Beneath the modern name Hotan lies the memory of Gosthana, a Buddhist kingdom where Indian, Iranian and Central Asian traditions met along the southern Silk Road.
By Pooja Bhatia
On the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert lies Hotan, or Hetian, an oasis city in present-day Xinjiang. To the modern reader it appears remote, separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Kunlun and Karakoram mountains and hundreds of kilometres of some of Asia’s most difficult terrain.
Its historical geography tells a very different story.
For centuries, the oasis was one of the great Buddhist centres of Central Asia. Caravans passed through it carrying jade, silk and other goods. Monasteries attracted monks and scholars. Sanskrit texts reached its religious institutions. Buddhist literature was translated into the local Khotanese language, and travellers from China encountered a society in which Buddhism had become deeply established.
Behind the familiar name Khotan lies another important historical name: Gosthana, or Gostana-deśa.
Bharat Nanda, in Beyond the Himalayas: Rediscovering India’s Forgotten Geography, places Gosthana among the most significant examples of an older geographical vocabulary connecting India with the lands beyond the Karakoram. His discussion presents the kingdom not simply as a distant oasis on the Silk Road but as part of a wider intellectual and religious network through which Buddhist learning, Sanskrit texts and cultural influences travelled between India and Central Asia.
Unlike some ancient-modern name associations that remain speculative, the identification of Gostana-deśa with ancient Khotan has strong support in established scholarship.
The distinguished Iranist H. W. Bailey, writing in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, explicitly referred to “ancient Khotan, Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit”. His formulation provides an important scholarly bridge between the Sanskrit geographical name and the oasis kingdom known to later history as Khotan.
This makes Gosthana particularly valuable for the study of forgotten geography. Here the older name is not merely an interesting linguistic possibility. It belongs to a documented Buddhist and Sanskrit tradition surrounding one of the most important cultural crossroads of Asia.
An Oasis Between Mountains and Desert
To understand why Khotan mattered, one must first understand its geography.
The kingdom developed along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin, where rivers descending from the Kunlun Mountains carried water towards the desert. In an otherwise arid environment, these rivers created fertile oases capable of sustaining agriculture and permanent settlement.
This geography placed Khotan directly on the southern branch of the Silk Road.
Caravans travelling around the Taklamakan could move westwards towards Yarkand and Kashgar or eastwards through other oasis settlements towards China. Routes leading south eventually connected this Central Asian system with the high mountain corridors towards Ladakh, Kashmir and the Indian subcontinent.
Khotan’s geographical position therefore gave it two advantages.
It possessed the water needed to sustain a significant population, and it stood on one of the great long-distance routes of Eurasia.
Trade made the kingdom prosperous.
But Buddhism made it historically extraordinary.
Gosthana in the Buddhist World
By the early centuries of the Common Era, Khotan had become one of the leading Buddhist kingdoms of the Tarim Basin.
The International Dunhuang Programme, maintained through institutions including the British Library, describes Khotan as particularly important in the transmission of Mahayana Buddhism from India towards China and Tibet. Surviving Khotanese Buddhist texts demonstrate connections extending well beyond the oasis itself.
Chinese Buddhist pilgrims provide some of the clearest testimony.
Faxian travelled through Khotan around the beginning of the fifth century while journeying towards India. His account describes a prosperous Buddhist society with an exceptionally large monastic community. Several centuries later, Xuanzang also visited Khotan on his return journey from India to China.
Modern scholarship based on these accounts describes Khotan as one of the great strongholds of Mahayana Buddhism. R. E. Emmerick, writing on the Book of Zambasta, noted that Khotan was already a major centre of Mahayana studies when Faxian visited around AD 400 and continued to hold this importance when Xuanzang passed through in the seventh century.
This is important when considering the name Gosthana.
The name belongs not to an isolated geographical curiosity but to a region deeply embedded in the Buddhist literary world.
Buddhist texts, monks and traditions connected the oasis with India.
Sanskrit in the Desert
Perhaps the most remarkable evidence of these connections survives in manuscripts.
