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.
PART ONE
THE BOOK
1
BUDDHIST BOOKS AND THEIR CULTIC USE
THE BOOK AND THE GODDESS
In today’s ritual worship of a Buddhist scripture performed in Kwā Bāhā, or the Golden Temple, in Patan, Nepal, a Vajrācārya priest invokes the goddess Prajñāpāramitā to come into a book (fig. 1–1). The contemporary ritual that takes place around a treasured thirteenth-century black-paper manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Verses) sūtra, henceforth AsP, may not date back to the inception of the Buddhist book cult in the early centuries of our Common Era.1 But it reveals an intriguing issue regarding the relationship between the goddess and the book. In this twentieth-century version of pustaka pūjā, or the ritual worship of the book, the book serves as a vessel for the goddess to come into, and it becomes an icon of the deity throughout the ritual. There is almost a promiscuous absence of the goddess Prajñāpāramitā, the personification of the famed Mahāyāna philosophical text of the same name. Of course, her presence is clearly palpable through the sound of the text recited loudly and through physical communications that occur between her and her devotees. It is her form that is absent in this ritual. As a personification of the perfected (pāramitā) wisdom (prajnā) that embodies the profound Mahāyāna concept of emptiness (śūnyatā), perhaps the absence of her visual manifestation itself represents her presence. But why is there a book in worship instead of an image of the goddess? How can a book replace a goddess when the possibility of “darśan (the divine grace through mutual gaze or seeing the divine),”2 the most quintessential aspect of devotional practices in Indic religions, practically disappears with this replacement? We will seek answers to these questions in subsequent chapters by exploring the history of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts in India. We will examine how a medieval Buddhist book was constructed as a sacred object and how its sacrality was intensified through various iconographic means and ritual interventions. Before entering the world of medieval Indian Buddhist manuscripts, understanding the historical process in which certain types of books emerged as the foremost sacred objects for Mahāyāna Buddhists will guide us to address this study’s central theme, the significance of a book as a material object. In this chapter, we will first examine how Buddhist books were used in ritual context historically and consider the nature of the Buddhist book cult in practice.
FIGURE 1-1Prajñāpāramitā pūjā, the main priest (Cakra Raj Bajracharya) invoking the goddess Prajñāpāramitā into the book, Kwā Bāhā (Golden Temple), Patan, Nepal. June 30, 2004.
RITUAL USE OF BUDDHIST BOOKS
As written and material records of the Buddha’s teachings, books were important doctrinal assets for the Indian Buddhist traditions, especially for Mahāyāna Buddhists. In addition to the passages in the sūtras and vinayas, we could glance at how some of the surviving manuscripts might have been used in cultic context in ancient and medieval India by examining the visual evidence that depicts books in ritual use. Scholastic use of manuscripts is easily attested from as early as the second to third century in a Gandharan relief where we see monks holding a manuscript in their hands and discussing the contents.3 It is in the Buddhist caves of Ellora excavated during the seventh century where we find some of the earliest surviving visual evidence for cultic use of a manuscript. Here we see a manuscript being used to invoke a goddess, paralleling the contemporary Nepalese practice mentioned above.
Upon entering the antechamber of Cave 6 at Ellora, we meet two impressive standing goddesses, Mahāmāyūrī and Bhṛkuṭī, flanking either end