LOCALIZING THE BUDDHA’S PRESENCE AT WAYSIDE SHRINES IN NORTHERN PAKISTAN

Engagement in the marketplace, commercial metaphors, and links between long-distance trade and patterns of religious transmission may appear to conflict with normative ideals of renunciation thought to be associated with the earliest phases of indian Buddhist and other śramaṇa movements that shared ascetic origins in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. Nevertheless, a structural impetus to seek donations of material goods in exchange for religious merit and the “gift of dharma” (dharmadāna) thoroughly entangled the Buddhist monastic community with groups of donors who could offer social, political, and economic patronage.¹ Although Max Weber attributed a “lack of economic rationalism