Integrity Score 390
No Records Found
No Records Found
Early Tibet-India and Sino-Indian Relations continues....
Some Chinese Buddhist monks too traveled to India to study and to collect Buddhist documents for translation. The most well-known of these was Hiuen Tsiang’s visit to India, from 629 CE.
Chinese chronicles such as Gaoseng Zhuan (Biographies of Eminent Monks) and Yuzhi Shenseng Zhuan (Biographies of Monks with Magical Powers) written in the 6th and 16th Centuries respectively, have recorded the visit of every Indian scholar to China, such as Kashyap Matanga, Dharmaratna, Kumarajiva, Bodhidharma , Amogha Vajra and Vajra Bodhi, but none who went from India to Tibet. The Indian founders of Tibetan Buddhism are not mentioned therein. Guru Padmasambhava Singh from Kashmir, variously known in Tibetan as Guru Rinpoche or Urgyan or Ratnagiri is not mentioned. Neither Shantarakshita from India’s famous Nalanda University, who introduced the Brahmi script, nor his disciple Kamalashmita who accompanied him, find mention.
There is also no mention of the famous Tantric Buddhist teacher Atisha Dipankara, born in 982 CE in the Bajra-yogini village of the Bikrampur area (in the Dhaka region) of eastern Bengal, who later became head of the renowned Vikramshila monastery in Bihar. At the age of 60 in 1042 CE, he had gone to live and preach for 13 years in Tibet, where he passed away in 1055 CE at the Nethang monastery, 26 km from Lhasa. It is thus clear that as per their own literature, in this vast period of Chinese history, China did not include Tibet.
To be continued......