Buddhism as Soft Power: India's Symbolic Diplomacy in Asia

Since the 2010s, India has re-entered Southeast Asia not only through trade and security, but also with a new strategy of leveraging Buddhism as soft power. Drawing on Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power as influence through attraction rather than coercion, this paper conceptualizes Buddhist diplomacy as a form of heritage soft power rooted in India’s status as the birthplace of Buddhism. It asks why India deploys this strategy in Southeast Asia, under what conditions it generates leverage, and how it compares with China’s resource-backed influence. Using Thailand and Myanmar as paired case studies, this paper shows that India’s Buddhist diplomacy is most effective where the government already seeks to diversify away from China and value Indian heritage as a source of symbolic legitimacy, as in Thailand. In Myanmar, by contrast, hard-power dependence on China and the politicisation of Buddhism by the military regime sharply constrain the returns to India’s Buddhist outreach. The paper concludes with policy recommendations: India should treat Buddhist soft power as a complement to, not a substitute for, economic and security engagement and work more multilaterally with Southeast Asian partners.

Introduction

For most of the Cold War, India’s presence in Southeast Asia was limited compared to China’s. Engagement expanded with the Look East policy in the 1990s and accelerated under Narendra Modi’s Act East policy after 2014, which linked economic corridors, security cooperation, and people-to-people ties. In parallel, Indian strategists revived the idea of soft power to describe how civilization linkages could serve foreign policy goals. 

Joseph Nye defines soft power as a country’s ability to shape the preferences of others through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It is not inherently benevolent; states regularly deploy cultural and religious symbols to advance strategic aims. Buddhism fits this pattern: although grounded in moral teachings, it is frequently instrumentalized as diplomatic branding and as a way to build influence within transnational religious networks. Today, Bodh Gaya in Bihar, where the Buddha attained enlightenment, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and widely described as the cradle of Buddhism. India is not a majority-Buddhist country, but it is where key sites of the Buddha’s life physically sit, and this geographic aspect gives India a distinctive symbolic credibility. 

Buddhism thus functions as a strategic asset whose value is most visible in contested regional settings. In Southeast Asia, where Buddhist traditions are prominent and great-power competition has intensified, religious symbolism has become an increasingly salient arena of influence. Since the 2010s, China has also expanded its influence in the region through the Belt and Road Initiative and its own Buddhist diplomacy. Southeast Asia has therefore become a competitive arena of civilizational soft power. Southeast Asia carries substantial geopolitical importance for India. The region sits at the center of the Indo-Pacific, where India aims to prevent China from consolidating strategic dominance, safeguard access to maritime trade routes through the Malacca Strait, and deepen ties with ASEAN as part of its broader Indo-Pacific strategy. 

This paper advances two claims. First, Buddhist soft power gives India meaningful, though limited, leverage by positioning it as the land of the Buddha and a non-threatening civilizational partner. Second, its effectiveness depends on domestic conditions in each Southeast Asian state. Thailand tends to welcome India’s symbolic legitimacy, while Myanmar’s political turmoil and deep dependence on China sharply constrain it. These two cases are selected because both are Buddhist societies historically connected to Indian pilgrimage sites, yet positioned very differently vis-à-vis China. 

How a non-Buddhist Majority India Claims Legitimacy to Buddhism 

India’s contemporary Buddhist diplomacy operates through multiple interconnected layers, beginning with heritage custodianship. Sites like Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar are sacred and are promoted by India’s Ministry of Tourism; Bodh Gaya in particular is recognized by UNESCO as one of the four holy places linked to the Buddha’s life and the holiest Buddhist pilgrimage site. This heritage-based strategy has been described by David Geary, a scholar of religion and heritage at the University of British Columbia, as a form of “heritage diplomacy.” In this model, the state invests in temples, museums and infrastructure at these sites, encourages foreign monasteries from countries such as Thailand and Myanmar to establish a presence, and then uses the resulting flows of pilgrims and monks as a platform for diplomatic engagement.  The second layer is organized religious diplomacy. Since 2010, India has hosted an International Buddhist Conclave every two years, explicitly framed as a way to showcase its Buddhist heritage and attract monks, scholars and tourism officials from across Asia, including ASEAN states. The Modi government has elevated Buddhism alongside yoga and the diaspora as one of three flagship soft-power tools in foreign policy. Soft power here clearly has influence insofar as it operates through heritage sites and religious networks. It also operates through narratives that present India as the land of the Buddha, as a secular home to multiple traditions, as a state that hosted the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees, and as a civilizational actor distinct from both the West and China.  

However, the same government that foregrounds Buddhism abroad also promotes Hindutva at home. This raises the question about whether non-Hindu traditions are being treated as living faiths or instrumentalized as heritage brands. This is where the question of “hypocrisy” often comes in. How can a majority-Hindu state with a relatively small Buddhist population claim symbolic legitimacy in Buddhist diplomacy? The answer lies in differentiating between devotional legitimacy, understood as the proportion of citizens who actively practice a faith, and genealogical legitimacy, which derives from the custodianship of a tradition’s foundational sites and historical origins. India’s claim is explicitly genealogical insofar as it markets itself as the birthplace of Buddhism and guardian of its earliest sites, but not as a modern Buddhist polity like Thailand or Myanmar. For many Southeast Asian Buddhists, pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya or Sarnath is meaningful precisely because they are “original places,” regardless of India’s current religious demography. 

