 So I'd like to thank Oric Pagel for the introduction and chairing this talk. And I would like to also thank Vincent Tournier for inviting me here to speak at SOAS for the Buddhist Forum. It's a great honor to be part of this vaunted series. This evening I'll speak about a previous birth, or what I'm calling rebirth narratives, in Buddhist texts and art of Gandhara and the northwestern borderlands of South Asia, which is displayed here on the map. Gandhara can be contextualized within a larger frame of the Indo-Iranian frontiers between the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau. I'd like to refer to a recent workshop on the geography of Gandhara and art at Oxford's Classical Art Research Center last month, where the discussion of what is meant by Gandhara proper, greater Gandhara, and connections with neighboring regions, such as Taksala and the Punjab across the Indus River, the Swat Valley, the Upper Indus Region, which I'll be discussing in the seminar on Saturday, as well as areas across the Hindu Kush in ancient Bactria where we're discussed extensively. And I think those talks are available now on a podcast on the Classical Art Research Center's website. The study of Buddhist narratives, which is my proper topic today in literary and visual cultures, has generated a considerable interest due to the great treasuries of stories across Buddhist traditions. The depths and broad extent of the ocean of Buddhist stories continue to be navigated, although scholars entering the waters of this ocean sometimes risk danger of drowning our shipwreck, like the merchant sailors in a famous episode of the Simhila Sartavaha of Adana. This story was the focus of a storytelling event, which was organized at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto after the last International Association of Buddhist Studies conferences there. Raths for crossing these potentially turbulent waters are supplied by recent work on Pali and Sanskrit texts, including translations published by Naomi Appleton and Sarah Shaw, Alice Collette, and Andy Rotman, with scholars such as John Strong, Rekha Onuma, and many others providing the kind of navigational tools for interpretation of the literary depths. Works by Todd Lewis on noir versions of Buddhist narratives, such as the version you see depicted here in this noir scroll and also by contributors to a recent volume edited by Stephen Collins on readings of the Vesantara Jataka demonstrate that many of these stories are still very much alive in contemporary Buddhist cultures. Ties between rebirth narratives, epigraphy, and art are evident very early at Barhut with second and first century BC Brahmi inscriptions with labels of Jatakas and also in recently published materials from a Satavahana Buddhist shrine at Kanaganahali in Karnataka, which Christian Lutsanets has made available with excellent images on his website. Dieter Schlingloff's detailed studies of narrative wall paintings at Ajanta, as well as important contributions by Vidya Dehejiya and Maritio Tadei help to understand various modes and styles of narration in Indian Buddhist art. Alfred Fusche, who is called the grandfather of Gandharan studies by Vladimir's Walf in his catalog of the Gandhara sculpture in the British Museum, also had a keen interest in Buddhist Jatakas and text and art throughout his long career as an art historian in the first half of the 20th century. Fusche and other scholars interested in Gandharan Buddhist visual culture and iconography, as well as the archaeologists who explored the material culture of many excavated sites in Gandhara, in Northwestern Pakistan, and Afghanistan, relied primarily on Pali and Sanskrit texts for literary frameworks to guide their interpretations of the narrative imagery and materials from the archaeological excavations. Now, as many of you know, Gandharan art tends to emphasize the present life story of Shakyamuni Buddha. But in this presentation, I'll discuss an important exception to that generalization by focusing on an encounter with the previous Dipankara in a past life story. Since Fusche's time, discoveries of early Buddhist manuscripts from Gandhara written in the Gandhari language, that is what Harold Bailey called the Northwest Procret Vernacular, which is almost exclusively written in the Karoshti script and used in inscriptions, coin legends, and administrative documents from Nia and other sites in the Taran basin, have opened new access to the regional literary culture in periods overlapping with the peak phases of Gandharan artistic production in the first few centuries CE. So before the British Library acquired a collection of 29 birch bark scrolls in the mid-1990s, only a single incomplete scroll of a Gandhari version of the Dharmapada from Kothan, which was discovered in 1892 and definitively edited by John Brough in 1962, provided evidence for a suspected corpus of Gandharan Buddhist literature. This emerging corpus of Gandharan Buddhist texts has become greatly enlarged within the last 25 years with additional collections listed here becoming available for scholarly study. And here I'd like to refer to a recent book published by my former supervisor Richard Solomon at the University of Washington on the Buddhist literature of ancient Gandhara, an introduction with selected translations, which just appeared from wisdom press last