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Dalai Lama not invited to World Buddhist Forum in E China

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-03-27 13:31

WUXI, Jiangsu Province -- The 14th Dalai Lama was not invited to the Second World Buddhist Forum that is to open in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi Saturday, a forum spokesman said Friday.

"He is a political fugitive and has done lots of things to secede his motherland and go against his identity of being a Buddhist," Ming Sheng, vice president of the Buddhist Association of China, told Xinhua.

He said the organizers would have considered sending invitation to him, had the 14th Dalai Lama been willing to abandon his "Tibet independence" claims, stop secessionist activities and publicly avow that Tibet and Taiwan are both inalienable parts of China, and the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government of China.

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"However, it is evident that the precondition doesn't exist for the time being," he said.

The forum, with the theme "A harmonious world, a synergy of conditions," was jointly organized by the Buddhist Association of China, the Buddha's Light International Association, the Hong Kong Buddhist Association, and the China Religious Culture Communication Association.

More than 1,000 Buddhist monks and scholars from about 50 countries and regions will attend the forum and discuss how to build a harmonious world.

The five-day forum will be held in two parts. The first part will be held from March 28-29 in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. The participants will move from Nanjing to Taipei by four direct charter flights on March 30, where the second part of the forum will be held from March 31-April 1, Ming said.

The 14th Dalai Lama was absent from the First World Buddhist Forum held in the eastern Chinese cities of Hangzhou and Zhoushan in April 2006.