This panel views frontiers not as passive receivers of tradition but as dynamic laboratories where new doctrines, iconographies, rituals, and narratives emerge. As our four case studies demonstrate, frontiers have long generated innovative religious forms that reshaped the wider Buddhist world. We analyze devotional narratives of the Malaya mountains in Kashmir, Newar Buddhist donative communities in Nepal, myths concerning Mount Jizu in southwestern China, and the leadership of lama Chokyi Wangchuk in Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor. These four cases demonstrate that these new geographic as well as imagined frontiers became engines of religious futurity: places where new social possibilities, doctrinal developments, and mythic visions took shape. The panel argues that an analysis of the confluence of creative energies in these frontiers will generate better analyses than would separately addressing each topic merely from the perspective of dominant Indic, Tibetan, or Sinitic forms of Buddhism.
This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.
Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia?
I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.
This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.
This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.