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