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INTRODUCTION

Text, Image, and the Book

Therefore then, Ānanda, aspirants to awakening [i.e., followers of the Mahāyāna], aspirants to what is great who want to obtain the knowledge of an omniscient [i.e., a Buddha] must practice in this Perfection of Wisdom. This Perfection of Wisdom must be heard, taken up, preserved, recited [or read], mastered, taught [or displayed], exhibited, declared, repeated, copied, and after it has been well written in a great book (mahāpustaka) with very clear letters through the sustaining power of the Tathāgata [i.e., the Buddha] it must be honored, treated as Guru, highly esteemed, worshipped, adored, venerated with flowers, incense, perfumes, garlands, unguents, aromatic powders, clothes, music, covers, umbrellas, flags, bells, banners, and garlands of lamps all around with many forms of worship. This, Ānanda, is our direct instruction.¹

—Buddha’s instruction to Ānanda, Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtra, chapter 32

This book is an art historical and material cultural study of the Buddhist book cult in South Asia, whose adherents consider a book not only a text but also a sacred object of worship. The core materials examined in this study are illustrated Buddhist manuscripts prepared during the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries in the ancient regions of Magadha, Aṅga, Varendra (Gauḍa), Vaṅga, and Samataṭa (present-day Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh; see map 3–1). During this period of late Indian Buddhism, books containing important Mahāyāna sūtras, especially the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtra, were produced in abundance, some with beautiful paintings. The cult of the book (Sanskrit, pustaka), the core idea for which dates to the inception of Mahāyāna Buddhism during the early centuries of our Common Era, witnessed its heyday during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Tantric or Esoteric strands of Buddhism were in full bloom in the region. At the heart of this age-old cultic practice, which still continues today in Nepal, lies the book, a physical object that we can touch, carry, open and close, read, use, and even worship.² Worship of a book is not unique to the Buddhist tradition. Other world religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the so-called religions of the book, put much emphasis on their respective scriptures—the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur’an—as sacred objects. In Sikhism, another Indic religion, the book, the Guru-Granth, is the central focus of worship and the ultimate teacher. In Jainism, too, the books are treated as sacred and ritually worshipped in jñānapūjā. What may be unique to the Buddhist tradition is that in the long history of the Buddhist book cult in South Asia, an individual, physical book has survived in worship for over eight hundred years (fig. 0–1). This study investigates the ways in which Buddhist books were constructed and maintained as sacred objects in medieval South Asia and locates them in their historical context. In particular, I consider the mutually reinforcing roles of text, image, and book as the major impetus behind the longevity of the book cult in South Asia. The book’s objecthood, that is to say, its nature as a three-dimensional object that can be animated by various means, is one of the primary concerns of this study.

That one can animate a book is not just a rhetorical proposal. A book’s inherent function is to be read, and the act of reading requires both the physical handling of a book and the turning of its pages by the reader. The simple act of going from one page to the next involves sound and motion. In a ritual context, for example in recitation, the accompanying sound can amplify the motions involved in the use of the book. When a book is not bound as a codex (the format used for modern books with the pages more or less permanently bound together) but is made in pothi format (which allows for separation of the individual leaves), the possibility for movement increases considerably. Moreover, the spatial limits of a book in pothi format are rather fluid. A book in traditional pothi format, like those from ancient and medieval India, was made from birch bark or palm leaves cut to a uniform shape and size, often in long rectangular folios. Once the scribing and illustrating were completed, the folios were bound with a cord or metal sticks through one or two holes in each folio and often enclosed between two wooden end boards. While a book in codex format is confined to the physical limits set by its binding, a book in pothi format enjoys a certain fluidity and flexibility in its physical dimensions, allowing for a greater range of uses (fig. 0–2), just as a sari is a loose garment that fits almost any body type. Using a book of this type involves a lot of active motions. As a user opens a palm-leaf manuscript of the Perfection of Wisdom sūtra, unfolding its cloth wrapper and untying the cord or pulling the metal rods out of their holes, she can pick up and put the wooden end board to the side and lift the first folio from the stack of two to three hundred folios. Flipping it horizontally, she reveals the text that runs from left to right on the two open pages—the verso of the first folio and the recto of the second folio—as well as any illustrated panels if the manuscript was commissioned with paintings. This action is repeated with subsequent folios, and if the user has been careful about putting the folios down neatly, she will have two stacks of equal height in front of her when the middle of the text has been reached. But a user can also divide the text into sections and put them into separate stacks, or remove a single folio for special study. The fluidity in the structure thus means that it is easy to deconstruct and reconstruct a book. This is demonstrated in a thirteenth-century painting from a Kalpasūtra manuscript in which a Jain monk, instructing a princely figure, holds a folio in his right hand while the rest of the book remains on a book stand (fig. 0–3).³

