Buddhism in India: Sacred Sites, Revival and Numbers

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 27 October 2026

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Buddhism in India today is a minority faith in the land where it began. The 2011 census counted 8.44 million Buddhists, 0.7% of the population, and Pew Research Center estimates 9.55 million for 2020. Most are Ambedkarite Buddhists, largely Dalits in Maharashtra whose families converted from 1956 onward. Most of the rest belong to Himalayan and North-Eastern communities or to the Tibetan exile community. India also holds Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar.

How many Buddhists are there in India?

The firmest number is also the latest: the 2011 census counted 8,442,972 Buddhists out of 1,210,854,977 people, or 0.70%. The census due in 2021 was never held. The Government of India notified a Census 2027 in the Gazette on 16 June 2025, with a reference date of 1 March 2027, or 1 October 2026 for Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and the snow-bound areas of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. No religion figures from it have been published.

The Pew Research Center’s 2025 report puts India’s Buddhists at 9,550,000 in 2020. That is 0.7% of the country, 2.9% of the world’s Buddhists, and the ninth-largest Buddhist population of any country. It is an estimate, not a count. Pew says that because the 2021 census was delayed, its “2020 estimates are based on population projections” from the 2011 census. In its prose Pew rounds the figure to “approximately 10 million”, the number our page on how many Buddhists there are quotes.

The census series shows when today’s community took shape:

The 1951 figure is D. C. Ahir’s census compilation, as given by the scholar Detlef Kantowsky (1997). It has no figures for Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh or Arunachal Pradesh, which the table marks “not known”, so it undercounts the Himalayan Buddhists. The later figures are Pew’s rounding of the census. (Pew’s 2021 table prints 2.67 million for 1951. That cannot be squared with Ahir’s 189,577, or with the 1931 census, which found about 157,000 Buddhists in what is now India, by the count Kantowsky takes from Ling; so we leave it out.) Most of the jump between 1951 and 1961 is the conversion movement described below.

Two cautions apply. The census records religion as people declare it, with no school or community, so it cannot say who is Ambedkarite, Tibetan or Theravada. And caste status has legal effects. Pew notes that only Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists can receive some caste-based “reservations” (affirmative-action benefits), so some Scheduled Caste Christians may record themselves as Hindu; Pew uses the census figures unadjusted because the size of any such bias is unknown. Converts lost those benefits when they left Hinduism in 1956, Kantowsky notes. The central government restored post-matric scholarships to Buddhists of Scheduled Caste origin in 1971, and a 1990 amendment to the Scheduled Castes Orders, which Kantowsky quotes from the Gazette of India of 4 June 1990, added Buddhists to the list. Ahead of the next census, the Buddhist Society of India has asked Buddhists to write “Buddhist” for religion and their pre-conversion caste, “such as Mahar, Mang, Chambhar, Dhor”, in the caste column, warning that welfare schemes and political reservation could be lost “if the population of Scheduled Castes is shown less” (The Mooknayak, May 2026).

Where do India’s Buddhists live?

Most of them live in one state. In 2011 Maharashtra had 6,531,200 Buddhists, 77% of all India’s Buddhists, and 5.8% of the state’s population. The next ten states together held about 1.5 million.

Counts from Census 2011 Table C-01; the shares are our arithmetic from the same table. A dash means the share is small and is not given here.

Shares of the population are highest in the mountains and the North-East. Sikkim was 27% Buddhist. Ladakh was not yet a census unit in 2011: it was then the Leh and Kargil districts of Jammu and Kashmir. Leh was 66.4% Buddhist and Kargil 14.3%, about 40% across the two. In Himachal Pradesh, Lahaul and Spiti was 62.0% Buddhist and Kinnaur 21.5%. In Arunachal Pradesh, Tawang was 69.9% and West Kameng 43.0%. Changlang was 34.0%, and its Buddhists include the Theravada Tai-Khamti (see below).

