Nepal Requests Korea To Change The Name Of Buddha's Birth Place

Nepal’s Ambassador to Korea Kamal Prasad Koirala has written a letter to President Lee Myung-bak requesting him to change the erroneous information in South Korean textbooks regarding the birth of Lord Buddha.

The four-page letter The Korea Times has obtained exclusively states that Lord Buddha was born in Lumbini and that Lumbini is a part of Nepal. “Most humbly I beg to bring to your kind notice the factual accuracy about the birthplace of Lord Buddha Shakyamuni which has been for many years and by many scholars has been (factually mistaken). Being aware of its significance and magnanimity of the sentiments of its large (body of) believers I take this opportunity to state the facts with humble request subsequently for its correction.”

The letter further states that when India was under the British rule, some British writers had written that Buddha was born in India and this is still believed to be true in many parts of the world.

The Shakyamuni Gautam Buddha was born in Lumbini, which at present is in Nepal, the ambassador writes. This place is at a distance of 32 kilometers north of the border of the Republic of India and while writing chronicles about Buddha the facts are in the ground.

“But many scholars mistakenly mention it following the old British archive. It seems many people are confused even today while answering the birthplace of Buddha,’’ he said, citing the colonization of India by Britain as the main reason. “With colonization of India British historians began to write its history in English. In these English histories it was written that Buddha was born in India. This mistake was done without any wrong motive. Until the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries the exact location of Lumbini remained unknown to them.”

Amb. Koirala also said that General Secretary of United Nations Ban Ki-moon has shown keen interest in the development of Lumbini, as it is the birthplace of Lord Buddha. He also stated that even the British Museum changed the birthplace of Lord Buddha to Nepal on Nov. 7.
He said President Lee would pay heed to the plea.

Amb. Koirala has also sent a copy of the letter to Lee Sang-ki, a founding member of the Asia Journalists Association and the publisher of The Asian. Praising Koirala’s attempt, Lee said the South Korean government would definitely pay heed to it.

“My humble request to Your Excellency is that the Korean children and college students should be given the opportunity to read the facts on the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. The fact known to His Excellency Ban Ki-moon and thousands of Koreans should be made known to children, students and young people of Korea as well,” the diplomat said in his letter.

A South Korean primary school textbook, ``Ethics Part One,’’ states that Lord Buddha was born in Khapila Castle in India. Similarly, another secondary school book, ``World History,’’ states that Lord Buddha was born in a Royal Brahmin family and his birthplace has been stated as India.

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Thaksin Visits Lumbini

Thailand’s former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra visited Lumbini, the birth place of Gautam Buddha, and performed worship as per the Buddhist tradition on December 17, 2011. The former Thai leader arrived in Kathmandu a day earlier on a chartered flight from Myanmar.

Shinawatra visited the Mayadevi Temple, where a marker stone has been kept at the place where Siddhartha Gautam was born, and observed the archaeological and historical sites including the Ashoka Pillar.

He visited the Thai Royal Monastery built by Thailand and distributed blankets to the common people there.


Along with his group, the Thai leader who is currently living in exile after he was removed from power in 2006 spent two hours in Lumbini. Officials of the Lumbini Development Trust informed Shinawatra about the site.

A team of Nepal Police officials led by a deputy superintendent of police is providing security to the Thai group.

An 11-member team including Sinawatra and Thai ambassador to Nepal Maria Sangiampongsa reached Lumbini yesterday evening. The visitors used two vehicles of the Thai Royal Monastery.

Secretary member of Lumbini Fund Rajendra Thapa Magar said he did not know about Shinawatra’s visit. Shinawatra returned Kathmandu at 3:10 am on Saturday by an Yeti Airlines to fly back to Myanmar

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Nepal Boy 'God'

A five-year-old Nepali boy, worshipped by many as a god, sits cross-legged with a stuffed teddy bear in his brick-and-cement home in Kathmandu.

Sambeg Shakya was hailed last year by Buddhist priests as Ganesh, or the god of good fortune, since when he has led several processions of Nepal's better-known 'living goddesses', also known as Kumari.













































Today, skinny Sambeg, his eyes rimmed in black kohl and wearing a gold brocade dress, walked at the head of a line of nine tiny girls to another girl believed to be the bodily incarnation of Taleju, the goddess of power.






















The centuries-old ritual, once used by now-toppled kings who thought it would make them stronger, was the climax of the annual Hindu festival of Dasain, which lasts for two weeks and has become a major tourist attraction in Nepal.






















