World needs to resolve conflicts on basis of Lord Buddha’s teachings
Zubair Qureshi
Pakistan is a home to the world’s ancient civilizations including Buddhism and there is a need to preserve and promote religious tourism to bring peoples of the world together.
These views were expressed by President Dr Arif Alvi Monday while addressing an international conference on ‘Buddhism in Pakistan: History, archaeology, art and architecture,’ at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts .
About 50 speakers from different countries of the world including Thailand, Sri Lanka, Germany, the US, Canada and Malaysia attended the conference, while 22 among them presented their research papers.
Ambassadors of Sri Lanka and Thailand along with a large number of representatives from the Buddhist-rich civilization countries were also present.
The president while welcoming the delegates viewed that Pakistan was rich with the Buddhist’s heritage and its sites like Taxila, Takht Bhai, even Swat Valley were rich treasure troves of the Buddhist relics.
In the recent past, various delegations of venerable monks from Korea, Thailand and Sri Lanka visited Buddhist sites in Pakistan. The exchange of such delegations helped in preservation of these historic sites, besides bringing people from different parts of the world closer.
The president said in Pakistan, the Indus valley civilization was rooted in Buddhism, besides the Gandhara and Mohenjo Daro were the other beautiful sites of the early civilization.
The president regretted that the world was full of hegemonic trends, as there was struggle over ‘mine and thine’. He said Pakistan always advocated for peace in the world.
The president said tens of millions had died of wars in the world, and stressed that going back to the peaceful traditions was very important.
The president said the basic instincts revolving around human exploitation, love and hate were deeply rooted in the human fabric.
He said Buddha taught that with worldly desires in mind peace was not possible. This message was also reflected in the image of fasting Buddha.
Buddhism stressed curbing of desires in life to becoming familiar with other basic human emotions.
Prince Miangul Adnan Aurangzeb, representative of Swat’s ruling family that has been looking after the preservation and promotion of Buddhist sites, briefed the participants about the history and different historical sites at Swat and other parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, forming ‘a golden triangle’ of Buddhist sites up to Taxila. He also enumerated the steps taken for the preservation of these sites.
