India has always has been a holy land for Tibetans and it provided not only the Buddha’s teachings but a network of sacred pilgrimage sites which some of the Tibetans visited and used for their spiritual practices, The Bhutan Live reported.
When the holy sites of India became lost or inaccessible for Tibetan pilgrims, Tibetan agents made sure that the connection was not gone to the Holy Land and they moved the sites to the Tibetan plateau or reinvented them elsewhere within India. India has become more than a Holy Land as it is now home to more than a lakh of Tibetan refugees. The small but significant diasporic Tibetan community led by the Dalai Lama and other important lamas, including Karmapa Urgyen Trinley Dorje have successfully re-created and maintained their new, reinvented and united Tibetan society, as per the news report.
Tibetans in India were not only able to continue their important practice of pilgrimage to the holy Buddhist sites which were either unknown or lost to them for centuries. They were also able to use them to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity.
They have colonized the newly restored ancient sites of the Buddha, by building hundreds of permanent monasteries, guest houses, institutes and other structures. One of the newest projects is the construction of the Maitreya Statue in Bodhgaya which, once completed, will not only attract pilgrims in huge numbers but certainly will dominate the already Tibetanized landscape.
Tibetan Buddhism is one of the most profound and fascinating forms of Buddhism that has been practised in India for years. India has been the birthplace of many spiritual and religious practices, including Buddhism and it has continued to flourish and evolve over the years.
Tibetan Buddhism is unique and one of the most remarkable aspects of this practice is the role of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is an ancient universal human activity and one of the most common phenomena found in all major religious traditions.
Despite modernity and secularization, the pilgrimage continues to remain extremely popular for religious practitioners and has been transforming along with the 21st century’s social, economic and technological developments.
With the gradual opening of the Tibetan region to tourism in the 1980s, visiting Tibet and doing fieldwork became possible for Western scholars interested in the subject matter, as per The Bhutan Live report. As a result, a new generation of researchers from various disciplines has started to explore the Tibetan pilgrimage culture and places, producing a number of studies.
All of these works completely ignored the Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage places and culture of India – Tibet’s immediate neighbour and the birthplace of Buddhism which, as Huber noted, concerning the development of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage culture has been extremely important to the Tibetans themselves for a very long time (Huber 2008).
According to him, the research on the Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage culture of India should have attracted more of a scholarly interest, owing to the fact that for the very first time in history a permanent Tibetan society, along with its religious leaders, has been living in India for over 50 years due to major political changes in China.
The new environment, modernity and the internationalization of Tibetan Buddhism have altered the traditional Tibetan pilgrimage rituals, as per the news report. Tibetans recreated and reinvented large-scale gatherings like the Kalachakra Teachings or the Kagyu Monlam prayer festival, as per The Bhutan Live report.
Furthermore, they abandoned certain practices, like walking to the holy places and developing new ones, creating a more united Tibetan society, mixing with the international Buddhist community for the first time in Tibetan history and creating a more gender-equal society, as per The Bhutan Live report.
Many organizations and people are coming together to find new ways to preserve the unique practice and make it more accessible to people. An important aspect of the reimagined Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage culture is the use of technology. The utilisation of technology has enabled the development of interactive pilgrimage experiences.