Sambeg will continue in his supporting role until he is big enough to fit in a chariot pulled by men, after which he must return to real life.

"I want to become a doctor," Sambeg, his long hair tied in a bun on top with a peacock feather planted on it, told Reuters.






















He is in grade one, the first of ten years in high school.

His father Bishwo Prakash said his family will help the boy pursue the studies he chooses.

"He is very bright and good at learning. He does not forget what is told to him once," Prakash said. "I am very happy that my son plays the divine role."

Prakash said his son likes porridge, biscuits, goat and buffalo meat, but must not eat chicken or eggs.























The government pays US$63 a month to meet Sambeg's living costs, but his family said the money was not enough.

"The government must increase the allowances to cover the living costs and education of the child who plays a culturally significant role," Prakash said

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Nature Threat To Buddhism In Nepal

An ethnic community in Nepal's remotest Himalayan district bordering Tibet says it has been struggling to save its unique Buddhism culture from being uprooted by floods from a glacial lake.

The locals of Halji village in Humla district of western Nepal practise the Drikung Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism which has an 11th century monastery at its heart.



They are very worried that the Rinchenling monastery - one of the oldest in Nepal and highly revered in Tibet - could be swept away or damaged by floods and mudslides caused by the outburst of a glacial lake on the mountain overlooking their village.

For the past five years, Halji has been hit by glacial lake floods almost every summer and the last one nearly two months ago damaged two

Several crop fields were washed away and many remain covered with sands, rendering them barren for many years to come.

Villagers say the historic monastery now stands only around 15m away from the river bank that has been eroded by flood waters.

They fear the next time the Tak Tsho lake bursts out like it did this year, it may hit the 1,000 year-old sacred site.



"It is our identity," says Kojuk Objang Tamang, the head of Halji village. "We cannot even imagine about our community without the monastery which is the base of our religious culture," he told the BBC.

So strong is the community's creed on the monastery that they are convinced that it has saved them from the floods and mudslides so far.

"It is because of the blessings of the monastery that the village is hit by floods at day time only and so there is no loss of human lives because we can run to safety during daylight," says Tamang. "Had it happened in the night when we are asleep, god knows how many of us would have been dead by now.

Astrid Hovden of the University of Oslo, who has been conducting her PhD research in Halji, has witnessed how central the monastery is to the community of around 100 households.

"At the night of the flood (last June), after the water level in the river started to get back to normal, the monks performed an elaborate ritual in the monastery to pray for the safety of their village.

"Since the villagers got aware of the problem they have invited important lamas (priests) from outside to perform rituals to protect their village

Prayers apart, the villagers have also done whatever they could to save the monastery and their settlement.

Although almost all of them are uneducated, they have knocked on the doors of the prime minister's office in the capital Kathmandu, the local authority and the national planning commission.

Those efforts had secured some funding which they used to build defences using rocks and gabion wires to tame the flood waters.

"Every family in our village worked free of cost for the constructions of those infrastructures," says Tamang.

But villagers say every year the floods and mudslides hurtling down from the glacial lake at the height of around 5,300m on the Gurla Mandhata mountain become increasingly dangerous.

"Our effort to save the village is proving to be no match for the force of the floods," said Mangal Lama, a social worker from the region

Lama and other locals said they hiked up to the area where the Tak Tsho glacial lake is located and found that it is hidden behind a hanging glacier.

"And we saw huge cracks on the glacier, and that explained why we used to hear big sounds around the same time in June every year before we were hit by floods.

"Apparently, it appears that the huge pieces of ice sheet from the cracked parts of the glacier might have fallen into the glacial lake which then overflowed, causing floods and mudslides downstream."

Some scientists say climate change has accelerated glacial meltdown in the Himalayas, creating many new glacial lakes and filling up existing ones to dangerous levels.

Most of the 4,000 or so glaciers and their lakes in the Nepalese Himalayas are not monitored, like the one above Halji in Humla district.

The National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) Nepal has prepared under the United Nations climate convention has rated the district's vulnerability to glacial lake outburst flood as "very low" - something which has been disputed.

Social worker Lama said some villagers are so frustrated that they are considering going to Tibet across the border to become refugees.

"Because it takes five days walk to reach the nearest local authority of Nepal while Taklakot (the nearest Tibetan market) is only 12 hours away and moreover the villagers speak the Tibetan language and follow all traditions of Tibet."

