Monks, Merchants, and Kings: The Transmission of Buddhism to Southeast Asia in the First Millennium CE and the Evidence of Candi Borobudur

Himanshu Bhardwaj

Monks, Merchants, and Kings: The Transmission of Buddhism to Southeast Asia in the First Millennium CE and the Evidence of Candi Borobudur

Author(s)	Mr. Himanshu Bhardwaj
Country	India
Abstract	This essay examines the factors that carried Buddhism from its Gangetic homeland across Southeast Asia during the first millennium CE, and asks what motivations, routes, and agents made that transmission possible. It argues that the spread of the doctrine was neither linear nor the product of organised missionary campaigns or forced conversion. Rather, Buddhist texts, images, and practices travelled in fragments along maritime and overland trade routes, carried by monks, merchants, and diplomatic envoys, and moved in more than one direction, with ideas at times filtering back towards the regions that had originally transmitted them. Three agents are identified as decisive: the close and long-standing association between monastic communities and trading networks, visible from the Satavahana and Kushana period at sites such as Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda; the intensification of long-distance commerce in the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea during the fifth and sixth centuries; and the readiness of new dynasties in China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia to employ Buddhism to legitimise their political authority and to fashion a distinct identity for newly established regimes. The Liang emperor Wu and his exchanges of relics with the Funan, Panpan, and Dandan polities are taken as an instance of this dynamic. The second half of the essay turns to a specific case study, the ninth-century monument of Candi Borobudur in central Java, built under the Sailendra dynasty. Through its architecture, its threefold cosmological scheme of Kamadhatu, Rupadhatu, and Arupadhatu, its narrative reliefs, and the votive deposits recovered from the site in 1974, the essay considers the long scholarly debate over the character of its Buddhism, from Krom and Stutterheim through de Casparis to Magetsari, and argues that Borobudur is best understood as a combination of exoteric Mahayana and esoteric Mantranaya or Vajrayana elements. A comparison with the stupa at Kesariya in Bihar suggests that this synthesis drew upon a transitional Indian prototype.
Keywords	Buddhism; Southeast Asia; Sailendra dynasty; Borobudur; Esoteric Buddhism; Vajrayana; Mahayana; Java.
Field	Sociology > Archaeology / History
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-07-21

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Monks, Merchants, and Kings: The Transmission of Buddhism to Southeast Asia in the First Millennium CE and the Evidence of Candi Borobudur

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