New Buddhist Silk Roads

As China embarks on its One Belt, One Road Initiative it is recreating not only the economic Silk Road of the past but incorporating a Buddhist-based regionalism that stretched from Eurasia to maritime kingdoms in the southern seas. It was a mandalic world of trade and a dharma of easy communication between cultures and religions. After outlining China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative, this paper provides the historical setting of silk road regionalism with its Buddhist contribution, and then moves to the possibility of a new silk road mandala. The paper concludes with a Buddhist geopolitics of peace. Here Buddhism’s philosophical, diplomatic and normative powers are tapped for a better understanding of how the new Buddhist silk roads are advancing the spiritual conduits of regional cooperation.