BEYOND INDIANIZATION: BUDDHIST KNOWLEDGE CIRCULATION IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

บทคัดย่อ

Background and Objectives: The concept of "Indianization" has long shaped scholarly understandings of cultural exchange between South and Southeast Asia as a largely unidirectional process through which Indian religious, political, linguistic, and cultural forms spread into a receptive Southeast Asian periphery. Although this framework has contributed significantly to the study of early Asian history, it has also encouraged hierarchical representations in which India appears primarily as a source of civilization and Southeast Asia as a recipient. Such a framework can obscure the historical agency of Southeast Asian societies in selecting, transforming, and circulating cultural and religious knowledge. This study has three objectives. First, to reassess the concept of "Indianization" and the diffusionist assumptions that have historically shaped interpretations of cultural exchange between South and Southeast Asia. Second, to examine how Buddhist knowledge in Southeast Asia was transmitted, localized, and transformed through processes of adaptation, reinterpretation, and materialization. Third, to propose a framework of multidirectional knowledge circulation to explain how religious and technical forms of knowledge moved across interconnected regional networks in early Asia.

Methodology: The study employed an interdisciplinary integrative literature review drawing on scholarship from history, archaeology, epigraphy, Buddhist studies, anthropology, and art history. The literature was selected for its relevance to debates on cultural diffusion, convergence, circulation, localization, and connected histories, as well as for its empirical evidence concerning the movement and transformation of cultural and religious forms. The analysis examined secondary scholarship on inscriptions, textual traditions, iconography, architecture, ritual practices, and mathematical notation. The selected cases were compared to identify recurring patterns of transmission, localization, transformation, and possible re-circulation.

Main Results: The findings showed that Buddhist formations in Southeast Asia were not simply reproductions of Indic models but were actively localized and reconfigured within particular sociopolitical, cultural, and cosmological contexts. Epigraphic, textual, artistic, architectural, and anthropological evidence demonstrated that Buddhist doctrines, ritual practices, visual forms, narratives, and religious figures underwent selective appropriation and reinterpretation across the region. The analysis further identified the encounter between the Śrīvijayan teacher Dharmakīrti and the Indian Buddhist scholar Atiśa as an important example of knowledge moving from Southeast Asia into wider Buddhist networks. The discussion of early Southeast Asian inscriptions containing zero notation likewise demonstrated that mathematical knowledge circulated through complex regional networks, although the lack of definitive empirical evidence rendered both cases largely speculative and, thus, served mainly to pave the way for further interdisciplinary research.

Involvement to Buddhadhamma: This manuscript falls under the scope of Applied Buddhism, focusing specifically on Buddhism and globalization, since it applies Buddhist history and the concept of upāya to modern transregional and anthropological theories. The findings showed that the circulation of Buddhadhamma involved more than the movement of fixed doctrinal formulations. Buddhist teachings were transmitted through textual, ritual, intellectual, and embodied practices and were repeatedly interpreted and adapted within different cultural and historical contexts. In this respect, the Buddhist principle of upāya, or skillful means, provides a useful interpretive perspective for understanding how Buddhist teachings could be expressed in forms appropriate to particular contexts while maintaining broader ethical and soteriological orientations.

Conclusions: This article proposes multidirectional knowledge circulation as an alternative to rigid center-periphery models of South and Southeast Asian cultural exchange. It foregrounds Southeast Asia as an active site of Buddhist knowledge production, interpretation, preservation, and transformation while avoiding the opposite claim that Southeast Asia was the sole or primary source of regional innovation. The article thus contributes to the decolonization of Asian historiography by shifting analytical attention from singular origins toward the movements, transformations, and historical agencies through which knowledge was produced and circulated across interconnected Asian worlds.