month. In that book, he gives samples of the various contents and genres attested in Gandhari manuscripts. These texts within the Gandhari manuscripts exhibit various levels of originality, innovation, or fidelity to Indian Buddhist parallels, and many of them lack direct literary parallels in Sanskrit, Pali, and other Buddhist languages. In this presentation, I'm focusing particularly on genres of rebirth narratives. And here I'm using the term rebirth narratives in a qualified sense that are labeled as avadanas and purvayogas in the British Library collection. OK. These two genres of avadanas and purvayogas were written by two scribal storytellers who composed original summaries of around 57 avadanas and purvayogas. So these summary stories, in many ways, just preserve the basic details with terse explanations of the names, the titles, and the place where the story happens. Their handwriting can be distinguished from the handwriting of the primary text of the British Library scrolls. So the primary text, in this case, was written by a scribe in using a thicker hand and was basically for a Kothirikagama type sutras, which were edited by Mark Allen, who is a previous speaker in the series this year. And you can see here at a certain point a scribe writing in a larger flowing hand takes over and begins to write these summary stories of avadanas in the leftover space on the bottom of the scroll, on the recto, and then flips the scroll over and continues to write on the verso. So these avadanas scavenge leftover space on these scrolls after the primary text had been written. And as Timothy Lenz has observed in his editions of poor avayogas and avadanas published in the Gandharan Buddhist text series, stories of linkages to previous births, that is to say the poor avayogas, explicitly connect the past and present lives of the figures, while the avadanas tend to focus only on the present lives without necessarily a reference to a past life. And there are only a few exceptions in which the avadanas are karmic tales with explanations of how current conditions resulted from past actions. So ripening of karma is not the overriding theme or concern of the vast majority of the avadana narratives, which, as Lenz has pointed out, do not conform to what he calls the standard avadana package. That is to say, other Buddhist literary compilations of both avadanas and jataka's jataka birth stories. So there's a lot of overlap between these genre terms. And one point I'd like to make is that this term poor avayoga, as Tim Lenz has pointed out, is not exclusive to the British Library Gandhari manuscripts. And the other main point I'd like to emphasize again is that the avadana stories in these manuscripts, in contrast to the avadanas in Sanskrit literature that many of you are familiar with, as well as the jataka's, tend not to be concerned with karma vipaka from a story of the past, the atitavastu, in Sanskrit. And so in other words, they represent probably an early phase of the narrative development of these genres, which are differentiated in these manuscripts, which belong to a time with a terminus postquem in the first century CE. So many of these summary stories do not have direct literary parallels, unlike most of the primary texts in the British Library Collection, except for commentaries and scholastic literature, which like the avadanas in poor vayogas do not have the direct literary correspondences. And they only include the skeletal information with formulae calling for the rest of the story to be expanded in detail. This formulae for expansion reflects connections between the written summaries and processes, probably of oral expansion in the storytelling tradition. Stories about well-known characters from the time of the historical Buddha, Arashoka, tend to be more identifiable with other versions in Buddhist literature that have been imported or transplanted from the Buddhist heartland in ancient Magadha and Kosala. On the other hand, Gandhari avadanas and poor vayogas localized in the Northwestern geographical, political, and cultural context represent what might be called a homegrown strand of regionally distinctive narratives. These homegrown avadanas and poor vayogas belonging to first century Gandhari context are more difficult to link with previously known narratives but display a great regional diversity of the early Buddhist storytelling tradition. So to give an example, I'll briefly discuss this story with references to the four Mahasravakas or the four Mahasravakas. And this story is the eighth avadana in a series of nine stories written that started on the bottom of the recto of the text with the four Ekotarigagama-type sutras as the primary text and then continues to the end of the verso to a point where you can see that it becomes very fragmentary, especially towards the right margin of the text. So the reconstruction of the recto by Mark Allen in his edition in the Gandharan Buddhist text series allows us to ascertain the placement of these fragments on the verso. A significant amount of writing has been lost, as you can see here, particularly towards the bottom of the scroll and many points in the interpretation remain uncertain. So I'm just presenting it here in case you're able to help me out a little bit with some ideas. But I think also I'm presenting it because I want to give you some ideas of the