Ms B5: Kv, early 12th century, British Library, Or. 13940
The images in the manuscripts categorized under Group C collectively symbolize the text. The relationship between the text and the images in this group is most straightforward, as images refer directly to the text. The images serve as indexical signs of the text and provide a visual index or a site map for each book. Through the presence of these images, a book becomes an icon of the text that could help open up the text in one’s mind even when the book is closed. This scheme seems to have become popular from the beginning of the twelfth century, and Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscripts follow it most closely.39 This iconographic trend in its simplistic form subsequently became the most popular method of illustrating a Buddhist manuscript in Nepal. This group would comprise a large number of manuscripts if we include all the surviving eastern Indian and Nepalese manuscripts from the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. Thus I have limited the discussion to a few examples:
Ms C1: AsP, Rāmapāla’s 37th regnal year (ca. 1114 CE), Tibet Museum, Lhasa (fig. 4–2)
Ms C2: Pañcarakṣā, NS 255 (1135 CE), San Diego Museum of Art, Acc. No. 1990:156, formerly Edwin Binney 3rd Collection (web 4–1)
Ms C3: AsP, NS 268 (1148 CE), Asiatic Society, Kolkata, G.4203 (web 4–2)
Ms C4: AsP, Gopāla’s 15th year (ca. 1147 CE), British Library, Or. 6902 (fig. 4-1, 4–3)
Ms C5: Pañcarakṣā, Madanapāla’s 13th year (ca. 1156 CE), Rietberg Museum, Zurich (web 4–4)
Ms C6: Pañcarakṣā, Govindapāla’s 16th year (ca. 1191 CE), National Archive, Kathmandu (web 4–3)
In Group D, a book becomes a three-dimensional maṇḍala through the presence of images. The seed for this trend is already seen in Group A, and its earliest manifestation appears in a mid-eleventh-century Pañcarakṣā manuscript (Ms D1). This iconographic mode is most inventive of all. It marks the culmination of the Buddhist book cult in medieval eastern India. The idea of making a book into a three-dimensional maṇḍala was experimented with and articulated in the practice of the Buddhist book cult during the twelfth century. Interestingly, although these Indian manuscripts containing the world of Esoteric Buddhist divinities were transported to Nepal and Tibet and survived there until the nineteenth century, this scheme was never seriously picked up in Nepal:40
Ms D1: Pañcarakṣā, Nayapāla’s 14th year (ca. 1041 CE), Cambridge University Library, Add. 1648 (fig. 4–4, 4–5, 6–3, W-diagram 4–1)
Ms D2: AsP, Rāmapāla’s 15th year (ca. 1092 CE), Bodleian Library, Oxford, Sansk a.7 (fig. 4–6, 4–7, 4–8, 4–9)
Ms D3: AsP, Rāmapāla’s 36th year (ca. 1113 CE), Victoria and Albert Museum, IS4.1958-10.1958 (fig. 5–1, 5–2, web 5–1)
Ms D4: AsP, Gopāla’s 4th year (ca. 1136 CE), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, No. 20.589 (fig. 5–3, 5–4, web 5–2)
Ms D5: AsP, Gomīndrapāla’s 4th year (ca. 1179 CE?), Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) (fig. 5–5)
Ms D6: AsP, Govindapāla’s 4th year (ca. 1179 CE), Royal Asiatic Society, London, Hodgson Ms 1 (fig. 5–6)
Ms D7: AsP, Govindapāla’s 30th year or earlier (ca. 1205 CE; late 12th or early 13th century), British Library, Or. 1428241 (fig. 5–7, W-diagram 5-1)
Ms D8: AsP, Govindapāla’s 32nd year (ca. 1207 CE), Musée Guimet, Paris, MA 5161, formerly Fournier Collection (fig. 5–8, W-diagram 5–2)
Ms D9: AsP, Govindapāla’s 32nd year (ca. 1207 CE), Asiatic Society, Mumbai, BI-210 (fig. 5–9, web 5–4, 5–5, W-diagram 5–3)
Ms D10: AsP, Lakṣmaṇasena’s 47th year (ca. 1226 CE), Bharat Kala Bhavan, BHU (fig. 5–10, 5–11, 5–12, 5–13, web 5–6, 5–7, 5–8, 5–9, W-diagram 5–4)
