YAN, Kedah, Malaysia – The Bujang Valley is an ancient kingdom still revealing its secrets. Standing atop Bukit Choras today, you see only the green roll of oil palm plantations, a distant peak of Gunung Jerai, and the haze of a tropical afternoon. The sea is invisible, hidden eight kilometres away behind a wall of sediment and time.

But 1,200 years ago, this hill was a cape. A rocky promontory jutting into the busy waters of the Strait of Malacca. And on that cape, facing the horizon where ships appeared, stood a gleaming white Buddhist temple—a beacon of the Dharma for sailors, merchants, and monks who navigated the monsoon winds between India, China, and the islands of Indonesia.

That cape was part of a larger sacred landscape. Gunung Jerai—Kedah Peak—towered behind it, a 1,217-metre landmark known to ancient sailors from Arabia to China as Kalah or Kadaram. The temple faced the sea, the mountain at its back, a perfect meeting point of the earthly and the divine.

In September 2023, a team from Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Global Archaeology Research Centre (GARC) and the National Heritage Department pulled back the earth to reveal that temple. What they found has stunned the archaeological world and offers a profound new chapter in the story of Buddhism in Southeast Asia.


A Temple Out of Time

From the moment the excavation began, it was clear that Bukit Choras was different.

The Bujang Valley, formally Lembah Bujang in Malay, the name believed to derive from an ancient Sanskrit or Old Javanese term, is not a single site but a vast archaeological complex. It contains over 100 known sites spread across roughly 400 square kilometres between Gunung Jerai and the Sungai Muda river. These include temple mounds (known as candi), jetty remains, iron smelting sites, and habitation areas. Most of these sites lie south of Gunung Jerai, along the Sungai Merbok and Sungai Muda. They have been extensively studied, some heavily reconstructed.

But Bukit Choras lies alone, north of the mountain, isolated and untouched for centuries.

“This site is unique,” explained Dr. Nasha Rodziadi Khaw, the chief researcher leading the dig. “It is the only site located north of Gunung Jerai, completely isolated. And the preservation is extraordinary.”

The team uncovered the entire western wall of the temple, along with half of the northern and southern walls and the staircase structures at its base. Unlike other sites where laterite bricks have crumbled or been scavenged, Bukit Choras has yielded a temple with remarkable structural integrity.

The bricks themselves tell a story of local ingenuity. Using X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence analysis, scientists confirmed that the laterite was mined from the south-eastern outcrop of the very same hill. The builders did not import materials from India or Java. They looked at their own earth, saw iron-rich stone, and transformed it into a monument.

But the bricks, impressive as they are, are not what makes this discovery historic.


The Buddha Who Remained

In the second and third phases of excavation, the team made a find that sent ripples through the academic world: life-sized Buddha statues carved from stucco—a mixture of lime, water, and sand.



Statues of this scale from the 8th or 9th century are rare. Statues preserved with their heads still attached are almost unprecedented. In April and May of 2024, researchers unearthed a seated Buddha in a cross-legged meditation posture, complete and intact. The robe is visible. The facial features remain distinct. And carved directly into the stone body of the statue, the team discovered a Sanskrit inscription—a mantra identified as sagaramatipariprocha, a text that expounds core Buddhist doctrines on emptiness and causality.

“This is not a random devotional object,” one researcher told me privately. “This is a teaching in stone.”



This inscription is engraved on the three faces of a rectangular stone bar found along with the image of the Buddha in excavations at Bukit Choras, Yan, Kedah, Malaysia. It is written in the Sanskrit language and in late Brahmi characters. Although damaged, it contains three verses from the Mahāyāna Buddhist text Sāgaramati-paripṛcchā (Questions of the Oceanic Intelligence). The verses present deep Mahāyāna doctrines concerning emptiness (śūnyatā) , conditionality (Pratīyasamutpāda) , and the qualities of a Buddha.

