbot
of Lumbini-based Zhong Hua Buddhist temple. Lumbini is the
birthplace of Buddha, and China has been aggressively pushing to
promote Nepalese pilgrimage site to counter India’s Sarnath and
Bodhgaya, where Gautama Buddha is said to have attained
enlightenment. Since early 2010, Yin Shun has been advocating “the
South China Sea Strategy” and had closely worked with Thailand and
Nepal to create Buddhist ‘One Belt and One Road’ (OBOR).
It is a known fact that India recently
boycotted China’s high-profile economic design flagging sovereignty
concerns over China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes
through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The plan, according to
sources, is to link Lumbini, Wuxi and Hainan through Buddhist OBOR,
usurping Buddhist legacy of India. Wuxi, near Shanghai, has been
turned into permanent venue of world Buddhist forum by the Chinese
government. According to sources, students as far as South American
countries are applying to the Chinese university, which, along with
knowledge, promises to provide best air and seawater quality in
entire South Asia.