Approved by the Bureau of Religious Affairs under the State Council, a joint move has recently been taken by Yunnan provincial government and its Buddhist Association to put up a Buddhist institute in Kunming, capital of the province, as China Daily reports.
The Yunnan Buddhist Institute, covering an area of 69mu of land with a floor space totaling 10,000 square meters, will be located in a beautiful area of Wenquan（Hot Spring）town, around 30-kilometer away from the city of Kunming. It will be the first trilingual Buddhist Institute in the world, comprising Chinese, Tibetan, and Pali and when it is completed in 2003 the first batch of students it is going to enroll will be 100 or so from among the Chinese Buddhist teaching and administrative staffs.
With a special geographic location Yunnan is adjacent to Tibet Autonomous Region to the northwest, where people believe in Tibetan Buddhism（Lamaism）. To the south and west, Yunnan borders on the Southeast Asian countries where people believe in Pali language（or Hinayana） Buddhism while the people in Yunnan itself are devoted to the Chinese Buddhism that can be dated back to as early as 714AD.
According to statistics from the Yunnan Provincial Bureau of Religious Affairs, these three sects of Buddhism have more than two million followers with well over 1,300 temples and a team of over 2,000 religious workers and priests across the province.
(China Daily 02/23/2001)