FIGURE 0-1A 13th-century manuscript of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra taken out for ritual worship, Prajñāpāramitā pūjā, Kwā Bāhā (Golden Temple), Patan, Nepal. June 30, 2004.

FIGURE 0-2A 12th-century illustrated manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā sūtra (AsP) laid out during research, National Archive, Kathmandu, Acc. No. 5.196. July 5, 2004.

FIGURE 0-3Jain monk instructing a princely figure with a book, a folio from a Kalpasūtra Ms, ca. 1300. Edwin Binney 3rd Collection. The San Diego Museum of Art, 1990.179.

A BOOK THAT DOES WONDERS

A book is a semiotically interesting object, as it foregrounds “the oxymoron of the sign.”⁴ A book is simultaneously content (text) and form (object) and thus embodies the classic tension between idea and material. When we talk about a book, we are often concerned with the book as idea, not as material. In this age of digital texts and electronic books, a book’s materiality may soon become an obsolete concern for many of us, and it may seem that the book as idea is ultimately prevailing over its materiality. But the invention of digital reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPad also suggests that a book’s material aspect will not disappear easily. What all the digital readers have in common with a traditional book is the fundamental function of the book as a vessel or container of content (i.e., text). Like traditional books, they are compact and portable, yet they can contain hundreds of texts or e-books at once. Using digital books may seem to diminish the kinds of physical interactions hitherto typical of book use, but the introduction of a touch-sensitive product like the iPad ensures that our interaction with a book remains as tactile and “real” as possible.

The concept of a book as an application, or app, designed for an electronic device in fact introduces the possibility of truly interactive books, as seen in the “Alice in Wonderland” app, a virtual storybook that translates physical inputs by the user into visual responses:

Tilt your iPad to make Alice grow big as a house, or shrink to just six inches tall. . . . Throw darts at the Queen of Hearts—they realistically bounce off her. Witness the Cheshire Cat disappear, and help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe. . . . Watch as full screen physics modeling brings illustrations to life.⁵

Here a “book” becomes a magical, wonder-working device. Although not as interactive as a virtual storybook of Alice in Wonderland, books that are perhaps just as magical and wondrous are mentioned in an eighteenth-century Tibetan account of the manuscripts made at Nālandā, a famous Buddhist monastery in Bihar (eastern India):

In Ratnōdadhi, which was nine-storied, there were the sacred scripts called Prajñāpāramita-sūtra, and Tantric works such as Guhyasamāja, etc. After the Turushka raiders had made incursions in Nālandā, the temples and Chaityas there were repaired by a sage named Mudita Bhadra. Soon after this, Kukuṭasiddha, minister of the king of Magadha, erected a temple at Nālandā, and while a religious sermon was being delivered there, two very indigent Tīrthika mendicants appeared. Some naughty young novice-monks in disdain threw washing-water on them. This made them very angry. After propitiating the sun god for twelve years, they performed a yajña, fire-sacrifice, and threw living embers and ashes from the sacrificial pit into Buddhist temples, etc. This produced a great conflagration which consumed Ratnōdadhi. When all of them were ablaze, streams of water gushed forth [i.e., miraculously] from the Prajñapāramitā [manuscript of the great Mahāyānist sūtra] and the Guhyasamāja [manuscript of a Tantric work] from the ninth storey of the Ratnōdadhi temple and many pothis [manuscripts] were saved.⁶

This fascinating account of a grand library building called Ratnōdadhi (lit. “ocean of jewels”) at Nālandā shows how books of certain Buddhist scriptures were considered so powerful and miraculous that they could spurt water to save other books from being consumed by fire. These manuscripts did not need any human input. They were like automated water sprinklers gushing water out to extinguish fire and thus saving the contents of the library. The historical origin of this account is unknown, but the Buddhist book cult in South Asia was indeed based on the idea of the book as an object possessing sacred power. The illustrated manuscripts examined in this study testify to the sacred and magical potential of the book because in the medieval South Asian Buddhist context, illustrating a manuscript charged it with divine power and made it a suitable tool for the spiritual transformation of medieval Buddhist practitioners.

