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