Where Buddhism lives

Where this tradition comes from, and where it is hardest to practise.

Buddhism arrived from India in the seventh and eighth centuries and was rebuilt after a period of collapse from the eleventh, producing the four schools: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Geluk. Tsongkhapa founded the Geluk at the turn of the fifteenth century, and his students founded Ganden, Drepung and Sera within ten years.

After 1959 the monasteries were emptied and very largely destroyed. Sera, Drepung, Ganden and Tashi Lhunpo all still physically exist inside Tibet, and all four were rebuilt from scratch in India by the monks who escaped. Study inside Tibet continues under tight restriction.

83,000 monks in 1937. Under 500 by the end of 1938.

Mongolia has followed Tibetan Buddhism since the sixteenth century, when Altan Khan gave Sonam Gyatso the title Dalai Lama. The Fourth Dalai Lama was a Mongolian. By the 1930s the country had more than six hundred monasteries.

Then, between 1937 and 1939, the Stalinist purge reached Mongolia. In September 1937 there were roughly 83,000 Buddhist monks in the country. By the end of 1938 there were fewer than five hundred. More than six hundred monasteries were reduced to two, kept open mainly to show foreign visitors. Estimates of the total death toll from the repressions run between twenty and thirty-five thousand.

Recovery began only after the democratic revolution of 1990, led at first by elderly former monks who had survived because they had been too young or too junior to be worth shooting. They were then in their sixties and seventies, and they had to reconstruct an entire monastic education system from what they personally remembered.

FPMT arrived in 1999. Lama Zopa Rinpoche visited Mongolia for the first time that year, at the invitation of Bakula Rinpoche, and FPMT Mongolia was registered as a Mongolian religious organisation in late 1999. Its Dharma centre in Ulaanbaatar was given the name Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling in 2000. The first teacher there was Ven. George Churinoff, followed by Ven. Thubten Gyatso, the Australian monk Dr Adrian Feldman. For a country that had lost almost every qualified teacher, outside help was not a luxury.

The one Vajrayana country that was never conquered or purged.

Buddhism is the state religion, in the Drukpa Kagyu form, and the monastic body has continuous institutional history. Bhutan is the exception that makes the rest of this page legible: it shows what an uninterrupted Himalayan Buddhist society looks like.

The Buddha's birthplace, and where this tradition met the West.

Lumbini, in the Nepali Terai, is where the Buddha was born. Nepal holds Newar Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism among the Himalayan peoples and the Tibetan refugee community, and Theravada in the lowlands.

It is also where the modern encounter began. Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche met their first Western students in the region in 1967 and established Kopan on a hill outside Kathmandu. The Kopan November course has introduced foreigners to this tradition for over fifty years.

Where it began, where it died out, and where it came back.

Buddhism began here and had largely disappeared from the Indian mainland by around the thirteenth century. It returned in the twentieth from two directions at once: the Tibetan refugee settlements from 1959, and the mass conversion movement among Dalits led by Dr B. R. Ambedkar from 1956.

The great Geluk seats now stand in Karnataka: Ganden and Drepung at Mundgod, Sera and Tashi Lhunpo at Bylakuppe. The Doeguling settlement at Mundgod alone has a population over fifteen thousand. Dharamsala holds the Tibetan administration in exile and Namgyal, the Dalai Lama's own monastery. Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh have their own long Buddhist histories independent of the refugee story.

Three Buddhist republics, crushed in the 1930s, rebuilt since 1988.

Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva are traditionally Buddhist in the Tibetan Geluk form, and Kalmykia is the only Buddhist-majority region in Europe. From the early 1930s the Soviet religious suppression policy fell on all three: almost all lamas were arrested, sent to camps or shot, and the monastic system was destroyed.

Revival began at the end of the 1980s. The first local Buddhist group was registered in Kalmykia in 1988, and the Kalmyk Buddhist Federation followed in 1991. FPMT has centres in Moscow and St Petersburg.