The Ambedkarite Buddhists

On 14 October 1956, at a large public ceremony in Nagpur, the jurist and Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar became a Buddhist together with hundreds of thousands of others. Estimates of the crowd vary. The ground, now called Deekshabhoomi, still draws crowds each year on Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din; in 2022 the Nagpur daily The Hitavada reported “lakhs of devotees”. His reasons, his twenty-two vows and his reading of the Dhamma are the subject of our page on Ambedkar. The census shows the scale of what followed. Kantowsky, using Ahir’s figures, gives Maharashtra 2,487 Buddhists in 1951 and 3,264,223 in 1971.

Who are they today? Pew’s 2019–20 survey of almost 30,000 Indian adults found that 89% of Buddhists identify as Dalits, a group Pew notes is sometimes called by the pejorative term “untouchables”. The National Family Health Survey of 2015, as tabulated by Pew, puts 88% of Buddhists in the Scheduled Castes and 9% in the Scheduled Tribes. Counted from the 2011 census itself, the share is lower: about 68% of India’s Buddhists belong to the Scheduled Castes, according to the scholar Tereza Menšíková (2025). The two figures come from different measurements, a household survey and the census. The name the community uses varies. In Pew’s survey, 48% of Indian Buddhists said they belong to the Navayana (“new vehicle”) order, which Pew describes as native to India and “inspired by the writings” of Ambedkar. Another 35% said they did not know their order and 13% named none. Pew also found that one-third of Indian Buddhists say they do not believe in God, the main exception to near-universal belief in God in India.

How large a share of India’s Buddhists is Ambedkarite? We found no source that counts it directly, so we give the proxies and say whose each one is. The census puts 77% of Buddhists in Maharashtra. Pew finds 89% are Dalit, while 48% call themselves Navayana. In 1991 the Buddhist writer D. C. Ahir put Ambedkar’s followers at “over 90%” of India’s Buddhists. None of these measures affiliation as such, but most of them point to a large majority.

Conversion changed some things more than others. In 1971 the researcher A. B. Hiramani studied two villages in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra; Kantowsky summarises the findings, published in 1977. Buddhist families there had left the hereditary service duties of the village system (baluta) without serious reprisals. Most had become agricultural labourers, which had brought no appreciable economic gain, but they no longer worked “under compulsion”; any compulsion now, Hiramani wrote, was “economic and indirect and not social”. At meals, though, they were still treated “as the former Mahars”, and their touch still counted as polluting. Kantowsky adds that they in turn kept discriminating against castes lower still, refusing food from them. These are village studies from the 1960s and 1970s (Kantowsky notes that Hiramani’s results largely match those T. S. Wilkinson gathered a decade earlier in two villages near Nagpur), not a picture of India now. Whether the Buddhist texts offer a reply to caste is the question of Buddhism and social justice.

Himalayan Buddhism in India

The second community is far older than 1956. Ahir’s survey, quoted by Kantowsky, calls these communities “survivals from the Buddhist period”. It names the Buddhists of Ladakh, of Lahaul, Spiti, Kinnaur and Pangi in Himachal Pradesh, and of Arunachal Pradesh. In Ladakh, in Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur, and in Tawang, their Buddhism is the Tibetan tradition, the Vajrayana, with monasteries belonging to the Tibetan schools. In Changlang and Lohit, as the next section shows, it includes Theravada communities.

Tawang shows how the Tibetan tradition looks on the ground. According to the district administration, Tawang Monastery belongs to the Gelug school. It was founded in the 17th century at the wish of the 5th Dalai Lama and, in the founding legend the district retells, built by Merak Lama Lodre Gyamtso with local villagers in late 1681. Nearby Urgelling is revered as the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama, and Khinmey is the main Nyingma shrine in Tawang. The administration also says the Monpa people of the district adhere strictly to Buddhist scriptures while having “harmoniously integrated pre-Buddhist Bon and animistic ancestral practices”. The scholar Chow Chandra Mantche lists the Sherpas, Monpas, Sherdukpens, Khambas and Membas among the North-East’s followers of the Mahayana form of Buddhism.

