Localizing Mahāyāna Buddhism through Sacred Space and Royal Patronage: Đồng Dương and Borobudur in Ninth-Century Southeast Asia

Abstract

This article examines how Mahāyāna Buddhism was localized in ninth-century Southeast Asia through
the interrelated processes of sacred-space formation and royal patronage. Focusing on Borobudur in Central Java
and Đồng Dương in Champa, it argues that these monuments should not be read as derivative reproductions of
Indian Buddhist models, but as regionally grounded courtly projects in which transregional doctrines were
reworked within distinct dynastic, ritual, and cosmological settings. Drawing on a comparative historical and
interpretive reading of inscriptional, archaeological, art-historical, and site-based evidence, the study shows that
Borobudur articulated a specifically Javanese mode of Buddhist localization by transforming cosmology into an
ordered experience of movement, ascent, and visual instruction under Syailendra patronage. Đồng Dương, by
contrast, reveals a different strategy in which Buddhist monumentality was embedded within the political
landscape of Indrapura and aligned more directly with royal foundation, ritual access, and dynastic projection.
Considered together, the two sites suggest that sacred space in premodern Southeast Asia was not merely a
backdrop for devotion, but an active medium through which kingship, merit, and cosmological order were
organized and displayed. The article therefore reframes the spread of Mahāyāna Buddhism in Southeast Asia not
as a simple process of religious transmission, but as a historically situated practice of localization shaped by court
power, regional landscapes, architectural production, and wider maritime circulation..