Nepal

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Nepal is the country of the Buddha's traditional birthplace at Lumbini, and a state in which Buddhism has long coexisted with a dominant Hindu order and was often subordinated to it. Until 1951 hereditary Rana prime ministers ruled in the name of a figurehead monarchy and enforced Hindu orthodoxy by law; the monarchy itself was abolished only in 2008, two years after Nepal declared itself secular. Buddhism in Nepal takes several forms: the Sanskrit Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, the Buddhism of Himalayan and hill peoples such as the Tamang, and a Theravada reform movement that began among Newars in the 1920s.

Nepal is included in the Radical Buddhism Project for three reasons: the conflict between the Theravada revival and the Rana state; Nepal's role as a meeting place for Indian figures such as Rahul Sankrityayan and, in 1956, B.R. Ambedkar; and the secularism campaign and the encounters between Buddhists and Maoists after 1990.

Buddhism in Nepal

Newar Buddhism and the Hindu State

Buddhism has a long history in the territory of present-day Nepal, and the Kathmandu Valley is home to a Sanskrit Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition that the Newars have practiced without interruption. The Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts that the British Resident Brian Hodgson collected in Kathmandu in the nineteenth century became a foundation of European Buddhist scholarship. According to Bechert and Hartmann, probably in the thirteenth or fourteenth century the monastic community of Newar Buddhism was transformed into a caste community: hereditary Vajracharya and Shakya (Shakyabhikshu) households, whose male members are initiated as boys and live as married householders, form the "Sangha," while other Buddhist castes, such as the Tuladhars and Manandhars, are excluded from these monastic communities. They describe a "spiritual crisis" of Newar Buddhism, in which there is no living doctrinal tradition, the rituals are expensive, and the caste exclusivity is one that the Vajracharyas cannot justify rationally. Newar Buddhism is still described as fully embedded in a traditional caste system.

The Rana prime ministers, who ruled from 1846 to 1951, sided with Hindu orthodoxy. In a dispute among Newar Buddhists over the food offerings of a Tibetan lama, the Rana state upheld the orthodox Hindu rules and imprisoned two Vajracharyas in 1932, which pushed some Newar Buddhists toward Tibetan and Theravada alternatives. Buddhism was tolerated as a sub-sect of Hinduism, with the Buddha treated as an avatar of Vishnu. Conversion from Hinduism, including to Buddhism, was banned: Letizia, following Gaborieau, dates the ban to the Rana-era civil code of 1935, and it survived in later law, including the 1990 Constitution and the 2007 Interim Constitution. Buddhism's cultural presence outside the Kathmandu Valley is carried largely by ethnic identity: Tibetan-influenced groups such as the Hyolmo, Sherpa, and Tamang are Buddhist, and educated Tibetan Buddhists settled in the valley in numbers only after 1959.

The Theravada Revival

In the 1920s a reform movement inspired by Theravada Buddhism emerged among the Newars. It began largely outside Nepal: Newar merchants and students in Calcutta met missionaries of the Maha Bodhi Society, and the first Nepalese Theravada monks were ordained in India. Dharmaditya Dharmacharya (Jagatman Vaidya, 1902–1963) met Anagarika Dharmapala in Calcutta, and after returning to Nepal in 1923 founded the Nepal Buddhopasak Sangha, a lay association, and three weeks later a women's counterpart; Chudal describes the Newari-language translations that he sent to Dharmapala's Calcutta journal as the first periodical in that language. The movement translated Buddhist texts into Newari and Nepali, gave laypeople access to teaching and meditation, and ordained novices, monks, and, in a development without precedent in the Theravada world, nuns. Its leading figures included Amritananda (Mahanayaka Thera), who kept a high public profile through his friendship with King Tribhuvan, and U Chandramani, the Arakanese-born monk of Kusinagar (see below). Its central institution, the Dharmodaya Sabha (Council for the Advancement of the Dharma), was founded in Sarnath on 30 November 1944, with Chandramani as president and Amritananda as general secretary. The Rana state suppressed the movement and expelled its monks, as described below.