challenge that's involved in interpreting these very fragmentary terse original stories. Now in this story, which I've given to you here in a kind of tentative in progress translation, we can see that there's a reference to the name of Ajata Shatru. And that's clearly preserved in the introductory formula and indicates that this avadana is set in ancient Magadha either during or shortly after the time of the historical Buddha. Now what's interesting about this story is that an enigmatic character named Yola Arutiga is introduced just after the name of Ajata Shatru. And that's what's highlighted here in this box. So this name, Yola Arutiga, is probably of Iranian derivation and suggests local innovation and deliberate anachronism in the composition of the narrative. Perhaps in an effort to link Shaka figures with Ajata Shatru and the four Mahasravakas, who are listed towards the bottom of the scroll as Shari Putra with Mogulana kind of supplied Mahakashapa and Aniruddha right before the formula for the expansion of the story. So the point I'd like you to take away here is that scribes and artisans employed different strategies to localize, incorporate, and appropriate diverse regional characters, groups, and settings. These summaries suggest a pattern in which local and regional associations with contemporary first century figures and settings in the milieu of the Northwestern borderlands are lost or diminished in the course of narrative transmission as doctrinal themes gain greater emphasis. This is a point that I presented at the last IABS meeting in Toronto. These story summaries written by scribal specialists belong to a stage of development when genre distinctions and characteristic structures were still very much in flux. The fragmentary condition of the Birchbark materials and the difficulty of identifying even partial literary parallels or versions makes interpreting the content of many of these stories an ongoing challenge, as you can see here. So in order to develop a better understanding of the broad range of previous birth stories that were circulating not only in Gandharan literary context, but also in visual media in the early centuries of the Common Era, I coordinated a collaborative research project, which Oric referred to in his introduction. And this project was a collaboration with Timothy Lenz, who I've been co-editing the remaining stories in the British Library collection with over the last many years, and also an art historian affiliated with the Royal Ontario Museum named David Jangoord. This project on Buddhist rebirth narratives in literary and visual cultures of Gandharan was funded by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies through the American Council of Learned Societies. And this funding supported a global survey of Gandharan Jadaka images in museums, archives, and other collections, which David Jangoord supervised. We found in this survey over 170 images of identifiable Jadakas in Gandharan art. I've given you a list of around 14 or 15 of those stories. The list sometimes changes. But one thing to understand about the list is that this repertoire is dominated by images of the Deepankara's encounter with the Bodhisattva, which I'm going to be talking about shortly. But before talking about that major episode, which dominates the repertoire with between 120 and 130 images out of the 170 we were able to find, I'd like to just point out that we were able to make a couple of new identifications. Those new identifications are highlighted here as the Nalapana Jadaka, the story in which the leader of the monkeys brings his troop down to a well and notices that there are footprints all around the well and bones. And so he tells the other monkeys not to go down and drink out of the well with their mouths, but to use straws. And that's what's depicted here, and because the well is inhabited by Arakshasa. We also know this story from Kanaganahali, from Kizal outside of Kucha in Central Asia. But the Gandharan depiction is a bit different, because instead of looking as if from above at Kanaganahali and in Kizal, the viewer sees the scene horizontally. Another story is that of the Naga, or the young elephant, who was raised by an ascetic. But then as the elephant grows up, he comes back to destroy the ascetic's hut. And that we were able to find in a couple of different Gandharan images, including this one from the archives of the Museum Nacional Orientale in Rome. So the point I'd like to emphasize is that from this survey of Jadakas, or so-called Jadakas identified in Gandharan art, we have a unique situation where we have not only very early texts, but also images of overlapping genres of rebirth stories from one cultural region, from Gandhara, from around the first century to third or so century CE, when these Gandharan images or Gandharan sculptures were produced. So the other point I'd like to emphasize is that our project really adopted a holistic approach for a comprehensive understanding of narrative transmission in written and visual media of Gandhara. Now, this approach is necessary because when we compare this list of previous birth narratives in Gandharan art with the avadanas and purviyogas summarized in Gandhari manuscripts, only one of these stories, that is to say, the well-known story of Vishwantara, are in Pali Vishwantara, is summarized in a Gandhari series