The Buddhist literature of Khotan was written both in the local Khotanese language and in Sanskrit. The International Dunhuang Programme notes that surviving Khotanese Buddhist manuscripts were written in Brahmi script and include texts in both Sanskrit and Khotanese.
Physical examples survive today.
The British Library’s International Dunhuang Programme catalogues Sanskrit manuscript fragments associated with Khotan. One Sanskrit manuscript fragment from Dandan-Uiliq, an archaeological site between the Khotan and Keriya rivers, is written in Brahmi script.
Another catalogued manuscript from the wider Khotan collection is explicitly described as a Sanskrit manuscript fragment, also written in Brahmi.
These are not literary recollections written centuries later.
They are material evidence.
Sanskrit was physically present in the cultural world of Khotan.
UNESCO’s historical study of the languages of the Silk Roads similarly notes the transmission of Buddhist traditions towards Khotan through Gandhari Prakrit, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Brahmi script. It describes successive waves of Buddhist literary influence connecting northwestern India and the Tarim Basin.
Seen against this background, Nanda’s treatment of Gosthana in Beyond the Himalayas acquires considerable significance. The old name becomes part of a much larger documentary record demonstrating that this oasis had sustained religious and intellectual relationships with the Indian Buddhist world.
Khotanese Was Not Sanskrit, and That Matters
Recognising India’s influence on ancient Khotan should not lead to the opposite error of erasing Khotan’s own cultural identity.
The local language commonly called Khotanese was an Eastern Iranian language, not an Indian language.
This distinction is crucial because it reveals the true nature of Silk Road civilisation.
Khotan did not simply reproduce Indian culture in Central Asia. It received ideas, texts and terminology from India and transformed them within its own linguistic and cultural environment.
Bailey’s study of Khotanese vocabulary noted the extensive use of Buddhist Sanskrit terminology alongside local Iranian vocabulary and northwestern Prakrit forms.
That linguistic mixture tells its own story.
Buddhist philosophy arrived carrying Sanskrit terminology.
Local scholars translated and interpreted it.
Khotanese Buddhist literature emerged from that encounter.
The result was neither entirely Indian nor entirely Iranian. It belonged to the cosmopolitan world of the Silk Roads.
The Book of Zambasta
One of the greatest surviving monuments of this intellectual world is the Book of Zambasta.
Written in Khotanese, it is considered one of the most important indigenous Buddhist texts associated with Khotan. The International Dunhuang Programme describes it as a poetic exposition of Buddhist teachings based substantially upon Indian sources while remaining an original Khotanese composition. Parts of the work may date to the fifth or sixth centuries, with later portions extending into the seventh century.
Its existence demonstrates something important.
Buddhism had travelled far enough from India to produce a sophisticated local intellectual tradition in another language.
Ideas had not merely passed through Khotan.
They had taken root there.
Khotanese scholars interpreted Buddhist philosophy through their own language and cultural experience. Local monasteries became centres from which Buddhist knowledge could continue travelling eastwards.
This helps explain why Khotan became so important in the transmission of Buddhism towards China.
The Travellers Who Came Through Gosthana
The Silk Roads were not roads in the modern sense. They were networks.
Merchants carried information from one oasis to another. Monks followed established routes because monasteries provided accommodation and intellectual companionship. Pilgrims sought manuscripts and teachers.
Khotan occupied a particularly favourable position within this system.
Travellers approaching from China could stop there before continuing towards the west or south. Those coming from the Indian Buddhist world could encounter monasteries that already understood many of the philosophical traditions they carried.
Chinese Buddhist history preserves the names of Khotanese missionaries who translated texts in China.
Academic work on the Book of Zambasta notes figures such as Devaprajña, Śikṣānanda and Śīladharma among Khotanese Buddhist translators represented in the Chinese Buddhist canon. It also records Chinese monks travelling to Khotan specifically for Buddhist study.
The direction of influence was therefore not one-way.
India transmitted Buddhist traditions to Khotan.
Khotan helped transmit them farther east.
China sent monks towards Khotan and India.
Manuscripts and translations circulated in several directions.
Gosthana stood in the middle of this movement.
Archaeology Beneath the Sand
The desert has preserved remarkable evidence of Khotan’s cosmopolitan culture.