Theravada in the North-East

Not all of India’s older Buddhism is Tibetan. Mantche’s 2019 study names the Tai-Khamtis, Tai-Phakeys, Tai-Khamyangs, Tai-Turungs, Tai-Aitons, Singphos, Tikhak-Tangsas, Chakmas, Moghs and Boruahs as followers of Theravada, the school of the Pali canon. The Tai-Khamtis are the largest Theravada community in Arunachal Pradesh, living mainly, Mantche writes, in the Namsai, Changlang and Lohit districts. They follow Theravada “after Burmese (Myanmarees) tradition” and entered what was then Assam towards the end of the 18th century. Ahir’s list also includes the Barua Buddhists of Bengal and the Chakma of Tripura and Mizoram, and, among the “ethnic overlaps from Nepal, Thailand and Burma”, the Tamangs and Sherpas of the Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts of West Bengal.

The Tibetan community in exile

The third group arrived in 1959, when the 14th Dalai Lama went into exile after the uprising in Lhasa. According to the Central Tibetan Administration, he reached Mussoorie on 20 April 1959 and left it for Dharamsala in the last week of April 1960; Dharamsala became his home and the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. His life and office are on the Dalai Lama page, and the history behind the exile on Buddhism in Tibet.

Several of the great monasteries of the exile community were re-established far to the south, in Karnataka. The Central Tibetan Relief Committee describes Lugsung Samdupling at Bylakuppe as the first Tibetan settlement in India. It was started in 1960 with Indian government help for 3,000 settlers. Of its five monasteries the biggest is Sera, which the committee says has “almost 3000 monks”; the others it lists are Namdrolling, a Sakya monastery and two it names as Nyingma. A second Bylakuppe settlement, Dickyi Larsoe, followed in 1969. Doeguling at Mundgod was established in 1966 and is one of the largest Tibetan settlements in India. Its nine monasteries include Ganden Jangtse, Ganden Shartse, Drepung Loseling and Drepung Gomang, alongside monasteries the committee lists as Nyingma and Sakya.

Newer movements

Some Indians come to Buddhist practice through movements that are not tied to any of these communities. S. N. Goenka settled in India and began teaching Vipassana in 1969, and his organisation calls his approach “totally non-sectarian”. Bharat Soka Gakkai, India’s organisation of the Soka Gakkai, a global community that practises Nichiren Buddhism, was established on 3 January 1986 and says it has “more than 275,000 voluntary members” in 600 towns and cities.

The sacred sites and World Heritage

Three of the four places tied to the Buddha’s life are in India: Bodh Gaya, where he awakened, Sarnath, where he first taught, and Kushinagar, where he died; the fourth, Lumbini, is in Nepal. Each is described in the four pilgrimage sites. One of Sarnath’s monuments has become a national symbol. The Government of Nagaland, relaying a Ministry of Home Affairs notice, describes India’s State Emblem as “an adaptation from the Sarnath Lion Capital of Asoka”.

India’s World Heritage sites with Buddhist monuments, with the year each was inscribed as the Government of India lists them:

Sarnath is the newest. PIB Research reports that it was inscribed on 25 July 2026, at the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan. The listing has two parts: the Chaukhandi Stupa, and the remains that include the Dhamek and Dharmarajika stupas and the Ashokan pillar. With it, PIB notes, three of the four principal pilgrimage sites are on the list: Lumbini, Bodh Gaya and Sarnath. Kushinagar is not. Sarnath’s stupas and the Lion Capital are described on the four pilgrimage sites page, and Sarnath joins Sanchi, Ajanta, Ellora, Bodh Gaya and Nalanda in the greatest Buddhist monuments.

Who runs the Mahabodhi Temple?

For many Buddhists the temple at Bodh Gaya is the most sacred place on earth, but it is not run by Buddhists alone. It is managed under a state law, the Bodh Gaya Temple Act, 1949. In the text as modified up to 1955, which the temple committee publishes, the committee “shall consist of a Chairman and eight members”, of whom “four shall be Buddhists and four shall be Hindus including the Mahanth”. The Mahanth is the presiding priest of the Saivite (Shaiva Hindu) monastery at Bodh Gaya. The District Magistrate of Gaya is chairman ex officio. The 1949 text added a proviso that the state would nominate a Hindu chairman whenever the District Magistrate was not Hindu. The Bodhgaya Temple (Amendment) Act, 2013 (Bihar Act 11 of 2013) deleted that proviso, which its preamble calls “prejudicial to secularism”. The Act also states that “Hindus and Buddhists of every sect shall have access to the temple and the temple land for the purpose of worship or pindadan”, and it makes “the proper performance of worship at the temple and pindadan (offering of pindas) on the temple land” one of the committee’s duties. Any dispute between Hindus and Buddhists over how the temple is used is settled by the state government, whose decision “shall be final”.

