ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with trans-Himalayan Buddhist secularities as a parallel development of state-sanctioned secularisms and as an integral part of Buddhist modernism in India and among Tibetans in the diaspora. It inquires into how the differently expressed Buddhist secularities in these two constituencies are engaged in the geopolitics of Tibet in relation to China. Situated in this transregional context, the author makes two arguments. First, Tibetan Buddhism in the last half a century has been a moving matter in the trans-Himalayan flows of people, ideas, and interregional politics. Its secular engagements and their outcomes are now affecting the ways how Tibetans and non-Tibetans project the future status of Tibet. Second, secularism and secularity are two sets of divergent practices and yet both dialectically lodge in one another. In such unique entanglement, the trans-Himalayan Buddhist secularities in essence are projects of both Buddhists and geopoliticians.