of purviyogas edited and translated by Timothy Lanz here. And so you have some of the images from the Peshawar museum of the Gandharan sculptures. And then you have the literary version, which again gives you an example of the very terse nature of these avadana and purviyogas summaries. So this point of overlap, of singular overlap, demonstrates the need to utilize various types of sources to clarify which stories were drawn from a larger pool of orally transmitted stories in Gandhara. So it's also necessary or helpful, I would say, to incorporate the outside testimony of Chinese pilgrims' accounts from a somewhat later period after the fifth century. These records of Chinese visitors to Gandhara and the Northwest testified a pattern of distribution and localization of rebirth narratives in the ritual landscapes of Gandhara and the Northwest, which came to be regarded as a second holy land, as Fushe terms it. Koichi Shinohara developed a typology for translocating narratives of previous Buddhas and births of the Bodhisattva in Gandhara in order to construct sacred places outside the greater mahogany homeland of Shakyamuni. And this is part of a three-fold typology, along with narratives about conversions of autochthonous naga and yaksha deities and also narratives about movable objects used by the Buddha, such as the contact relic, his Paribogika Datu, of the Begging Bull, which was Koichi Shinohara's specific focus on this article on the story of the Buddha's Begging Bull imagining biography and sacred places. So what I'd like to do now today in the time that I have remaining is to take stock of the significance of previous birth stories by offering hypotheses about the selective emphasis and elaboration in Gandhara and written and visual media. And I'll be making three points. The first point, or the first hypothesis, is that macrohistorical narratives proposing karmic links between past and present births of the Buddha in place where the Buddha was previously barned, seen, and heard in the terrain of Gandhara and neighboring regions. Thus, rebirth narratives integrate Northwestern regional places and figures, including contemporary first century characters in Gandhari, Avedanas, and Purviyogas into the life stories and genealogies of the Buddha and previous Buddhas. The second point I'd like to make is that narrative models shaped and contributed to the development of Buddhist religious aspirational and devotional practices, including making vows, pranidanas, to realize goals of Buddhahood by embarking on the bodhisattva path. These stories certainly also encourage ethical action, such as by providing an impetus for patrons to make donations. But the use of narratives as didactic tools to promote the material interest of the monastic community to lay audiences was only part of their function. The third point I'll make is that rebirth narratives as well as other narrative genres, which were embedded or localized at regional shrines, facilitated Buddhist transmission beyond the Northwestern borderlands. If aspirations to embark on the path of becoming the Buddha could be realized there in this frontier region of the Northwest, it could happen anywhere, even much further away from Shakyamuni's homeland beyond the frontiers of South Asia. So I'll be applying these three hypotheses to two major examples. The examples of the Siddhasana story, which is the version of the bodhisattva's name in the Gandharipurva Yoga, as well as to Dipankara's encounter with figures named as Megha in the Mahavasthus, Dipankara Vastu, Sumati in the Divyavadana, in the Dharmaruchi Avadana, and as Sumeda in the Pali Nidhana Katha. So first, though, before coming back to the Siddhasana Purva Yoga, I'll talk about the Dipankara episode. So this story is one in which a young ascetic encountered the previous Buddha Dipankara. And when he encountered the previous Buddha Dipankara, he made offerings of flowers, of padmas, which he attained from a kind of flower girl, and then bowed down so that the Buddha Dipankara did not have to walk through the mud that was created by a tempest. And so a big part of the story is that at this point, the young ascetic, Megha or Sumati or Pali Sumeda, makes a vow, a pranidhana, to become a Buddha. And then that's paired with a prediction, a vyakarana, by the Buddha Dipankara that that will, in fact, happen over the course of many births. So what's particular about this Dipankara, this story of encounter with the previous Buddha Dipankara, is that we do not find it summarized in extant Gandhari, avadhanas, and poor viyogas, at least in the British Library collection, despite its dominance of the visual repertoire of Gandharan rebirth narratives. However, Dipankara is listed as the first of the previous Buddhas in a Gandhari version of the Bahubutaka Sutra in a scroll in the US Library of Congress being edited by Richard Solomon. Now, Vincent Tournier has drawn attention to this Gandhari version as the earliest evidence, the text and evidence of the kind of sub-classification of Bahubutaka Sutras incorporated into the Mahavastu and other Buddhist texts. The episode of the Bodhisattva encountering Dipankara, although not included in the Pali Jataka collection, that's to say it's in the Nidhana Kata instead, can be considered a rebirth narrative in the broad sense. Although it's not technically a Jataka, according