CONTENTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      On one sunny afternoon on Berkeley campus more than eleven years ago, I sat down with my advisor and mentor Joanna Williams on a bench outside the Kroeber Hall, asking a question about the lecture she just gave. In her erudite lecture, Joanna showed the class a number of images of Indian Buddhist manuscript paintings, many of which I saw for the first time, and mentioned that some images are placed in reverse direction to the text. This perplexing, paradoxical phenomenon of unrelated nature of the text and images in Buddhist manuscripts was enough to hook me to delve further into the world of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts. It is hard to believe that I spent more than ten years working on illustrated manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult, but it is equally hard to believe that the book is done.

      From this quotidian beginning, Joanna has been a great mentor and an enthusiastic supporter of my project. I thank her for her wisdom and warm support throughout my graduate years and beyond. I was fortunate to have another great mentor, Patricia Berger, and I thank Pat for her continuous encouragement and insights. I thank Alexander von Rospatt, also at Berkeley, who has provided much needed guidance and resources for this project in its initial stage. Perhaps due not to my own merit but to the merit of the project, I have met many scholars of great wisdom and erudition whose research and intellectual rigor have improved my understanding of the material at hand. I thank Gregory Schopen for always inspiring me to look and think beyond the obvious with wit and rigor. I also thank Rob Linrothe for his scholarship on Esoteric Buddhist iconography and for answering my endless questions and queries. I am grateful to Christian Luczanits, who has been extremely patient and generous with resources. My understanding of the Pāla manuscripts owes much to Janice Leoshko’s rigorous studies of the Pāla material. My initial introduction to the field of Indian Buddhist art owes much to Juhyung Rhi, who remains a great mentor. I am grateful for the generous help I got from Phyllis Granoff, Tamara Sears, and Andrew Quintman in solving various problems this book posed to me. Further away from home, Gerd Mevissen, Eva Allinger, and Jorrit Britschgi have been generous with their time and resources, and I thank them sincerely.

      Much