Thailand: Buddhist Heritage amid Strategic Hedging:

Thailand presents one of the most favorable environments for India’s Buddhist soft power. More than 90 percent of Thais practice Theravada Buddhism, and the monarchy’s role as the formal protector of the faith gives Buddhism deep political and cultural authority. Thai elites have long framed their own Buddhist tradition as genealogically connected to India, viewing the Indo-Gangetic region as the sacred landscape from which their religious heritage originates. These narrative and institutional affinities translate into concrete practices: pilgrimage from Thailand to Bodh Gaya and Sarnath has been continuous since the twentieth century, and Thai monastic institutions have maintained a sustained institutional presence around Bodh Gaya through the operation of Thai monasteries. Successive Indian governments have facilitated this presence by supporting land acquisition, providing infrastructure, and incorporating these monasteries into broader plans for the development of Buddhist pilgrimages. Recent relic diplomacy illustrates how this works in practice. In early 2024, India loaned sacred relics of the Buddha to Thailand, displayed at Sanam Luang in Bangkok and then in Chiang Mai, Ubon Ratchathani and Krabi. Crowds queued for hours daily, and Thai officials framed the exhibition as a reaffirmation of the spiritual bond between the two countries. In doing so, they emphasized India’s status as the land of the Buddah, translating religious symbolism into a shared civilizational narrative. In April 2025, Narendra Modi pledged another loan of relics during an official visit, again explicitly presented as deepening “spiritual and diplomatic ties.”

This receptiveness to India’s Buddhist diplomacy exists alongside Thailand’s deepening economic relationship with China. As Thailand's largest trading partner and a major source of FDI, China has growing involvement in manufacturing, infrastructure, and regional supply chains. Recent reporting suggests that Bangkok has moved closer to Beijing economically in recent years, even as it maintains security and diplomatic ties with Washington and other partners.  

Yet Thailand is also a site of Chinese Buddhist diplomacy. In 2023–24, Beijing lent a Buddha tooth relic from Lingguang Temple in Beijing to Thailand. The event, held to mark the Thai king’s birthday and fifty years of PRC–Thai ties, drew thousands of participants and heavy media coverage. Chinese Buddhist associations, Confucius Institutes and cultural centres linked to the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) all operate in this space, promoting a narrative of shared Asian values and Chinese benevolence. Crucially, however, Thailand’s economic engagement with China has not translated into political dependence or domestic instability. Unlike in Myanmar, Buddhism in Thailand is not militarized or tied to regime survival, allowing Thai elites to compartmentalize economic pragmatism and cultural diplomacy. Within this context, India’s Buddhist soft power does not compete directly with China’s material influence, but rather offers a complementary source of symbolic legitimacy.

India's advantage lies more in symbolic depth. Being able to bring relics from Bodh Gaya, Sarnath or ancient sites like Piprahwa, whose attempted auction in 2025 triggered a fierce Indian diplomatic effort to reclaim them as inalienable heritage, puts India’s claim to authenticity in a way China cannot easily match. For Thai elites anxious about over-dependence on China, Indian Buddhist diplomacy offers a way to diversify cultural and religious reference points without provoking Beijing directly. That is soft power as reassurance and hedging, not as zero-sum conversion.

Myanmar: Politicized Buddhism and the Limits of Soft Power under Conflict

Myanmar appears, at first glance, to be a promising environment for India’s Buddhist diplomacy. It is a Buddhist-majority country rooted in Theravāda tradition, and its monastic networks have long maintained ties to Indian pilgrimage sites such as Bodh Gaya. Myanmar also shares a land border with India, making it a focal point of India’s Act East policy and related connectivity initiatives, including the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway. Despite these cultural and geographic linkages, however, Myanmar’s domestic political conditions sharply constrain the effectiveness of Buddhist soft power.

In peacetime, soft power depends on attraction and credibility but in settings of active conflict, strategic survival concerns tend to outweigh symbolic or cultural alignment. Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s military regime has prioritized regime survival amid civil war, creating a political environment in which cultural diplomacy has limited traction. China has emerged as the junta’s most consequential external partner by providing arms, investment, and diplomatic cover, including support for Belt and Road Initiative projects such as the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor. India, by contrast, has pursued a hedging strategy, criticizing the coup in multilateral forums while maintaining working relations with the junta to manage border security and preserve connectivity projects. This balancing approach creates an immediate ceiling on how credible India’s Buddhist soft-power messaging can be under conditions in the status quo. 