The presence of this specific text is significant. The Sāgaramati-paripṛcchā is a major Mahāyāna sūtra that discusses the bodhisattva path and the nature of reality. Finding its verses inscribed on a statue in Kedah proves that the monks at Bukit Choras were not merely pious devotees but were engaged with advanced philosophical texts of the Mahāyāna tradition. They were scholars as well as worshippers.

Bukit Choras, therefore, was not a remote wayside shrine. It was one of the important religious or pilgrimage centres of Mahāyāna Buddhist learning in ancient and medieval times. Pilgrims and monks travelling between India and China would have stopped here to study, debate, and receive teachings. It was a node in a network of learning that stretched across the Bay of Bengal.



It is very interesting to note that in earlier excavations at the same place were found Pallava inscriptions (8th century C.E.), which show trade relations between southern India and south-eastern countries. The presence of both Pallava and late Brahmi scripts at the same site confirms that Bukit Choras was a multilingual, multicultural centre. Indian merchants brought their scripts and their faith; local artisans adapted them; and together they created something new.

Two other life-sized statues were found nearby, their stucco surfaces weathered but their presence undeniable. Together, they form the largest collection of free-standing Buddhist statuary ever discovered in Malaysia.

And here is the fact that should stop every Buddhist in their tracks: Malaysian heritage officials have confirmed that these statues are older than both Angkor Wat (12th century) and Borobudur (9th century) . Not by a few years. By centuries.


The Srivijaya Connection

To understand why Bukit Choras matters, we must look across the water to the island of Sumatra.

Between the 7th and 13th centuries, the Srivijaya Empire dominated the maritime trade routes of Southeast Asia. It was not an empire of vast land armies but of ships, ports, and diplomacy. Its capital, near modern-day Palembang, was a great centre of Buddhist learning. The Chinese monk Yijing (I-Ching; 635–713 CE) stayed there for months in 671 CE, studying Sanskrit grammar and translating scriptures before continuing his journey to India.

Yijing wrote that Kedah was the main port of embarkation for the journey to India and that the entire region acknowledged Srivijaya’s authority. His words, dismissed by some later Western historians as exaggeration, now find their proof in the soil of Bukit Choras.

The architectural style of the temple, the iconography of the Buddha statues, and even the choice of stucco as a medium, all of these echo discoveries made in Sumatra and West Java. This was not a remote outpost copying a distant capital. This was a fully integrated partner in a Buddhist mandala, a network of power and faith that stretched from the Isthmus of Kra to the shores of Java.

The Pallava script found on inscriptions at Bukit Choras further confirms the links to South Indian and Srivijayan courtly culture. Sanskrit mantras, Pallava calligraphy, Sumatran architectural styles, local Kedah laterite, this was a meeting point of civilisations.

And the faith was not exclusive. Across the valley, archaeologists have found thousands of lingam and yoni stone carvings (symbols of the Hindu god Shiva), statues of Ganesha and Vishnu, and remnants of Saivite rituals. Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism lived side by side here, as they did in Srivijaya’s Sumatran heartland. The merchants who stopped at Kedah’s markets could pray at a Buddhist stupa in the morning and a Hindu shrine in the afternoon. This religious tolerance was not an accident; it was a deliberate strategy to unify the diverse trading communities that passed through the strait.


The Iron That Built Temples

But devotion alone did not build this temple. The Bujang Valley was also an industrial centre.



Excavations have revealed furnaces, tuyères (ceramic blowpipe tips), and tonnes of iron slag dating to the 5th century, centuries before the Bukit Choras temple was constructed. Local smelters developed sophisticated technology to process the valley’s iron-rich laterite into metal bars. This iron became a prized export commodity, traded across the Indian Ocean for Indian cotton, Chinese ceramics, Persian glass, and Sri Lankan gems.

The profits from Kedah’s iron trade financed its temples. The Bujang Valley was not merely a religious centre sustained by outside patronage. It was a dynamic local economy that generated its own wealth and then invested that wealth in sacred architecture. The Buddha of Bukit Choras gazes out from a hill built on iron.


What Was Lost, What Is Found

Why did this temple fall? Why was the Bujang Valley abandoned?

We cannot say with certainty, but history offers a compelling answer. In 1025 CE, the Chola Empire of South India launched a massive naval raid against Srivijaya. The Cholas sacked the capital, captured the king, and broke the mandala’s spine. In 1068 CE, they returned, this time directly attacking Kedah. The Bujang Valley was looted. Its temples were desecrated or abandoned. And over centuries, the jungle swallowed the hilltop stupa.

The Buddhist tradition that had flourished for four centuries—that had hosted monks, sponsored translations, and illuminated the Strait of Malacca with its presence—faded into memory.

But memory is not oblivion.


Relevance for Buddhists Today

For Buddhist readers, the discoveries at Bukit Choras offer three profound lessons.

First, they remind us that the Dharma has never belonged to a single culture or nation. For centuries, we have told the story of Buddhism’s eastward spread as an Indian story that became a Chinese, Tibetan, or Japanese story. But Southeast Asia was not a passive recipient. The Bujang Valley was a creative, dynamic centre of Buddhist practice and art, developing its own expressions of the tradition while remaining connected to the larger Mahayana world.

Second, they challenge us to rethink what we mean by “periphery.” To the great empires of India and China, Kedah was a stop on the way to somewhere else. But from the perspective of Buddhist history, Kedah was a centre. It was a place where mantras were carved into statues, where laterite was turned into temples, where the Dharma met the daily lives of iron smelters and pepper farmers. The periphery is only a matter of where you stand.

Third, and most urgently, the discovery calls for stewardship. The Bukit Choras site is fragile. The stucco statues require immediate conservation. The temple structure is exposed to the tropical elements. The Malaysian government has spoken of developing the site for archaeo-tourism—a worthy ambition—but only if it is done with the reverence and care that a sacred site deserves.

There is hope on this front. The Bujang Valley has been on Malaysia’s Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage status since 2014. The Bukit Choras discovery has breathed new life into that bid. If successful, it would provide international recognition, technical assistance, and protection. But UNESCO cannot stop a bulldozer alone.

In 2013, a developer famously demolished a 1,000-year-old temple, Candi Sungai Mas, with a backhoe before archaeologists could fully excavate it. The loss was irreversible. That tragedy galvanised Malaysian heritage activists and led to stronger legal protections, but it remains a warning: the secrets of Bujang Valley are still emerging, but they are also still vulnerable.

As Buddhists, we have a responsibility not only to practice the Dharma but to protect the material remains of those who practiced before us. These stones, these statues, these mantras—they are not just history. They are the physical continuation of the Sangha across 1,200 years.


A Beacon Again

Today, if you visit Bukit Choras, you will find a dig site: ropes, measuring tapes, shade cloth, and researchers brushing soil from ancient brick. It is not yet a tourist destination. The statues have been moved to the GARC laboratory for preservation. The temple is still partially buried.

But something has changed. When the final phase of excavation is complete, when the conservation work is done, Bukit Choras may once again become a beacon—not for ships at sea, but for pilgrims and practitioners seeking the roots of the Dharma in Southeast Asia.

The Buddha who sat on that hill, facing the ocean, teaching emptiness and compassion, has returned from the earth. His voice is still faint. But it is no longer silent.

The Editor extends deep gratitude to the team at Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Global Archaeology Research Centre (GARC), the National Heritage Department, the Buddhist Channel, and the many Malaysian heritage activists who work to protect the Bujang Valley. May these discoveries benefit all beings and turn the Dharma Wheel once more in the land of Kedah.


Suggested Further Reading:

I-Tsing (Yijing), A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (trans. J. Takakusu)

Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, The Malay Peninsula: Crossroads of the Maritime Silk Road

Recent excavation reports from GARC USM (available through their official publications)

UNESCO World Heritage Centre: "Archaeological Heritage of the Bujang Valley, Kedah" (Tentative List)