Ruined settlements such as Dandan-Uiliq have yielded manuscripts, paintings and Buddhist objects. The International Dunhuang Programme records that the site lies between the Khotan and Keriya rivers along the southern Silk Road and was excavated by the explorer Aurel Stein at the beginning of the twentieth century.
One painted wooden panel from Dandan-Uiliq, dated to around the sixth century, dramatically demonstrates the cultural exchange taking place there.
The panel contains Buddhist figures, while other figures have been interpreted as deities connected with Indian or Iranian religious traditions. The International Dunhuang Programme presents the object specifically as evidence of cultural interaction along the Silk Roads.
Such discoveries make it difficult to describe Khotan using a single civilisational label.
It was Buddhist.
It was Iranian-speaking.
It absorbed Indian religious and literary traditions.
It interacted with China and Tibet.
It belonged to Central Asia.
All of these statements can be true simultaneously.
That complexity is precisely what makes Gosthana important.
From Gosthana to Khotan
Place names rarely change in a neat straight line.
A name may appear differently when written in Sanskrit, Khotanese, Tibetan, Chinese, Persian or Turkic. Foreign travellers often recorded unfamiliar pronunciations according to the sounds available in their own languages.
Over centuries, one geographical place can therefore leave behind several textual identities.
Gostana-deśa belongs to the Buddhist Sanskrit tradition associated with Khotan. Bailey’s explicit description of ancient Khotan as “Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit” gives the identification a firm scholarly footing.
Other historical forms also appear in different traditions.
Rather than searching for a single eternally correct name, historical geography asks what each form tells us about the people using it.
Gosthana tells us something particularly significant.
It places Khotan within the Sanskrit and Buddhist geographical vocabulary of the ancient world.
A Kingdom Between India and China
The greatest significance of Gosthana may therefore lie in its position between larger civilisational worlds.
Khotan was never simply an extension of India.
Nor was it merely an outpost of China.
Its geography made it a mediator.
Indian Buddhist concepts entered the oasis.
Khotanese scholars translated and interpreted them.
Monks and texts carried those traditions towards China.
Later Tibetan political and religious influence also became important.
The International Dunhuang Programme notes that Khotan came under Chinese and subsequently Tibetan authority between the seventh and ninth centuries and remained predominantly Buddhist until its conquest by the Kara-Khanids around the end of the tenth century.
Political authority changed.
The cultural memory accumulated.
Gosthana survived in Buddhist Sanskrit.
Khotan survived in other traditions.
Hetian appears on the modern map.
Each name represents another historical layer.
Why Gosthana Matters Today
Recovering the name Gosthana does not require replacing Khotan or Hetian on contemporary maps.
Its importance is historical.
The name reminds us that Sanskrit geographical vocabulary once extended into the Tarim Basin.
The manuscripts remind us that Sanskrit Buddhist texts circulated there.
The Khotanese language reminds us that Indian ideas were received by a distinctly Central Asian society rather than simply transplanted unchanged.
Faxian and Xuanzang remind us that monks physically travelled across these enormous distances.
And archaeological sites such as Dandan-Uiliq demonstrate that the interactions described in texts were reflected in material culture.
This is why Gosthana provides one of the clearest examples of the argument Bharat Nanda develops in Beyond the Himalayas: Rediscovering India’s Forgotten Geography: modern political maps can conceal older networks of intellectual and cultural exchange that once crossed the mountains with remarkable regularity.
Look at today’s map and Hotan seems distant from India.
Look at manuscripts, monasteries, languages and caravan routes, and the distance begins to shrink.
Gosthana belonged to a world in which the Karakoram could be crossed, Sanskrit manuscripts could reach desert oases, Chinese monks could travel towards India, and an Iranian-speaking Central Asian kingdom could become one of the great centres of Mahayana Buddhism.
The modern map remembers Khotan.
Buddhist Sanskrit remembers Gosthana.
Between those two names lies the story of a civilisation built not behind borders, but along roads.
That is forgotten geography.
Pooja Bhatia is a media analyst and law graduate with an interest in history and geopolitics.