Locals say they cannot also move the monastery and their settlement to a safe place.

"The moment we move the monastery, its religious and historic value will drop to zero," says Tamang. "And that, in turn, means our century old intact religious and cultural community will break and it will all be over"

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Kung Fu Nuns

It is early in the morning at the Amitabha Drukpa Nunnery on a hillside just outside Kathmandu and hundreds of devotees are walking clockwise around a golden statue of Buddha.

But rather than being immersed in prayer, up on the roof something different is happening - they are practising the same kung fu fighting made famous by the Bruce Lee films of the 1970s.

Young Buddhist nuns from the 800-year-old Drukpa Buddhist sect are being taught by their Vietnamese master.

The martial art was introduced to the nunnery two years ago and the nuns practise up to two hours a day.

'More powerful'

Rupa Lama, a 16-year-old nun from India, says kung fu helps her concentrate.

"It's good for our health. Meditation is very difficult and if we do kung fu, then afterwards meditation becomes much easier," she says.

It's a beautiful life option to getting married, having a baby every year, working in the fields and doing the cooking

Another nun, Konchok, also from India, says she likes kung fu because it gives her strength.

"It's very helpful for our safety. If somebody teases us or something, then we can hit them and be more powerful," she says.


The confidence shown by these young nuns is unusual. Buddhist nuns in the Himalayas are normally seen as inferior to monks.

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, an Englishwoman who became a Drukpa Buddhist nun more than 30 years ago, says traditionally nuns have been neglected and overlooked.

"The main problem for nuns has always been that they have not normally had a good situation in which to live, they have not received the support from lay people that monks receive and they have not been educated.

"So often nuns became basically just household servants for their families or working in the kitchens and the gardens in the monasteries," she says.

Kung fu was introduced into the Amitabha Drukpa Nunnery by the leader of the Drukpa spiritual sect, His Holiness The Gyalwang Drukpa.

'Well-equipped'

The Gyalwang Drukpa is the 12th incarnation of the leader of the Drukpa - or dragon - sect of Buddhism, which is the main religion of Bhutan and is widely practised in countries across the Himalayas.

The nunnery is no different to any other large house in Kathmandu
He says that he felt that previous spiritual leaders had not done enough to advance the rights of women.

"When I was very small, I was already thinking that it was not right to suppress women in our society," he says.

"But then when I grew up, I started to think what can I do for them? Then I thought what I can do is to build a nunnery and then give them an opportunity to study and practise spiritually," he says.

The nunnery built by The Gyalwang Drukpa, the Amitabha Drukpa Nunnery, is a modern, well-funded and a well-equipped place of worship and study.

"Not only [is it] just beautiful to look at, but it is a nunnery with the guidelines and the full support from their master, me," he says.

He says he encouraged the nuns to take up kung fu when he saw nuns from Vietnam practising it.

Emphasis on meditation

For the past week, the nuns have been giving demonstrations of their new skill to thousands of pilgrims who are attending the Second Annual Drukpa Conference.

Nuns say that Kung Fu has opened up a whole new world
The Drukpa sect, which places an emphasis on meditation, is popular throughout the Himalayas and also with Westerners.

Jan Duin, who is attending the conference from the Netherlands, says he has been impressed by the kung fu practice.

"I think it is very helpful physically and also psychologically because they do a lot of sitting practice," he says.

"In meditation you practise concentration and you also practise concentration with kung fu."

Buddhist nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo says that she'll be introducing kung fu into her own nunnery which is based in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

"It's excellent exercise, secondly it's very good for discipline and concentration, thirdly it arouses a sense of self-confidence which is very important for nuns, and fourthly when any young men in the area know nuns are kung fu experts, they keep away," she says.

Jetsunma says since nunneries have begun to offer better education and physical programmes like kung fu, the number of young women who want to become nuns has grown dramatically.

"Many of them say, wow, if I become a nun I can study, I can practise, I can do these rituals, I can live together with all these other lovely nuns and lamas will visit us and give us teaching," she says.

"It's a beautiful life option to getting married, having a baby every year, working in the fields, doing the cooking, doing the cleaning.

"You know for them this is a huge opening up in a whole world that had previously been closed to them."

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First Nepali Movie On Buddha

Alarmed by Bollywood training its lenses on the Buddha, an Indian film director of Nepali origin is now making the first Buddha film from the Himalayan republic to bolster its claim to the founder of Buddhism.

