FIGURE 1-2A monk with a book, detail of the Mahāmāyūrī panel, antechamber, Cave 6, Ellora, ca. early 7th century.

      The panel establishes an interesting semiotic relationship between the book and the goddess. The goddess may be a symbol of the book, but it can be vice versa. