Nanjing University set up the Glorious Sun Buddhism Research Centre this month.

With a donation of 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) by Hong Kong Glorious Sun Holdings Ltd, the centre is the first of its kind in a mainland university.

Nanjing University has a long history of such studies. For the past 100 years since it was founded in 1902, Buddhism has been one of the major study and research areas and numerous professionals in the field have been trained there.

Scholars from Chinese history and philosophy departments have combined their efforts to comprehensively study the development of Buddhism in China from a variety of perspectives. These include the Buddhist influence in ancient literature, the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road, Buddhist reflection in art and so on.

In the early 1980s, the university began to offer an MA programme in Buddhism, and later in 1994 a post graduate programme was developed, both of which have drawn students from different parts of the world, including Japan, Canada, Poland, Chile and a number of Southeast Asian countries.

The centre will take as its major responsibility the training of researchers and teachers in the discipline of Buddhism, said Wang Yueqing, an information officer at Nanjing University.

(China Daily July 23, 2003)