The Bodhgaya Temple Management Committee says the first committee took charge on 28 May 1953. It describes itself as nine members, four Buddhist and four Hindu, with the District Magistrate as chairman, and says ten resident monks lead the temple’s daily rituals.

The arrangement is now openly contested. Al Jazeera reported in March 2025 that on 27 February police removed more than two dozen monks who were on a hunger strike inside the temple. Protests followed, from Ladakh to Mumbai and Mysuru. The campaign, led by the All India Buddhist Forum, wants the 1949 Act repealed and the temple handed over completely to Buddhists. Protesters allege that the Hindu monastery in practice controls the temple’s day-to-day running, and that Hindu monks perform rituals there that “defy the spirit of Buddhism”. Swami Vivekananda Giri, the Hindu priest who, Al Jazeera reports, “currently looks after” the monastery, called the protests “politically motivated”. He said Buddhists had never been “disallowed” from praying there and that Hindus had been “generous in allowing four seats to Buddhists”, and he argued that if the Act were repealed “the temple will solely belong to the Hindu side”. A constitutional challenge to the Act is before the Supreme Court. LiveLaw reported that on 11 August 2026 the court deferred it and listed it for 6 October 2026. As of late October 2026 we have found no ruling.

Buddhism’s Indian centuries, in outline

Buddhism began here. The Buddha was born, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s words, in “the area of the present border between India and Nepal”; his dates were long put at about 560–480 BCE, and many scholars now hold that he died around 405 BCE. The Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who died in 232 BCE by Ven. S. Dhammika’s account, “sent teaching monks to various regions in India and beyond its borders”, Dhammika writes. Sarnath alone, PIB notes, has monuments from the 4th–3rd centuries BCE to the 12th century CE. How the Mahayana and the Vajrayana took shape in India, and how Buddhism spread across Asia, is traced in the history of Buddhism and how Buddhism spread.

By about the 12th to 13th century, Buddhism had largely disappeared from most of India. Historians still argue over the causes. That story belongs to why Buddhism declined in India.

How Buddhism came back to India

In the plains, one of “the leading figures of the Buddhist revival”, as Banglapedia calls him, was a Sri Lankan. Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), born in Colombo, visited Bodh Gaya in 1891. That year he founded the Maha Bodhi Society in Colombo, and the Indian society followed in Kolkata in 1892. According to Banglapedia, the society set out to revive Buddhism and “to reestablish the rights of Buddhists at Buddhagaya”. Banglapedia credits it with getting four Buddhists placed on the temple’s managing body after independence, the arrangement the 1949 Act set down. Dharmapala also laid the foundation stone of the Mulagandhakuti Vihara at Sarnath on 3 November 1922. He was not alone: in Calcutta the monk Kripasharan Mahasthavir founded the Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha on 5 October 1892, with the aim, Banglapedia records, “to revive the Buddhist religion in India and nurture Buddhist studies”.

The Indian state has since honoured the language of the Theravada scriptures. On 3 October 2024 the Union Cabinet gave Pali the status of a “Classical Language”, along with Marathi, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali, bringing India’s total to eleven. It is a cultural-policy status, awarded on criteria such as the antiquity of a language’s early texts. Pali itself is explained in our glossary entry on Pali, and its scriptures in the Pali Canon.

India among the Buddhist countries

India’s Buddhists are few in proportion but many in number: by Pew’s estimate, the ninth-largest Buddhist population in the world, in several distinct communities. How those communities fit the wider family of schools is set out in the branches of Buddhism. For comparison, see Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Buddhism in Nepal and the country-by-country map in Buddhism around the world.