Buddha Foundation UK condemns Dalai Lama’s controversial speech

London-Buddha Foundation UK has condemned Dalai Lama’s controversial speech on friday by a statement. A press release issued by President Deepak Shrestha and General Secretary Ganesh Khadka reads as below-

Buddha Foundation expresses the strongest condemnation against the speech made by Dalai Lama at UP India on October 16, 2017, during the launch of the Universal Ethics Curriculum for the Indian schools.

It has recently come to our attention that the views shared by Dalai Lama dispute the facts about Gautama Buddha’s birthplace as disseminated to the public during his speech. Dalai Lama intensifies his argument by saying “Nepalese are claiming Lumbini as the birthplace of Buddha”. He blatantly attacks the Nepali as being nonsense. Instead, he advocates Gautam Buddha was an Indian. This has not only hurt the sentiments of millions of Nepalese but also created a colossal facet of controversy to the outside world about Gautam Buddha’s birthplace.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this bigotry display of history. Two-minute narratives of his speech seem to be politically motivated and aimed at promoting Gautam Buddha’s birth as India. Not only Dalai Lama, Prime Minister Modi, Scholars, Artists, and textbooks were written in past to perpetuate the idea of Buddhism belonging to India.

We strongly urge Dalai Lama to apologize for his controversial speech which might be perceived as a fact by many of his followers. We stress that “Lumbini-Nepal is the birthplace of Gautam Buddha” which has already been recognized by UNESCO. We further urge Dalai Lama one of the spiritual leaders not to advocate such false claims in near future and respect the feelings of Nepalese.