Imagine Tantric Buddhism in the Maldives – Crossroads or Terminus?

Andrea Acri

A significant, yet still little studied amount of tantric buddhist vestiges have been discovered in several locations of the Maldives islands, an archipelagic state set in the middle of the Indian Ocean. These vestiges, including inscriptions (written in both local and Northern Indian scripts) on stone and metal, ritual/deposit caskets, reliefs, and statues, may be dated to the period from the 8th to the 12th century, when tantric or Vajrayāna Buddhism circulated widely along the maritime routes connecting South Asia to East Asia through Southeast Asia. This material displays both a cosmopolitan/translocal and local character, being often made of locally sourced materials, and including visual representations of vajras, deities, and elements of local fauna and the culture associated with them, most notably seashells. This fact, along with the abundance of Buddhist sites spread across the archipelago – only a fraction of which has survived – suggests that the Maldives were not only a crossroads but also a terminus of different varieties of Buddhism. While located at a relatively short distance from the Indian ocean hub of Sri Lanka, the archipelago was not an entrepôt for ships bound to Southeast Asia. Their relative isolation and small inhabitable surface notwithstanding, many islands attracted Buddhist agents because of their rich production of cowrie shells, which were used in various parts of Asia as currency. My paper will survey relevant vestiges (some recently discovered and documented by MAHS project) and contextualise them against the background of the circulation of tantric Buddhism across the Indian Ocean.