The Bukit Choras Inscriptions and the Significance of the Sāgaramatiparipṛcchā Verses to Ancient Kedah

Abstract: The Bukit Choras archaeological site in present-day Kedah's Bujang Valley was first reported in 1849. Earlier archaeological interventions were incomplete, however, because they only focused on a section of a seventh-to-ninth-century CE Buddhist stūpa . In 2023 and 2024, three further excavations exposed several sides of this stūpa . Among the new items unearthed were two Sanskrit inscriptions in the Southeast Asian style of Brāhmī, engraved on narrow rectangular shale-bars, and three life-sized stucco Buddha images. The statues were set in recesses of the laterite projections that marked the cardinal directions of the stūpa . Both inscriptions bore three verses of the Sāgaramatiparipṛcchā , similar to three other Buddhist textual artefacts previously discovered in the Bujang Valley. This article focuses on the archaeological contexts of these new inscriptions and, with reference to the three previously found artefacts, describes their significance to the Buddhist practices of Ancient Kedah during the second half of the first millennium CE. By treating the Kedah epigraphs as a whole, taking into account their local contexts and broader cultural connections, they add to growing evidence that Ancient Kedah was an active participant in contemporaneous exchanges of ideas and practices within the larger framework of Asian Buddhist networks, while retaining its distinctive and autonomous features.