Word: buddhists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FIGHT? The island's two main ethnic groups are the majority Sinhalese (who number 14 million, are Buddhist, and live mainly in the south) and the Tamils (who number 2 million, are Hindu, and are concentrated in the north and east). The roots of discord go back to colonial times. The British favored the Tamils in the civil service in what Neil DeVotta, author of Blowback, a book about the origins of the conflict, says was "classic divide and rule." After independence in 1948, the Sinhalese took revenge. They made Sinhala the official language, discriminated against Tamils in areas like...
...China diluted its socialist purity by embracing economic reforms, religious controls began easing as well. The skylines of Chinese towns now teem with temples, shrines and churches. In Shanghai alone, at least 25 Buddhist temples have been built or renovated since 2000. Other cities are also being transformed. In the seaside town of Quanzhou in Fujian province, where Nestorian Christians and Manicheans practiced their faiths during the Silk Road's heyday, one of the city's oldest clans, the Wangs, built a shrine in the 11th century to honor their family. But the sanctuary was converted into a stable during...
...police. In northwestern Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is fighting a separatist movement by the Uighur ethnic group, Muslim activity outside of state mosques is suppressed and offenders sometimes jailed. Nor do Tibetans have free rein to worship the Dalai Lama, who was not invited to the World Buddhist Forum in Hangzhou two weeks ago. The main speaker was the Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama, who in 1995 was named by the Chinese in place of the child monk the Dalai Lama himself had chosen for a key position in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy. Even in the new China...
...Shanghai entrepreneur who runs a solar-heating company and converted to Tibetan Buddhism in 2004. "But now after studying Buddhism, I realize there is much more to life, and I want to share that lesson with everyone." Zhou now donates a chunk of his earnings to build new Tibetan Buddhist temples in western China, and has imparted the Buddha's teachings to his business partners. Tempering a capitalist impulse with a quest for inner peace jibes with the Chinese government's own shift from a development model based mainly on high GDP-growth rates to one in which overall quality...
...Equally important is religion's role as a safety net, especially when the government no longer provides free social services for its most impoverished citizens. Buddhist monasteries, which now shelter an estimated 200,000 monks, are reporting an influx of children whose parents feel the cloistered life is the best way to get their kids fed and educated. Others are spending what little money they have to court the gods. On the outskirts of Quanzhou, where locals pick tobacco leaves for a living, poor villagers have banded together to build a shrine to Kwanyin, the goddess of mercy. "We need...