One of the main characteristics of Group D manuscripts is the inclusion of Tantric Buddhist deities that belong to what Rob Linrothe identifies as “Phase Two Esoteric Buddhism” and “Phase Three Esoteric Buddhism.”42 The unrelated nature of the text–image relationship marked by the appearance of the highly charged forms of Phase Three Esoteric Buddhist deities, such as Hevajra, Cakrasamvara, and Kālacakra, in the manuscripts of the AsP led previous scholars to consider these images just as a protective measure. With some images placed upside down to the direction of the text, the text–image relationship in this group seems the most distant. This distant relationship, however, makes this group the most interesting. The Group C trend, that is, images functioning as indexical signs and ultimately serving as iconic symbols of the text, became the norm in the later Nepalese manuscript production. During the twelfth century, however, many experiments were conducted in manuscript production, as seen in the Group D manuscripts. There is a sense of freedom in experimental design of Group D manuscripts, which may reflect the social and cultural situation of Buddhists in twelfth-century eastern India because many of the Group D manuscripts were provincially made and their production was not controlled by monastic institutions.
These four groups are by no means exclusive categories. For example, a manuscript with Buddha’s life scenes that belongs to Group A could also belong to Group B in terms of embodying the pilgrimage sites. Group B and Group C share similarities in their iconographic structures. Many manuscripts in these two groups have images marking the beginning and the end of each chapter. The importance of the Buddha’s life scenes in illustrating the AsP manuscripts is common to all these four groups. Regardless of their iconographic characteristics, images in an illustrated Buddhist manuscript serve as a visual index of a manuscript.
PICTURES, MOVEMENTS, AND A CULTIC OBJECT
THE MAÑJUŚRĪMŪLAKALPA AND THE ILLUSTRATED BUDDHIST BOOKS
Another common trait in book design in medieval South Asia is the idea of constructing a maṇḍala, comparable to the construction of patas as elaborated in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa (Mmk). As scholars like Matthew Kapstein and Rob Linrothe suggest, the bearing of the Mmk as a ritual manual (kalpa) on the production of Buddhist art in eastern India and Tibet is clear.43 The goal of the following discussion, of course, is not to argue that the Buddhist book cult practitioners used the Mmk as their manual. The Mmk provides a useful analytical frame to understand the medieval practice of the Buddhist book cult because what is described in the Mmk reflects the general cultic attitude towards the construction and the use of sacred objects in medieval India.44 The illustrated manuscripts provide art historical support for Kapstein’s theoretical construction of the process of pata production in India when no pata from Pāla India survives to prove it.45 Although only Group D is identified as the manifestation of a thre,e-dimensional maṇḍala, the manuscripts in all four groups have a characteristic of a maṇḍala, as the illustrated panels are systematically placed to represent the various fields of power and to articulate the hierarchical relationship among them. For example, in the case of Group A manuscripts, at least four different visual fields of power, that is, the Buddha’s life scenes, the Prajñāpāramitā deities, the cultic deities, and the letters of the text, all come together in a book and create the collective field manifesting the spiritual power of the enlightenment (see W-diagram 2–1).
Even a manuscript with the most diverse spatial arrangement, like Ms B1 (Cambridge University Library, Add. 1643), in which famous images and sites from all over the Buddhist world are arranged in a maze-like fashion, can be understood as a linear maṇḍala that ultimately creates a vast space of Buddhist universe in one’s mind (see W-diagram 3–3).46 If we consider a book as an object with many movable parts, the folios, which could be animated under its normal use, that is, opening of a book and flipping the folios, we can understand a book’s cultic potential as an animatable object. If pata is an “animated cult image” in Glenn Wallis’s “interpretive translation,”