Editing Nepal (section)

=== The Kathmandu Conference of 1956 ===

In November 1956 Kathmandu hosted the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. King Mahendra opened it on 14 November and banned animal sacrifice on Buddha Jayanti; Amritananda was elected a vice-president of the Fellowship; and among the speakers, according to Kloppenborg, were Chandramani and the Sri Lankan scholar G.P. Malalasekera, who called for a "Buddhist welfare state."<ref>LeVine and Gellner (2005), ''Rebuilding Buddhism'', p. 58; Kloppenborg (1977), "Theravada Buddhism in Nepal", pp. 308–309. One source calls the conference the "World Congress of Religions" (Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2020). "Living Buddhism: Migration, memory, and castelessness in South India". ''History and Anthropology'', online 14 December 2020, n. 7); the sources are consistent on the year, and the naming differences appear to be only that.</ref> [[BR Ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]], who had converted at Nagpur a month earlier, addressed the delegates in the palace on 20 November, on the relation between Buddhism and communism; the speech is treated on his page.<ref>Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "Buddha or Karl Marx" (Kathmandu speech, 20 November 1956). In: BAWS 17, part 3: 549–558. The headnote (p. 549) places the speech in the palace of the King of Nepal and records that Chandramani gave the Three Refuges and Five Precepts; its dais list names "Amrutanand Mahasthavir," whose identification with Amritananda is not stated by the source.</ref> LeVine and Gellner and Chudal, who relies on Anand Kausalyayan, also place Ambedkar at the conference, and Chudal reports that Sankrityayan, who also attended, said in an impromptu speech that Nepal and India share a single culture.<ref>LeVine and Gellner (2005), ''Rebuilding Buddhism'', p. 60; Chudal (2015), "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal", pp. 77, 81–82. Chudal's gloss that Sankrityayan felt he was never in a "foreign land" in Nepal, expressing "one cultural soul," is her own interpretation. Ayyathurai (2020), "Living Buddhism", n. 7 (p. 18), reports an informant's account that Tamil Buddhists from Hubli met Ambedkar at the conference.</ref>

Three years later Amritananda traveled to [[China]], North [[Vietnam]], [[Mongolia]], and the [[Russia and the Societ Union|Soviet Union]]. According to Kloppenborg, he returned convinced that Buddhism was flourishing under communism, and his praise of the communist countries made a great impression on Buddhists in Nepal, [[Sri Lanka]], and [[Burma]].<ref>Kloppenborg (1977), "Theravada Buddhism in Nepal", p. 310, citing Amritananda (1961), Welch (1963), and Bechert (1966) (as reported by Kloppenborg). LeVine and Gellner (2005), ''Rebuilding Buddhism'', p. 69, repeat the visit from Kloppenborg and are not independent confirmation.</ref> This is the only pairing of Buddhism and communism that the Theravada sources record before the 1990s, and the sources do not show that Amritananda drew on Marxist ideas.