to the Pali classification, and scholars like Dieter Schlingloff do not classify it as a really classify it more with the life story of Shakyamuni Buddha so that the term Dipankara Jataka tends to be restricted to the conventions of Gandharan art history more than anything else. Now, in Gandharan art, the encounter with Dipankara very often prefaces the events of Shakyamuni's present life story, making its position in the iconographic program of Gandharan stupas quite extraordinary. So in other words, even though you can't see it here, when you do look at stupas with many different life events depicted around the drum, oftentimes that series starts with Dipankara's encounter, or the encounter with Dipankara. Like you see here in these images from the British Museum right next door. So depending on how the narrative scenes in false gables are counted, the Dipankara encounter is among the top five narratives in Gandharan art, just after the birth, the departure, and the Mahaparinirvana of the Buddha Shakyamuni. So it easily exceeds the number of depictions of other pivotal events, including the awakening under the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya and the first teaching in the deer park at Sarnath, as well as other pivotal events in Shakyamuni's Hagueography. So in terms of my first point about how the Dipankara episode relates to macrohistorical connections between the Buddhas and present lives, it's clear that the genealogy of previous Buddhas and the extended life story of the Bodhisattva essentially begins with this encounter with Dipankara, which is localized by Chinese pilgrims, including Fashen in the early fifth century, in Nagarajara. Nagarajara, as you can see from the map, is located in the Kabul River Valley, just upstream from Gandhara proper, and on the way to the Hindu Kush passes that you see here on the map. Now the second point about what the Dipankara's prediction of future Buddhahood contributes to the development of Buddhist practice, I would follow Vincent Tornier in pointing out that Megha's aspirational vow, his Pranidhana, and Dipankara's Vyakarana, his prediction, sets the pattern for aspiring to Buddhahood in the interlinked biographies of other previous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Finally, why is embedding or emplacing the encounter with Dipankara important for the transmission of Buddhism beyond Gandhara? I would say that this localization of Megha's meeting with Dipankara and aspiring to Buddhahood, which might be considered within a range of Buddhological developments in the early century CE related to the generation of the thought of awakening, necessary for pursuing the Bodhisattva path in a Gandharan environment, demonstrates that one can set forth on this path anywhere, that undertaking this vow does not necessarily entail meeting the historical Buddha Shakyamuni in the heartland of ancient Magadha. Since the genealogy of previous Buddhas in past eras was expanded and incorporated the future Buddha Maitreya, the franchise for making Pranidhana vows to aspire to Buddhahood, is consequently also expanded backwards and forwards in time and outwards from Shakyamuni Buddha's homeland in ancient Magadha and Kosala. So as I've already noted, the story of the prince who gives everything away, known in the Gandhari Purvayoga summary as Sudashna in Sanskrit as Vishwantara and in Pali as Vesantara, is the only story summarized in the BL Gandhari series of Purvayogas and also depicted in Gandharan art. So here I've shown images in the British Museum from the site of Jamalgarhi in the Peshawar Basin. Now here I should qualify that it's the second story in the series of Purvayogas edited by lens, but it's not explicitly labeled as a Purvayoga. And the protagonist's name, Sudashna, or Sudasha, with a kind of diacritic over the top of the retroflex asha, which would correspond to retroflex n, like in terms of when we transcribe the name Vishnu, it's with a similar character. It doesn't correspond to the Pali or Sanskrit forms of Vishwantara or Vesantara. So as discussed by lens, the difference in the name, Sudasha, aligns the Gandhari summary more closely with Sogdian and other Central Asian versions, as well as with the Chinese transcriptions of the character's name in earlier translations, thus serving as a key piece of mounting evidence to confirm the Gandhari hypothesis that Gandhari was the underlying language of the initial phases of Chinese translation. So the sequences of the Vishwantara or Sudashna story in Gandharan sculptures from Jamalgarhi and perhaps also from Sherri Balul in the Peshawar Museum place this narrative a very distant second, along with sculptures of the Shyama Jataka after the Deepankara episode in Gandharan art. So according to our survey of Gandharan Jataka's, both the Sudashna story of giving everything away, including the royal elephant, the children, the chariot and even his wife, as well as the Shyama Jataka, which I'll discuss very briefly, both have about 10 or 12 different images, whereas if we compare that to the Deepankara story with over 120, it's very small, they're not represented quite as well. So in terms of asking questions about how the Sudashna story fits into a kind of macro historical perception of karmic links between the Buddha's past and present lives, in the well-known Pali Jataka collection, Vesantara