The history of Buddhist studies in the Himalayas is often traced back to Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801-1894), an officer of the British East India Company stationed in Nepal exploring the trade routes to China through Tibet (Waterhouse 2004: 7). His fine collection of Buddhist texts contributed to the establishment of Buddhology in the West by pioneering figures like Max Müller and Nathaniel Wallich (Lopez 2004: 49-51). Toward the end of the nineteenth century while European Buddhologists were indulging themselves in the textual and historical studies of Buddhism, native Buddhists in these regions rather began to link their traditional doctrinal teachings to pan-Asian Buddhist political actions. For instance, the birth of the Calcutta-based Maha Bodhi Society founded by Anagarika Dharmapala in 1891 attested to this transregional trend of modern Buddhist practices. It later spawned a variety of the socially engaged Buddhisms throughout Asia and the rest of the world, and compelled contemporary scholars to rethink Buddhist practices in the framework of Buddhist modernism, which is understood as a product of Western colonialism, industrialization, and modernization as well as of Asian Buddhists’ agentive responses to these forceful changes of our modern times (McMahan 2008: 5).

This chapter is a study of trans-Himalayan Buddhist secularities as a parallel development of state-sanctioned secularisms and Buddhist modernism in contemporary India and among Tibetans in diaspora.