What Buddhism can teach luxury about belonging in Asia

Few cultural systems have travelled across Asia as successfully as Buddhism. Born in northern India, it reached China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia over the course of a millennium, and took root in societies whose beliefs and social structures differed profoundly from those of its origins. It spread without conquest and took a different form in each of these societies.

Its success rested on a capacity to be transformed by the cultures it entered. In China, Buddhism encountered a civilisation with its own philosophical traditions, and gradually wove itself into them. Translators borrowed Daoist vocabulary to convey Buddhist concepts, and the Chan school that emerged from this encounter, later known in Japan as Zen, owed as much to Chinese thought as to Indian doctrine. Erik Zürcher's classic study of this period shows how this “conquest” of China was in fact a long process of mutual adaptation.

The figure of Guanyin is a good example. The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, represented as a male figure in India, gradually became in China a female embodiment of compassion. This transformation emerged over centuries from popular devotion and artistic practice, without any religious authority deciding it. Buddhism became Chinese in part because it left room for Chinese believers to give it a new face.

In literature, the real pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, who travelled to India in the seventh century to bring back Buddhist scriptures, became in the sixteenth century the basis of Journey to the West, a novel in which Buddhism merges with Daoist and folk traditions into a popular epic led by the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. The story remains so embedded in Chinese culture that Black Myth: Wukong, a video game drawing on it, became a global success in 2024, and a symbol of China's renewed cultural confidence.

The same adaptation shaped devotional objects. As Borges and Alicia Jurado note in their study of Buddhism, Chinese practice gave particular prominence to small devotional objects such as the rosary, in a culture long attached to the handling and collecting of small things. These objects made the faith tangible and portable, and allowed it to enter everyday life. Thailand followed a different path: Theravada Buddhism coexisted with local spirit cults, and devotion found other material forms, such as the amulets whose trade today resembles a luxury market, driven by rarity and symbolic value. Among younger Thais, this devotional culture has found a new expression in mutelu, a wave of spiritual consumption blending Buddhist amulets, Hindu deities and astrology, in which objects are valued for the protection they offer as much as for the status they confer.

This history differs from the model most luxury houses follow in Asia. Localisation adapts the surface of a brand while leaving its core untouched, and treats each market as an exercise in translation. Buddhism suggests another path, closer to syncretism, in which lasting presence comes from allowing local cultures to shape what the brand becomes, including its objects and its rituals.

In practice, this may mean conceiving certain products from local relationships to objects instead of adapting existing ones, or designing rituals of purchase and ownership that draw on local practices of gifting and collecting. Like Guanyin, a brand can keep its origins while allowing the cultures it enters to change some of its features.