KATHMANDU — The first sign I had that the “Buddha was born in Nepal” controversy was taking a serious turn was when I saw an ID card, modeled after the Nepali citizenship card, which listed “Gautama Buddha” as a citizen. This image was floated on Facebook and had received thousands of “likes” by the time I saw it. As a cosmopolitan Nepali, this card discomfited me. Surely, I thought, Buddha is a transcendental figure that cannot be located in space and time, and everyone has the right to claim him as their own. The modern parochial politics of national boundaries, I thought, wasn’t fit for the Buddha. So I commented that neither the contemporary nation state of Nepal, nor India, existed 2,600 years ago.
read more: http://www.irrawaddy.org/contributor/search-buddha-without-borders.html
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