Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

Religious architecture, often called ‘monuments’ within the current understanding of ancient shrines, are prominent features of the landscape in South and Southeast Asia. Many of these sites are admired for their artistic and aesthetic appeal and are centres of tourism and travel. This paper traces the historical trajectory of three contemporary monuments of Buddhist affiliation across the Bay of Bengal, namely Nalanda in north India, Borobudur in Central Java, and Nakhon Pathom in Central Thailand to address both their distinctiveness and their interconnectedness. The paper also focuses on the extent to which these shrines reflect the religious theories that prevailed between the sixth and the thirteenth centuries AD and are currently known to us through religious texts. It is not often appreciated that ‘collections’ of religious texts, as well as the ‘discovery’ of monuments were mediated through the priorities and practices of European and Western scholars from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of the study of Buddhism shows that it centred on religious texts and philosophical doctrines produced by a small group of monastic elites, with little attention paid to the more difficult questions of the contexts underlying textual production and circulation. This paper suggests that it is important to factor in the colonization of South and Southeast Asia into any discussion on the understanding of religions and monuments, as well as current interest in these monuments, which are also World Heritage Sites and associated with present interests in maritime heritage.