Buddhism Since 1951

After the overthrow of the Rana regime in 1950–51, the legal climate changed. King Tribhuvan took part in a Buddha-puja on Vesak in 1951, breaking with a tradition that had forbidden the Gurkha rulers to worship the Buddha, the Dharmodaya Sabha moved to Nepal, and an All-Nepal Bhikshu Mahasangha was formed with Amritananda as president; Buddha Jayanti became a national holiday. The Sabha's activity then declined quickly after the mid-1950s, having exhausted its resources, and did not revive until 1984. In the mid-1980s Bechert and Hartmann counted about forty-two fully ordained monks and some sixty anagarikas, and they noted a degree of significance for nuns that had no precedent in the Theravada world. Nepal remained a Hindu kingdom until the proclamation of a secular state in May 2006, and in the 2021 census about 8.2 percent of the population (some 2.4 million people) was counted as Buddhist, down from 9 percent in 2011. Census figures have been contested: Bechert and Hartmann called the 1981 figure of 5.3 percent very doubtful, and activists campaigned to be counted as Buddhist in 2001 (see below). Questions of ownership and identity also surround Lumbini itself: according to Ober, many Nepalis object to claims that the Buddha was "Indian" rather than Nepali.

Radical Buddhism in Nepal

Prior to the 1990s there is little that resembles radical Buddhism in a strict sense in Nepal. Nevertheless, there was a Theravada reform movement that came into conflict with an authoritarian state; Indian radical Buddhists passed through Nepal or corresponded with Nepalese Buddhists; and since1990 there have been campaigns in which Buddhist identity was linked to secularism, ethnic recognition, and, in a few cases, left-wing politics. Even for the Rana period, LeVine and Gellner observe that political reformers were not primarily concerned with religious reform, nor religious reformers with politics.

Dissent and Reform under the Rana State

The Rana regime was a patrimonial state in which the kings lived under what LeVine and Gellner call permanent house arrest, and it kept Indian democratic and nationalist ideas out of Nepal. Besides banning conversion, it banned the public use of languages other than Nepali and the printing of books in them, which especially affected Newari; writers who used Newari were arrested. The Theravada revival was therefore also a language movement, and its translations into Newari and Nepali were themselves a form of dissent. According to Kloppenborg, following Bechert, the Maha Bodhi Society combined the propagation of Buddhism with nationalistic and social-revolutionary ideals, which is why the Rana regime distrusted contacts with it in the 1930s and 1940s. The regime's response was not uniformly hostile: Chudal reports that Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher contributed to the renovation of the Kindol Vihara at Swayambhu in 1923.

Repression came in several waves, and the sources disagree about the dates. In November 1931 Das Ratna Tuladhar (Dhammalok) and eleven other Newars, among them the poets Jogbir Singh Kansakar and Chittadhar Hridaya, were fined and briefly imprisoned for "unorthodox religion." Kloppenborg and LeVine and Gellner report that Mahapragya (Mahaprajna) and five others were expelled to India in 1926, while Bechert and Hartmann place the arrest and expulsion of Mahapragya and Amritananda at Bhojpur in 1937, a date that Chudal's notes give as 14 January 1937. In 1940 the government imprisoned Hridaya and Fatte Bahadur Singh over a Newari poetry collection, Nepali Vihara; in prison Hridaya wrote his best-known work, Sugata Saurabha, a verse life of the Buddha. On 30 July 1944 Prime Minister Juddha Shamsher ordered the monks to stop preaching, ordaining, and printing in Newari and to return to lay life, and those who refused had to leave; about a dozen monks went into exile in India. Buddhists in several countries protested, the Maha Bodhi Society offered the exiles hospitality in Sarnath, and the Sri Lankan monk Bhikshu Sri Nivasa sheltered five of them at his rest house at Nautanva on the Indian side of the border. The government's reply to the protests defended Hindu sanatana dharma and treated the conversion of "minors and women" as an offense; LeVine and Gellner add that the vihara of the anagarika Dharmashila at Pokhara became a meeting place for political opponents of the regime. The same sources record that in 1941 four men were hanged for organizing the Praja Parishad, a political association; LeVine and Gellner do not present this as a Buddhist event.

Indian Visitors and Allies

Nepal's Buddhist revival also unfolded in contact with Indian scholars, several of whom are covered elsewhere in the project. Dharmanand Kosambi visited Kathmandu in February 1902, hoping to learn about Buddhism; he found no learned monk or lay Buddhist, was saddened by what he saw at a stupa, and went on to Bodh Gaya. His account is a useful baseline for how little visible Buddhist learning there was before the revival. Rahul Sankrityayan entered Nepal repeatedly between 1920 and 1936, often disguised as a Hindu pilgrim during the Sivaratri festival, because Nepal was his gateway to Tibet. Dharmaman Sahu, a wealthy Newar merchant of Lhasa, and Hemraj Sharma, the Rana state's rajguru, helped him; Chudal reports that his political books were later banned in Nepal while his Buddhist books were not. Chudal concludes that Sankrityayan was not actively involved in the Theravada movement and that his support for it was moral rather than organizational. His books nevertheless reached its members. Hridaya read Sankrityayan's Hindi Buddhacharya in prison as a devotional text, and Mahapragya's Newari life of the Buddha is described by LeVine and Gellner as following Sankrityayan's Hindi life closely, although Bechert and Hartmann say that it was composed from Pali sources.

