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