This does not mean that India’s Buddhist diplomacy is irrelevant in Myanmar. Pilgrimage flows to Indian sites continue, and Myanmar’s Sangha, the institutional community of ordained Buddhist monks, remains interested in Bodh Gaya and other sacred locations. India has also hosted Burmese monks at international Buddhist conclaves and cultural events. However, unlike in Thailand, these religious and cultural ties operate largely at the societal level and do not translate into meaningful influence over state behavior. Under conditions of civil war, dependence on Chinese arms and finance and the junta’s appropriation of Buddhism for domestic legitimacy, relic tours or cultural exchanges cannot compensate for the perceived ambiguity of India’s stance.

Comparative Tension: Symbolic Legitimacy vs Resource-Backed Persuasion

Across both Thailand and Myanmar, a common pattern emerges. India’s Buddhist soft power travels primarily through three channels: pilgrimages to Indian sites, circulation of relics and ritual objects, and elite-level conferences and dialogues framed around shared heritage. China’s influence, by contrast, is dominated by trade, infrastructure, arms sales and financial support, with Buddhist diplomacy layered on top as an adjunct to BRI and political ties.

The tension the paper began with, India’s symbolic legitimacy versus China’s resource-backed persuasion, plays out differently in each case. In Thailand, where the state is stable and diversified, India’s symbolic advantage matters more. Thai elites can afford to treat spiritual and cultural ties as ends in themselves, and to use India’s heritage as one pillar of an increasingly multi-polar foreign policy that also includes the US, Japan and others. China’s economic weight is enormous, but Thai society retains enough autonomy to value a link to the Buddha’s homeland as a distinct good rather than simply an ornament to economic dependence. In Myanmar, by contrast, the hard-power asymmetry is too great. The junta’s immediate concern is regime survival; China offers weapons, debt relief and political cover; India offers limited connectivity, some arms, and Buddhist symbolism. Under those circumstances, Buddhist soft power cannot realistically rebalance Myanmar’s orientation away from Beijing. It may help keep lines open to segments of the Sangha and civil society, which could matter in a post-junta future, but its impact on current strategic choices is minor.

Comparing Thailand and Myanmar suggests an important conclusion. India’s Buddhist soft power in Southeast Asia is neither a game-changer nor a mere branding exercise. It is a secondary but non-trivial resource whose effectiveness depends on three conditions: whether local elites see value in diversifying away from China; whether civil society and religious actors trust India’s intentions; and whether India can make its heritage physically accessible through infrastructure, visas and connectivity.

Policy Recommendations:

India’s Buddhist diplomacy can be strengthened, but only if it is embedded within other institutional reforms. India should first de-politicize and diversify the message. Scholarship on India’s religious diplomacy notes that Hindu nationalism can undermine India’s image as a plural, secular guardian of multiple traditions. To mitigate this, India would benefit from emphasizing inclusive strands of Indian Buddhism and foregrounding the work of international Buddhist organizations rather than relying solely on state-led events. A wider narrative coalition makes it harder for critics to dismiss India’s outreach as a Hindutva-driven branding exercise and strengthens India’s credibility as a steward of Buddhist heritage rather than an appropriator of it.

Secondly, India should also pair Buddhist diplomacy with principled policy positions, especially in Myanmar. India’s long-term strategic interest lies in a stable, less China-dependent Southeast Asia. In Myanmar, this requires balancing pragmatic security cooperation with visible commitments to humanitarian relief, cross-border civil society, and the protection of vulnerable groups, including the Rohingya. Aligning Buddhist messaging with tangible actions, rather than treating Buddhism as a symbolic veneer, would make India’s presence more morally coherent and more persuasive to regional actors who are skeptical of great-power realpolitik.

A third step is to embed Buddhist initiatives within broader regional public goods. Buddhist circuits should not be framed exclusively through an Indian lens. ASEAN and India have already explored integrated Buddhist tourism routes, and these initiatives could be expanded into co-branded projects involving sustainable tourism, environmental protection of sacred sites, archival cooperation, and educational exchanges. When India positions Buddhist heritage as a shared regional asset, it creates collective ownership and reduces the perception that Buddhist diplomacy is simply a soft-power competition with China.

India has undoubtedly invested in Buddhist diplomacy through heritage sites, the infrastructure of memory around Bodh Gaya, conclaves, relic tours, connectivity projects and tourism campaigns, all explicitly targeting Buddhist-majority Southeast Asian states. It has done so in part because Buddhism offers a ready-made civilizational link, in part because Chinese BRI financing has pushed it to find non-coercive ways to remain relevant, and in part because domestic political actors have embraced religious diplomacy as a tool of national branding. In Thailand, this strategy has yielded visible returns, but in Myanmar, the payoff has been far smaller, having been constrained by exogenous factors like a civil war and China’s hard-power footprint. 

If India leans into its comparative strength in the former, and aligns its policies with the ethical commitments of the Buddhist tradition it invokes, its soft power method can offer a durable place in the region’s evolving order. 

Hasini Gunda is a first-year student at The George Washington University studying International Affairs and planning to concentrate in Comparative Political, Economic, and Social Systems. She is from South Windsor, Connecticut, and has broad academic interests in the comparative politics of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.