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." 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. 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.

Three years later Amritananda traveled to China, North Vietnam, Mongolia, and the 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. 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.

U Chandramani

U Chandramani (1876–1972; also Candramani) was an Arakanese-born monk who came to India at Dharmapala's request and was based at Kusinagar, where he opened a school in 1929. He trained the first Nepalese Theravada monks, among them Dharmaloka, who was ordained a novice under him in 1931, and Ober, following LeVine and Gellner, credits him with spearheading the Theravada movement in twentieth-century Nepal by introducing a new lineage of trained monks and nuns among Vajrayana Newar families. He was the first president of the Dharmodaya Sabha. He matters for the history of radical Buddhism chiefly because he was the senior monk at Ambedkar's conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, where he administered the Three Refuges and Five Precepts, and, according to the headnote of Ambedkar's Kathmandu speech, he also gave the refuges and precepts at the Kathmandu event a month later.

Caste, Women, and Reform within the Sangha

Bechert and Hartmann identify modernist features in the Nepalese Theravada movement: translation of texts, lay access, mass meditation, rationalism and demythologization, and a social philosophy that included the emancipation of women and a critical examination of the inherited social and political order. Caste was a practical problem. A monk who accepts food from a lower-caste donor may be refused by higher-caste lay supporters, so that many monasteries replaced alms rounds with invitations to lunch. Bechert and Hartmann report that Theravada monks call caste a secular matter, that laypeople threatened to withdraw their support if certain bounds were crossed, and that, although alms from untouchables are accepted and several untouchables have entered the community, the Sangha had not yet conferred full ordination on a monk of untouchable caste, who remained a novice. LeVine and Gellner record that the monks Ashwaghosh and Buddhaghosh insisted from the start on taking alms rice from low-caste households, and that Theravada reached middle and lower Newar castes, notably the Maharjans, who became a main source of recruits. Vipassana courses opened meditation, formerly restricted to Vajracharyas, Shakyas, and Udays, to a wider public.

Nepal did not develop a Dalit Buddhist movement like the one that followed Ambedkar in India. Letizia, citing Hangen, notes that the Dharmodaya Sabha has not promoted Dalit conversion, that the Newars who control the public representation of Buddhism accept Janajati (ethnic) Buddhists but seem uncomfortable with Dalit Buddhists, and that the Janajati category, which excludes Hindu caste groups, impedes coalitions between Janajatis and Dalits. The movement was nevertheless linked to the Indian one: according to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, the Triratna movement founded by Sangharakshita, which supports Ambedkarite converts, had centers in India and Nepal by the 1970s.

Bhikshu Ashwaghosh

Bhikshu Ashwaghosh (born Buddha Ratna Shakya, b. 1926; also Aswaghosh, Asvagosha) became a novice in 1944 and was fully ordained in 1949 in Sri Lanka; he was later abbot of the Shrigha Vihara in Kathmandu. LeVine and Gellner report that he was known to many as "the communist monk," that after 1990 he was active in the movement for a secular constitution in alliance with the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), and that he sat in the Upper House on its nomination, either from 1991 to 1993 (p. 281) or from 1993 to 1995 (Appendix 1, p. 293). The chapters of LeVine and Gellner on meditation and social activism contain no politics: they show him as a supporter of the meditation movement who hoped it would help with his temper, included selfless social service among its advantages, and, with Sudarshan, advised Magar activists on rites and texts. He is the clearest case in the sources of a monk allied with a left-wing party, but the sources do not document his own political statements, and none links him to the monks' secularism campaign discussed below.

Secularism, Ethnicity, and Buddhism after 1990

The first jana andolan (people's movement) of 1990 ended the panchayat system under King Birendra, the Maoist insurgency lasted from 1996 to 2006, a second jana andolan in April 2006 led to the proclamation of a secular state on 18 May 2006, and the Constituent Assembly declared a secular republic in May 2008. Torri reports, at second hand from Letizia, that the campaign for secularism emerged in the 1990s from a movement launched by Theravada monks with the support of Janajati activists; no monk is named, and Torri does not link the campaign to Ashwaghosh. Letizia describes how late in the Panchayat period young Newar activists formed the Yuba Bauddha Samuha, which sought Janajati recruits for a "secular, that is, non-Hindu" constitution and held meetings in Theravada viharas; when the 1990 constitution still called Nepal a Hindu state, the activists judged the campaign a failure. By "secularism" many groups meant primarily the equal recognition of religions and an end to the primacy of Hinduism, and not the separation of religion from the state. The Maoist leadership also envisaged a secular Nepal as part of its program of "new democracy." The 2015 Constitution calls Nepal "secular," but the explanatory note glosses the word as protection of religion and culture practiced from ancient times, which Letizia reads, according to Torri, as evoking sanatan dharma.