While the earliest mode of illustrating manuscripts in eastern Indian Buddhist monasteries was to construct a book like a stūpa, the most ancient symbol of the Buddha, some manuscript makers took a more creative approach and designed a book as a three-dimensional maṇḍala (lit. “circle”; a sacred diagram often used for meditation). In the latter, the makers took full advantage of the three-dimensionality of the book as object and of the movement inherent in a book’s function by lining up deities in a hierarchical and systematic order to be revealed as a user went through the leaves of the book. If such a book was used in a ritual practice in which a practitioner would recite the text, flip the folios, and visualize the images in three-dimensional form in his mind, the experience may have been similar to that invoked by the three-dimensional interactive book installation Without a Special Object of Worship, realized in 1994 by artist Jacquelyn Martino.⁷ Thus, I use the metaphor of moving pictures as a fitting analogy throughout my analysis of the iconographic programs to emphasize this aspect of performance in handling a book and the resulting animation of the text and the images. Although it is anachronistic, I also employ the analogy of Internet and hypertext, using terms like hyperlink to emphasize the fluidity of structure and the flexibility of space in a Buddhist manuscript.⁸ By doing so, I aim to position Buddhist book design in medieval South Asia as comparable to technological innovations of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. In an object that is often no bigger than 22 inches by 2 inches by 3 inches, the medieval book makers managed to contain the Buddha’s teaching written in beautiful letters and the Buddha’s physical presence in the visual depictions of moments from his life. In addition, they often conveyed an array of divinities forming a maṇḍala, and sometimes even the entire universe of Buddhist sacred sites known to them.

The Buddhist book cult is not just about the materiality of a book. A book in worship, a narrow, rectangular object frequently depicted on a pedestal in sculptures and paintings, does not seem to have any functional value as a text. However, the illustrated manuscripts made in the context of the Buddhist book cult are not pure objects, at least not in the sense of an object that “abandons the realm of use value and enters an ornamental realm of exchange value.”⁹ The book’s cultic value is very much rooted in its textual content. A manuscript of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra is a sacred object precisely because it is the text of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra spoken by the Buddha. While I put the visual material at the core of our reading experience as I analyze the iconographic program of each book, the text is not just a beautiful back-drop, a sea of letters, but the matter that substantiates the sacred structure that is being read. Moreover, as an object used in ritual worship and practice, the Buddhist book is never outside the realm of use value. Although it is often assumed that illustrated manuscripts were crafted to earn religious merit (puṇya) and were stored away and never meant to be read, traces of physical use on the body of each manuscript—copyediting marks, fingerprints, drops of sandalwood paste and vermillion powder on both the folios and the book covers—suggest otherwise. The post colophons on a twelfth-century manuscript of the Pañcarakṣā (Five Protectresses) sūtra, for instance, demonstrate that this book was taken out again and again by generations of users for the ritual worship of the goddesses residing within its leaves.¹⁰ The invocation of these goddesses often involved reading the text of the sūtra. The application of vermillion powder dots on the foreheads of the five goddesses in another twelfth-century Pañcarakṣā manuscript suggests that the images of the goddesses were considered to embody the divine presence. In other words, an illustrated Buddhist manuscript is more than a material container for text and images in the Buddhist book cult in South Asia: it is a sacred space, a temple in microcosm, not only imbued with divine presence but also layered with the memories of many generations of users.

But in one notable instance, the materiality of the book has prevailed. Rahula Sāṅkṛtyāyana, an Indian pandit who visited Tibetan monasteries in the early 1930s in search of Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts, reports a story about a Tibetan Buddhist monk who dispensed chopped fragments of palm-leaf manuscripts to the richest devotees as medicines of miraculous healing power.¹¹ Like the legendary water-spouting books of the Nālandā monastery, here the book as material object performs wonders: even a drop of water in which a book’s smallest material fragment had been dipped could heal the sick. Sānkrtyāyana’s report does not tell us which Buddhist text the healing fragments came from, but from his appalled reaction to the “atrocious” treatment of the manuscripts, we may speculate that some of them were old Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts.¹² A skeptic may point out that this was just a trick played on ignorant devotees by an enterprising monk, but the story makes clear that there is something special about the Buddhist book as object that a blank sheet of paper cannot replicate. That efficacy stems from the book’s inherent textuality.

