By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING, Apr 12 (Reuters) China hosts the World Buddhist Forum this week, its first international religious meeting since the Communists swept to power more than five decades ago.

Organisers timed the forum to coincide with the Christian festival of Easter, sources said, apparently to send a message of China's greater religious tolerance to church-going US President George W Bush ahead of his summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao later this month.

Some 1,000 monks and Buddhist experts from 30 countries will gather in the scenic eastern city of Hangzhou for the forum which starts tomorrow and winds up in nearby Zhoushan on Sunday.

''The Communist Party has come a long way from uncompromising Marxist-Leninist-inspired atheism to a far more lenient and tolerant attitude towards religion,'' a Western diplomat said.

The theme of the forum -- ''a harmonious world begins in the mind'' -- mirrors Hu's campaign to build a ''harmonious society'' in the face of rising unrest at home.

''This is an unprecedented grand gathering in Chinese Buddhism's 2,000-year history,'' Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, wrote on the forum's Web site.

Apart from this forum, there has been talk of China forging ties with the Vatican by 2008 and a possible warming towards Tibet's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama. A Tibetan nun jailed for 15 years was allowed to seek medical treatment in the United States last month.

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