is the Bodhisattva's penultimate birth before Siddhartha as elaborated in the final and longest Jataka in the Mahanapata of the Theravada or Mahavehara tradition. It's still the most widely known narrative in Southeast Asia and while it's not possible to extrapolate from the Pali collection or from contemporary Southeast Asia to Gandhara, this story may have served as a bookend, as suggested by lens, to the Deepankara episode as a conclusion to the extended previous birth stories before Shakyamuni. Now as far as what the Sudashna story contributes to the development of Buddhist aspirational and devotional practices in Gandhara, it is the paramount example of selfless donation but limiting its interpretation to a functional explanation of ethical principles is insufficient. If it is a literary, a Buddhist literary and visual epic as proposed by Richard Gombrich and Margaret Cohn in their translation of the Pali version which is depicted and labeled in multiple panels at Kanaganahali and in expanded visual format such as Sanchi and Ajanta, it's not so surprising to find the narrative in Gandhara media. According to Chinese accounts but not of Vaishan but of later Chinese visitors, this narrative is also localized at shrines around Palusha which remains kind of uncertain as to its exact location. Elizabeth Errington proposed locating it around Sherry Balol but Fushe and others who follow him have instead proposed to identify the events in the story with landscape features around Shabasgarhi where we find a set of Shokin major rock edicts at the foot of the Karamar spur of hills. Now why is embedding the story of the prince who gives everything away important for transmission within and beyond Gandhara? So consolidation of Buddhist sacred geography in Gandhara between the visits of Vaishan and Chuanzong overlaps with the growth of monasteries and shrines in the Peshawar basin. The localization of famous episodes of this narrative attracted local and long distance pilgrims just as episodes associated with the exiles of the epic heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata stimulated the growth of Hindu pilgrimage to regions beyond the Ganga Yomena Doab in Northern India. Gandhara and Buddhists were not the only ones to play this game as Fushe and Lamat dismissed the process of generating sacred geography. But their agency in claiming their own place as a home for the Buddha's previous births was obviously successful and did not prevent other regions beyond South Asia from staking their own claims. Okay, so since my time is short, I'm going to jump to my conclusions instead of talking about the Shyama and Ekashringha Jatakas which were also located in kind of the ritualized topography of the mountain passes separating the Peshawar basin from the Swat Valley. And for discussions of the Shibi Jataka and also the Viagra Jataka which are not only depicted in fragments of Gandharan art but also in petroglyphs from the upper Indus region at sites like Chalas Bridge and Shatiyal, you'll have to come to the seminar on Saturday. Okay, so in terms of giving some conclusions to my talk I'd like to review the hypotheses about selective emphases and elaboration of previous birth narratives in Gandharan texts, images and landscapes. The integration of Buddhist macro-historical paths into Gandharan and adjacent regional contexts was a way to domesticate rebirth narratives by making homes or dwellings for previous Buddhas and previous births as the Bodhisattva in settings in the Northwestern borderlands. So here I'm drawing upon this model of literary domestication of Avadhanas and Jatakas proposed by Todd Lewis for Noir Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley. And I'm also drawing upon this idea of a theory of religion developed by Thomas Tweed which he called Crossing and Dwelling in which there's basically an impetus to situate religions in both time and place and also for religions to move beyond their original times and places to other regions. The second hypothesis about rebirth narratives as models of and far Buddhist religious practices of aspiration and devotion, those, that kind of hypothesis is most strongly supported by Megas or Sumatis or Sumedas encounter with the previous Buddha, Dipankara and also by the Sudashna Purvayoga. Secondary story compilations of Gandhari, Avadhanas and Purvayogas belong to a transition from oral storytelling to formalization of standard Avadhana packages when perhaps these doctrinal emphases were not quite so clearly pronounced. The placement of Jataka sequences in Gandharan sculptures on staircases to paths for circumambulating stupas along the production of Pata can be related to the idea of realizing aspirations of the Bodhisattva career through a series of births by taking steps on the path to that kind of aspirational level. Embedding or emplacement of rebirth narratives in Gandharan landscapes facilitated Buddhist mobility and transmission in multiple directions. The localization of these stories crisscrossed between ancient Magadha and Gandhara, between Gandhara and Bhaktriya along Khushay's Vyal route and between Gandhara, Taxiliswat, Central Asia and China just like the two-way traffic of missionaries from the Northwest and Chinese pilgrims who followed the routes where many of these episodes from these stories were commemorated. Thank you.