TEXT AND IMAGE

Among the thousands of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts prepared in medieval South Asia, the manuscripts of three Mahāyāna sūtras, the Karaṇḍavyūha, the Pañcarakṣā, and the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, were often chosen for illustration.¹³ The Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, mentioned in the Tibetan account of Nālandā’s library, seems to have been the central focus of the book cult in medieval Indian Buddhist context. Among the thirty-five dated illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from Bihar and Bengal examined in this study, twenty-five are of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, and all of these but one are the version known as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-Prajñāpāramitā sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā sūtra in Eight Thousand Verses, henceforth AsP). According to the AsP, a person gains more merit by copying, reciting, illuminating, honoring, and worshipping the Prajñāpāramitā text than by making thousands of stūpas filling the entire Jambudvīpa (lit. “land of the Jambu tree”; the Indian subcontinent).¹⁴ It is curious that the AsP was the most favored text for making illustrated manuscripts during the period when Tantric Buddhism was in full bloom, for the core of this sūtra dates all the way back to the first century of the Common Era. If the later Tibetan accounts of Indian Buddhism are a reliable indication of the status of texts in eleventh- and twelfth-century Buddhist India, then we can conclude that the Prajñāpāramitā and the Tantra, such as the Guhyasāmaja tantra and even the Kālacakra tantra, were held in equal esteem. The AsP text provides the fundamental basis for the doctrinal aspect of the Great Tradition of Mahāyāna, on which the philosophical foundation of what is categorized as Vajrayāna or Tantric Buddhism lies.¹⁵ There exist at least six Chinese translations of the AsP of varying dates, evidence that the text did not remain static over time. It is within the context of developing Tantric Buddhist schools in India that we find the renewed interest in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra and the emergence of the medieval Buddhist cult of the book in which a book is not just a symbol of knowledge and authority but also a central object of worship, often serving as a great vehicle for the achievement of Tantric ritual means. The existence of carefully designed book-mandalas from the twelfth century in which powerful Tantric Buddhist deities are aligned in a systematic manner also suggests that the paintings could transform the Mahāyāna text into the cultic object of the Vajrayāna schools, in essence realizing new interpretations of older doctrinal values through visual means.

The popularity of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra for the production of illustrated manuscripts is also an unexpected phenomenon when we think about the images in relation to the text. The Prajñāpāramitā sūtra would seem to be a very difficult text to render visually, because of its highly metaphysical content, summarized in the famous axiom “Form is empty, emptiness is form.” Indeed, the images in the painted panels of the Prajñāpāramitā manuscripts seem to have little connection to the text. For example, among the most common subjects depicted in the AsP manuscripts are scenes from the life of the Buddha, even though the story of the Buddha’s life is not recounted in the AsP text. More puzzling perhaps are images that appear in the reverse direction to the text. This seeming lack of coordination between text and images underlies the prevailing interpretation that the images were included only for the sake of increasing religious merit and that they have nothing to do with the text. But when considered within the context of the book cult, the images do much more than increase a donor’s religious merit. The images make the book more wondrous and powerful and increase the book’s cultic value. It is through the systematic placement of certain types of images that a book becomes a suitable object of worship for the Buddhists in medieval South Asia. The images define and determine the book’s cultic efficacy, whether as a relic-container comparable to a stūpa, as a three-dimensional map of the Buddhist sacred sites, as a physical symbol of the text, or as a book-maṇḍala. In a more rhetorical sense, we may even suggest that the lack of relationship between the text and the images may be read as a clever visual pun on the text’s paradoxical main thesis, which on the one hand argues for the emptiness (śūnyatā) of the phenomenal world while on the other hand arguing for the worship of a material object, that is, the text.¹⁶ It is certainly clear that the book’s dual, paradoxical strategy for its own survival and proliferation has been successful, since some books still remain in worship and many are well cared for, while others are treasured for their artistic value.

