In West Bengal (India), Barua Magh Buddhist Community is recognized as Scheduled Tribe (ST).

For instance, according to multiple respondents the Siddala and Hangor shnutki (dried sea fish) are consumed by this particular Arakanese community.

[7] Taranatha mentions a monastery named Pinda-Vihara at Chittagong where the custom of wearing pointed caps originated.

[10] He studied in Sri Lanka, parts of the old heartland of Buddhism in present-day Bihar including Bodh Gaya, Tibet and then he settled down in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.

Starting with the Muslim invasion when Ikhtiyar Uddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji with his marauding soldiers plundered their way to the throne of India, it was a time when the Buddhist Viharas were destroyed and monks fled the place to escape the brutality and later the Brahmins too caused immense damage to Buddhism by killing the Buddhist monks and destroying the very fabric a Buddhism.

By the advent of the nineteenth century, Buddhism was almost extinct in the land of its birth save except for a few pockets where it survived with the influence or migration of Buddhist tribes from Myanmar, Thailand and Chittagong (now in Bangladesh)[13] In the ancient history of Rakhine Razawin, towards the middle of second century AD (AD 146), a vassal of Magadh’s Chandra Surya Kingdom established a territory in Arakan and Chittagong.

Those arriving from Magadh (Ancient Indian kingdom in Southern Bihar) as well as locals in Chittagong, who embraced Buddhism, came to be known as ‘Mag’ or ‘Magh’.

[14] By 1585, European, Persian, and Bengali accounts began describing all the Buddhist groups in the region as the Mugh or Maghs.

In present day, non-Buddhists of Chittagong consider the word ‘Magh’ and Buddhists to be identical in the usual settings.

[19] The first Pāli school in modern times was started in Pahartali, Chittagong by Ācarya Punnācāra with the financial backing from a zamindar, Haragobinda Mutsuddi, in 1885.

[20] Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha Buddhist religious organization founded by Venerable Kripasaran Mahasthavir in Calcutta on 5 October 1892.

The journal of the Dharmankur Sabha, Jagajjyoti, edited by Gunalangkar Sthavir and Shraman Punnananda Swami, was first published in 1908.

He improvised the syllabus of the MA course in Pali, in addition his work in the departments of Ancient Indian History and Culture, (1919–48) and Sanskrit (1927–48), in the same university.

[1] [23] Anagarika Dharmapala visited Chittagong in 1917, where he influenced a 9-year-old boy, who later became the well known Pali scholar Prof. Dwijendra Lal Barua.