ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the Buddhists navigated the relationship between the presence of the Buddha’s relics and the formation of institutional and political power in the Indic Northwest (eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan) at the turn of the Common Era. In wedding their institutional presence and means of expansion to the division and distribution of the Buddha’s relics and the signifying stupas in which they were housed, the Buddhist faced a paradoxical predicament—that the means of institutional dissemination was only possible by virtue of its own destruction. This resulted in the development of a set of ambivalent legal regulations, preserved in some hitherto unnoticed passages from the Sarvāstivādavinaya and other works extant in Chinese translation, that both pro- and pre-scribe stupa destruction and relic theft. Such regulations were also framed within two cycles of narrative propaganda, the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra and Aśokāvadāna, both of which sought to legitimise the theft of relics by political agents. On the basis of further archaeological and art-historical evidence, alongside a socio-historical analysis of inscribed reliquaries, these discourses are shown to pertain in particular to the discrete milieu of the Indic Northwest.
