Early Tibet-India and Sino-Indian Relations begins....

There are various perceptions regarding the earlier relationships that existed between Tibet and India, Tibet and China, and India and China. One is that of the perceptions of the Indian Government vis-à-vis Tibet and China, another that of the Indian people. Ethnic Tibetans irrespective of present residence have their own views regarding India and China. The so-called ‘Tibetan Government-in-Exile’ located in India has its own view of history, while the Chinese Government of the PRC appears to have a different version of history regarding Tibet and India. Some of these are dramatically different from each other, even on the same subject, and this account attempts to present a synthesized view, from as many available accounts as possible, shorn of bias, without presenting comparative differences where they exist.

The spread of Buddhism from India to what is now the PRC was in two separate streams, independent of each other, to Tibet and to China.

Though Buddhism first reached China from India in the First Century CE, it was during the Sui Dynasty in China (581-618 CE), which corresponded with the resurgence of Hinduism in India, when it really grew. Many Buddhist monks from India traveled to China and made it their permanent home. The Chinese name for India, ‘Shendu’, a sinification of ‘Sindhu’, got changed to ‘Tianzhu’, meaning ‘heavenly land’, in this period. Indian Buddhist monks went to China by one of two routes, one overland and the other by sea. More common was the land route through today’s Afghanistan, which was then a flourishing centre of Indian Buddhism, as the famous 6th Century Bamian Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001 testify, through the
similarly Indian Buddhist oasis towns of today’s Xinjiang, and thence into mainland Han China. The other route was the sea route from southern India via the Indian-founded Buddhist states of modern Indonesia, there being regular seaborne commerce between southern Indian ports and south-east Asia, and thence to the southern China ports.

To be continued.......