Bronze to Stone, Court to Coast: Recasting the Aśoka Stūpa in Maritime East Asia

Amid the geopolitical volatility of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the Aśoka stūpa became an unusually adaptable relic technology for securing Buddhist efficacy across coastal East Asia. This paper traces the form’s spatial and material localization from the Wuyue kingdom to the Fujian littoral, then to Goryeo Korea and Kamakura Japan. In tenth-century Wuyue, state patrons mass-produced miniature metal stupas to project universal Buddhist kingship. In later centuries, coastal communities and local lineages appropriated and enlarged the same visual grammar to authorize local power and stabilize mobility, recasting the stupa in durable stone and public siting. Following the form’s further translation into Korea’s Bohyeopin seoktap and Japan’s Hōkyōintō, widely used as outdoor mortuary monuments, I show how sacred objects were recalibrated in medium, scale, and function to anchor memory and engineer karmic futures along a maritime frontier.