Janajati Buddhism

After 1990 ethnic activists campaigned against Brahmin domination, and the federation of indigenous nationalities (founded as NEFEN, renamed NEFIN in 2003) became the main organization of the Janajatis, who make up about a third of the population. Buddhism supplied some of them with a way of opposing Hindu hegemony. The first international Magar conference in 1998 declared Buddhism the Magars' religion, and after a campaign by activists about a quarter of Magars declared themselves Buddhist in the 2001 census, although, as Letizia notes, the Magars and Tharus had no Buddhist tradition of their own. Buddhist awareness camps, a new class of lay Buddhist ritual specialists (Magar uapas and Tharu pandits) who replace the Brahmin in life-cycle rituals, and the Himalayan Buddhist Education Foundation (founded 1995 with Taiwanese funds) supported the turn; Letizia argues that by 2008 ethnic activism had given way to moral teaching and personal responsibility. The Maoist insurgency brought the camps to a halt in 2001, and they have only slowly restarted.

Maoists and Buddhists

The only source in hand that pairs Buddhism with Maoist politics in Nepal is Steinmann's ethnography of Buddhist Tamangs in the eastern hills. She reports that in the 1980s Tamang villagers called themselves communists while revering the Hindu king, that from the 1990s young people read Buddhism as protest against Hindu supremacy, and that a few marginal, self-educated urban Tamang intellectuals aligned Marxism with a modernist Buddhism. According to her, the Maoists did not seek to destroy monasteries, and they aimed to open places of worship to untouchables, although a Tamang lama was tortured by Maoist relatives. Steinmann also reports that all parties courted the "Buddhist vote"; that Lharkyal Lama sat in the Constituent Assembly for the CPN-UML after 2008, briefly became a minister, and was elected on the Maoist proportional list in 2013; and that the monk Bhikkhu Ananda, trained in Sri Lanka, became a Maoist member of the Assembly. Her own interpretation, which is contested, is that Nepali Maoism was a Brahmin-led project of modernization and a "third wave" of Hinduization from above.

Literature in English

• Torri, Davide (2019). "Religious Identities and the Struggle for Secularism: The Revival of Buddhism and Religions of Marginalized Groups in Nepal". Entangled Religions 8. [An open-access study of Nepal's secularism campaign, Janajati identity politics, and the Buddhist revival after 1990. It deliberately excludes Dalits.]
• Gellner, David N., Sondra L. Hausner, & Chiara Letizia (Eds.) (2016). Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal. Oxford University Press. [A collection that includes Letizia's chapter on ideas of secularism and Brigitte Steinmann's study of confrontations between Maoists and Buddhists, the only source consulted that pairs Buddhism with Maoist politics.]
• Chudal, Alaka Atreya (2015). "Rahul Sankrityayan and the Buddhism of Nepal". European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 46: 62–87. [An open-access account of Sankrityayan's journeys through Nepal and his ties to Newar Buddhists, which also reconstructs the Rana-era suppression of Newari-language Buddhist writing.]
• Letizia, Chiara (2014). "Buddhist Activism, New Sanghas, and the Politics of Belonging among Some Tharu and Magar Communities of Southern Nepal". In: Toffin, Gérard, & Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (Eds.), Facing Globalization in the Himalayas: 286–322. Sage. [The fullest account of how Janajati activists adopted Buddhism after 1990, including its legal frame and the campaign for a secular constitution.]
• LeVine, Sarah, & David N. Gellner (2005). Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal. Harvard University Press. [The standard history of the Theravada movement, covering the Rana-era repression, the exiles of 1944, the Dharmodaya Sabha, and the later movement's social activism, with a "Dramatis Personae" appendix; it contains little on Marxism or Dalits.]
• Bechert, Heinz, & Jens-Uwe Hartmann (1988). "Observations on the Reform of Buddhism in Nepal". Journal of the Nepal Research Centre 8: 1–30. [A mid-1980s survey of the Newar Buddhist caste structure and of the Theravada movement's modernism and treatment of caste.]
• Kloppenborg, Ria (1977). "Theravada Buddhism in Nepal". Kailash 5(4): 301–321. [The earliest scholarly account of the Theravada movement's institutions and of the Kathmandu conference of 1956.]

Literature in Other Languages

(none identified)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Nepal". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Nepal.