GENEALOGY OF ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPTS

The illustrated manuscripts analyzed in this study are dispersed in libraries and museums in Britain, Ireland, India, Nepal, and the United States. Over the course of ten years of research, I have examined roughly over 220 Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts from eastern India and Nepal, some of which survive only in fragments in the form of illustrated folios scattered around different collections. Only about half of these manuscripts belong to the medieval period of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries concerned here. I do not claim to cover all the surviving illustrated Buddhist manuscripts prepared in medieval South Asia in this study, partly because the number of such manuscripts will be close to a hundred examples or more. Most manuscripts analyzed in detail in this study are those that I could physically examine in person, for a methodological reason. I consider each manuscript like an archaeological site, in which one finds layers of traces of use and whose structure guides our interpretations.¹⁷ At the outset, I acknowledge that my own narrative is a historical construct of the early twenty-first century. It is my contention that our present attempts to understand the past can in certain ways be helped more by historical imagination than by historical truism. If every one of the hundreds of manuscripts written and illustrated at the Nālandā monastery during the two hundred years concerned in this study survived and were available for study, the story told might be different. I have worked with only seven manuscripts from Nālandā, one of which has only four surviving illustrated folios. Yet each of these seven manuscripts has much to tell about the people who made and used them. Some have valuable colophons that identify the makers, patrons, or users; others contain physical traces left by previous users. Some of these traces are visible only on microfilm or digital copies of the manuscripts; some can be found only when a researcher handles a manuscript as it was used many times in the past.¹⁸ When we start weaving these pieces of evidence together, we can discern patterns of production and use that illuminate actual human experience with these illustrated manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult, histories that may not be recorded in any surviving textual sources.

While my interest in the materiality of the book as object frames this study, this is ultimately an art historical study of illustrated manuscripts. The majority of the paintings I analyze are miniature in size, most measuring 2 inches by 2 inches, and high-resolution digital images were extremely helpful in the study of certain details. But a researcher cannot hope to uncover the full story of a manuscript through digital and print reproductions alone. The object under study, a book, has a structure that can be two-dimensional and three-dimensional simultaneously, and in fact requires a four-dimensional approach, encompassing the elements of time and movement, to fully appreciate its structure and value. As suggested above, the paintings in a Buddhist manuscript are like paintings and sculptures in a temple, and they survive within a constructed environment. Viewed in this context, the paintings can elucidate the mechanisms and goals of Indian Buddhist sacred structures, many of which are in ruins, and the role of images in medieval Indian Buddhist practices. They not only form a bridge between the famed murals of Ajanta and later Indian manuscript paintings, but when understood in the context of the book, Buddhist manuscript paintings also provide the missing link for understanding Buddhist thangka paintings as well as other artistic productions from the period of phyi-dar (the second or later transmission of Buddhist teaching to Tibet) in central Tibet and beyond. The iconographic programs in these manuscripts further help us understand some of the idiosyncratic iconographic choices made in early Tibetan paintings. Based on a close investigation of the formal relationships between the images and of their relation to the text and the book, I argue that practical concerns—the availability of space, the compositional balance, the context of the text, and the needs and means of the donors—govern the iconographic choices and overall programming as much as, if not more than, ritual manuals such as the Sādhanamālā and the Niṣpannayogāvali.

While I emphasize the connection with Tibet in understanding the Buddhist book cult in medieval India, for example the impact of phyidar in sparking the interest in illustrated Buddhist manuscripts, my research mainly follows the developmental trajectory of the Buddhist book cult in Nepal. There are two reasons for this, one related to the accessibility of the manuscripts and the other related to the sociohistorical characteristics of the Buddhist book cult in medieval India.