Tulsi Ghimire, who moved from India's hill town of Kalimpong to Mumbai first to learn acting and film-making and then made Kathmandu his home, has begun making "Gautam Buddha", the first Buddha film from Nepal, the birthplace of the apostle of peace.

The 60-year-old, who gave the Nepali film industry such hits as "Kusume rumal" and "Balidaan", says he was inspired to make the film after a conversation with Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka and other places.

"First, there was this Bollywood movie, 'Chandni Chowk to China', that claimed the Buddha was born in Nepal," Ghimire told IANS in an interview. "Then there are reports of renowned Bollywood director Ashutosh Gowarikar making an epic film on the Buddha.

"We are concerned whether there isn't some political motivation - to lay claim to the Buddha. If Gowarikar builds the sets of Kapilavastu, the kingdom in which the Buddha was born to its ruler King Shuddhodan, the Indian state where it is erected may be regarded by many people as the birthplace of the Buddha.

"Some puzzled Sri Lankan monks actually asked me whether the Buddha was born in India or Nepal. I told them, he was born in Kapilavastu, when neither India nor Nepal existed. Archaeological ruins prove Kapilavastu was in southern Nepal. You can still see the remains of the old palace and the garden where the Buddha was born."

"Gautam Buddha", to be dubbed in English, Hindi, Sinhalese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and German, is going to be an animated film and the first animated feature film from Nepal.

"It would have cost far less had I chosen people to play the roles," he says ruefully. "But I found that impossible.
The Buddha literature available details minutely the 32 auspicious signs Prince Siddharth possessed, that made him a king among men. He had arms that reached his knees, the large kindly eyes of a cow, and a voice as deep as an echoing well. I realised it would be impossible to find such an actor."

Incidentally, Gowarikar is said to be on a manhunt to find the perfect face for his Buddha. "The Little Buddha", the 1994 feature film made by Hollywood director Bernardo Bertolucci, obliquely presents the story of the Buddha and his
quest for enlightenment, with Keanu Reaves playing the role.

Ghimire's film will be ready by 2013. However, he has a sneak preview for the media in mind later this year when only a few scenes will be shown.

Ghimire says he read all the literature available on the Buddha that he could get, including Dr B.R. Ambedkar's "The Buddha and his Dhamma", and Indian vipassana guru S.N. Goenka's writings about the Buddha and Buddhism.

"There are three schools detailing the Buddha's life," he says. "The Mahayana Buddhists chronicle a logically believable life while the Hinayana Buddhists depict Prince Siddharth as a reincarnation of god. The Vajrayana school, on the other hand, invests him with tantric powers.

"I have tried to adopt a middle path in my story-telling."

Ghimire says his 110-minute film will explode some of the common myths about the Buddha, including the one that said the prince left the luxury of the palace in shock after he saw an old man, a sick man, a dead man and a monk.

"The prince was 29 when he renounced worldly life," Ghimire explains. "It is therefore impossible that he didn't come across any old man in that time. His own father must have been old at that time.

"Actually, he gave up all claims on his kingdom to avert a clan war as his infamous cousin Devdutta was gearing up for battle."

His film, Ghimire hopes, will also bring into light the character of the prince's wife, Yashodhara, of whom little is known.

"She was a pillar of support to her husband," he says. "They had met before they were married and those scenes bring romance to the film."

It is rather unusual to see an Indian director championing the cause of another country. Ghimire has a vey simple answer to that.

"I just want to present the facts," he says.

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Photo Gallery - Vesak Celebration

In Bodhgaya, India


In Phnom Penh, Cambodia



In Bangkok, Thailand



In Yangon, Myanmar



In Hanoi, Vietnam





In Central Jawa, Indonesia






In Kathmandu, Nepal





In Colombo, Sri Lanka




In Seoul, Korea





In Singapore



Vesak Celebration at Borobodur Temple in Magelang, Indonesia on May 17, 2011









In Penang, Malaysia




In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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Buddhist Personality : Zenisha Moktan

Name : Zenisha Moktan
Nationality : Nepal
Date Of Birth : 1989
Height : 168cm
Profession : Model - she was crowned Miss Nepal in September 2009 who will end her reign later this month.

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Buddhist Personality : Mingma Sherpa

Name : Mingma Sherpa
Nationality : Nepal
Date Of Birth : 23rd September 1980
Profession : Singer

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