Many historical factors have conditioned the accessibility and availability of the illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from South Asia, including the colonial practice of collecting Buddhist knowledge and major political events in the region. Persian and Tibetan sources report the violent destruction of monastic centers by the Islamic army of Muhammad Bakhtiyar circa 1193 CE, and despite the wishful eighteenth-century accounts of libraries magically saved by water-gushing manuscripts, countless Buddhist manuscripts were lost as a result.¹⁹ But while not literally emitting water, the Prajñāpāramitā manuscripts, especially those containing illustrations, did in fact contribute to the survival of Buddhist manuscripts from Indian monasteries. As portable objects, the illustrated manuscripts could easily be taken on long journeys. Thanks to the monks and lay pilgrims who transported them from eastern India to the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal and the Ü and Tsang regions of central Tibet, Buddhist manuscripts prepared in medieval India survived for another thousand years. The demands for illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from these Himalayan visitors seem to have contributed to the increased production of illustrated manuscripts in India. A beautifully made copy of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra was sure to become a treasured and sacred object in the community that received it. Many manuscripts were steadily transported in this manner during the two centuries of their production. Some were whisked from their homes during the final days of the monasteries, when news of the approaching Islamic army forced devotees to take flight. It is not difficult to imagine a Buddhist monk or lay caretaker grabbing a cherished copy of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra from the Khasarpana temple in Nālandā before seeking refuge for himself and the book.²⁰

The manuscripts that survived in Nepal were the first to be introduced to the West. Brian Houghton Hodgson, the British Resident at the Kingdom of Nepal, inaugurated the field of Sanskrit Buddhist manuscript study with his “Sketch of Buddhism, derived from the Bauddha Scriptures of Nipal,” published in August 1828 and by presenting the manuscripts he had procured to the Royal Asiatic Society of London in 1835 and 1836.²¹ Early scholars like Cecil Bendall and Daniel Wright noted the existence of pictures in these manuscripts. In addition to the “brilliantly coloured” paintings, Wright also writes about marks of worship on the wooden covers: “they are covered with small hard cakes or lumps of rice, sandalwood dust, and red and yellow pigments, used by the natives in ‘doing pūjā.’”²² Yet the paintings in these manuscripts and the ritual use of the book were not taken seriously at this early stage in the study of Buddhist manuscripts.

The Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts surviving in the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet came to the notice of the West almost a century after the introduction of the Sanskrit manuscripts from Nepal. This was due in part to Tibet’s remote location and to its role as a buffer zone between colonial powers and Qing China. Indian pandits of the early twentieth century, like Sāṅkṛtyāyana mentioned above, report the existence of many Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries, and Giuseppe Tucci, who visited Tibetan monasteries in 1939, returned there in 1946 to photograph many of these manuscripts.²³ From Sāṅkṛtyāyana’s report and accompanying photographs we know that a number of illustrated Sanskrit manuscripts of Nepalese and Indian origin were in the collections of Tibetan monasteries. But following the Chinese Cultural Revolution, individual folios with illustrations started to leave Tibet, prompted in part by the demand from Western art markets.²⁴ Because the manuscripts’ format allows for easy deconstruction, illustrated folios could be removed without causing much scandalous physical damage to the book. It is within this historical and political context that many individual folios from Buddhist manuscripts came to the West as art objects.²⁵ A few illustrated manuscripts from India now in the Tibet Autonomous Region have been published and have traveled to the West, and these precious examples are included in my analysis.

The sociohistorical characteristics of the Buddhist book cult as practiced in medieval India and the similarity in the patterns of illustrated manuscript production in India and Nepal provide more important reasons for framing my historical narrative around the later Nepalese practice of the Buddhist book cult. First of all, the patronage of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts in the twelfth century affirms David Gellner’s observation that Newar Buddhism as it is practiced today may be “a direct lineal descendent of the Mahayana and Vajrayāna Buddhism in north India.”²⁶ While many illustrated Buddhist manuscripts were prepared in Buddhist monasteries in India, the most prominent of which was Nālandā, patronage patterns suggest that the Buddhist book cult in medieval India was largely a lay-based cult. As a recent study by Gregory Schopen suggests, the Mahāyāna cult of the book seems to have begun as a lay-oriented practice,²⁷ and when illustrated manuscripts were introduced to the “market” of religious piety towards the end of the first millennium, the laity, both male and female, remained the strongest proponents of this practice, while monastic interest in these manuscripts was limited to visitors from the outside. During the twelfth century, an important lay donor group that I designate as “lay Esoteric Buddhist practitioners” emerged, and their manuscripts were commissioned with complex Esoteric Buddhist iconography. In this group, we find married householder Buddhist practitioners, some of whom may have been lay Buddhist masters (gṛhasthācārya)²⁸ comparable to the married householder monks/Tantric priests (vajrācāryas) of Newar Buddhism.²⁹ In addition to the sociohistorical connection, the business of illustrating manuscripts took off in Nepal almost contemporaneously with the beginning of this practice in India. One unique iconographic scheme for illustrating manuscripts was developed in eleventh-century Nepal and later emulated in India. From the beginning of the twelfth century, the iconographic scheme for illustrating Buddhist manuscripts in Nepal becomes more or less standardized and simplified to render a book as a physical and visual symbol of the text, a mode also employed in some Indian manuscripts. I have included a few Nepalese manuscripts in my discussion of the iconographic programs, to explain the general pattern of iconographic innovations in the design of Buddhist manuscripts in medieval South Asia, but my historical analysis of patronage and production patterns is focused mainly on dated illustrated manuscripts from Bihar and Bengal.³⁰

OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1, The Book, explores the core issue of this study, the materiality of a book in the Buddhist book cult in relation to the introduction of illustrated manuscripts in medieval South Asia. Chapter 1, Buddhist Books and Their Cultic Use, examines how Buddhist books were ritually used historically and locates the Mahāyāna Buddhist book cult in practice in medieval India. I propose that there was a renewed interest in the Prajñāpāramitā from the mid-ninth century onwards in the context of the developing Tantric Buddhist thought, and it is only after the tenth century or later that the cult of Prajñāpāramitā, both as book and as goddess, became popular and more elaborate. This chapter also explores the relationship between the Buddhist book cult and the development of the cult of the dharma relics, and locates the function and significance of the illustrated manuscripts in the larger context of the production of Buddhist sacred objects. The use of the dharma verse in the production of Buddhist manuscripts ultimately affirms the book’s status as a physical container of the Buddha’s true relic, that is, his teaching, and ultimately contributes to a book’s qualification as a Buddhist cultic object par excellence.

Chapter 2, Innovations of the Medieval Buddhist Book Cult, examines the historical context behind the introduction of illustrated manuscripts at the turn of the first millennium and identifies the general developments in book design from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. I suggest that the increased interest from the Himalayan visitors (i.e., from Nepal and Tibet) provided a likely impetus for the production of illustrated manuscripts in Indian monastic centers. While the idea behind illustrating text folios may have originated elsewhere, possibly in Central Asia or even further east, the format of illustrating a palm-leaf folio was firmly rooted in the indigenous tradition of constructing sacred structures. I also discuss the iconographic programs of illustrated manuscripts as strategies developed to make a book a more effective and powerful cultic object. I divide the manuscripts into four groups: Group A manuscripts are designed like a stūpa, while Group B manuscripts are designed as a container of holy sites, like a three-dimensional pilgrim’s map. Group C manuscripts are true to their texts, and the images directly refer to the text. Group D manuscripts are designed as a three-dimensional maṇḍala. In this regard, I emphasize the three-dimensional book’s potential for animation and compare it to other Buddhist sacred objects, such as paṭa paintings and lotus maṇḍalas, which are designed to invoke the sense of movement and transformation.

Part 2, Text and Image, examines the iconographic programs of illustrated manuscripts according to the parameters identified in chapter 2. One of the major concerns in part 2 is to understand the relationship between the text, the image, and the book. To this end, I have prepared diagrams of iconographic programs to help the reader understand the iconographic structures under discussion, and they accompany the text whenever possible in chapters 3 through 5.³¹ Chapter 3, Representing the Perfection of Wisdom, Embodying the Holy Sites, examines the first two groups of manuscripts. I explain how the scenes from the life of the Buddha, often seen to be unrelated to the text of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, illustrate the main message of the text when understood together as a group. When taken together with the Prajñāpāramitā deities, the Buddha’s life scenes in these manuscripts clearly articulate the intertwined relationship between the Prajñāpāramitā and enlightenment. If we consider the manner in which the illustrated panels are systematically arranged in a book, we can see how a book was designed just like a stūpa. This chapter also examines the group of manuscripts in which we see an array of illustrated panels depicting famous images and holy sites. I suggest that the seemingly random placement of many holy sites within a single manuscript can invoke a mental journey or an imagined pilgrimage to these sacred sites, thus allowing a Buddhist practitioner to roam freely beyond the spatial boundaries and physical limits of his surroundings. I contend that the rationale behind this rather haphazard yet ambitious iconographic programming is replication, which is a cultic strategy of the Buddhist book cult. We find a system of interpretive replication at play in the Indian copies of the Nepalese “prime object.”

Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the iconographic programs of illustrated manuscripts in relation to Esoteric Buddhist practices. In chapter 4, The Visual World of Buddhist Book Illustrations, I discuss possible ritual uses of the illustrated manuscripts. Considering the iconographic programs in Group C manuscripts, I argue that these books could have been used for meditation, much like paṭa paintings discussed in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa, with the images serving as a mnemonic device. I also analyze how a Buddhist book was constructed as a three-dimensional maṇḍala, transforming a manuscript of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra into a powerful cultic object. Chapter 5, Esoteric Buddhism and the Illustrated Manuscripts, focuses on the manuscripts that employ Esoteric Buddhist iconography. This chapter explains the rationale behind the introduction of powerful Tantric Buddhist deities of the mahāyoga and yoginī tantras in the iconographic programs of the AsP manuscripts. I analyze the iconographic program of each manuscript in detail and suggest how each case reflects the new interpretations of the Prajñāpāramitā, both the goddess and the text, in the context of Esoteric Buddhism. I suggest that the upside-down placement of images with respect to the text was not accidental but rather a conscious design choice made to emphasize a book’s three-dimensional nature and the movement that is necessary in its use. It is my contention that the iconographic programs of the late-twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century AsP manuscripts were designed with the same level of creativity that we see in the technological innovations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Part 3, The People, concerns sociohistorical aspects of production of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts. In chapter 6, Social History of the Buddhist Book Cult, I examine the human agents behind the medieval Buddhist book cult—the donors, makers, and users of the illustrated manuscripts. I chart the general historical patterns for patronage and production based on a collective analysis of the colophons of thirty-six dated illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from India. The percentage of female donors is surprisingly high, indicating that the Buddhist book cult provided a channel for women’s participation in religious matters in medieval India. The involvement of monastic donors, with the exception of monks from Tibet and elsewhere, is unexpectedly low, indicating that the Buddhist book cult remained a lay-based cultic practice despite monastic production. My analysis also suggests that there is a clear esotericization of the Buddhist book cult during the twelfth century, which coincides with the increased participation by lay Esoteric Buddhist practitioners in commissioning illustrated manuscripts. From the evidence of the illustrated manuscript colophons, it seems that Esoteric Buddhism, or Vajrayāna, never became part of a self-proclaimed religious identity in India, and Mahāyāna remained an umbrella term for the majority of Buddhists who participated in devotional activities. In discussing the production pattern, I examine the scribal colophons and painted representations of donors and ritual masters in manuscripts. The production pattern suggests that the monastic centers managed to control the practice of the book cult, even though it was mainly a lay-based and lay-driven cult, by remaining the dominant suppliers of illustrated manuscripts for more than a century. A shift in the production pattern from monastic centers to nonmonastic, provincial sites occurred during the mid-twelfth century, a period that coincides with the esotericization of the iconographic programs. While the monastic productions remained conservative in their iconographic programs, nonmonastic productions employed highly complex Esoteric Buddhist iconography. The illustrated manuscripts prepared by non-monastic ritual specialists during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in fact demonstrate how lay Buddhists claimed and affirmed their Buddhist identity through participation in the Buddhist book cult, an age-old Mahāyāna practice, when Buddhist monastic institutions were falling apart. I suggest that the Buddhist book cult in practice, as seen through the analysis of the colophons and the iconographic programs, exemplifies how Mahāyāna Buddhism adapted to the changing religious and political conditions. I argue that many Esoteric Buddhist practices were designed to encourage lay participation in Buddhism by householders, not to drive them away.

The epilogue, Invoking a Goddess in a Book, ends the book with a brief analysis of the contemporary ritual of the Prajñāpāramitā pūjā performed in Kwā Bāhā (Golden Temple) in Patan, Nepal. The ritual and the restoration carried out today not only testify to the changing yet unchanging cultic value of the book as a sacred object with great adaptability but also provide a mirror to reflect on the voices and actions of the people long lost in the body of the book. With this ethnographic account of the ritual, the study comes full circle to the question of how and why the Buddhist book cult has remained in practice for nearly two millennia.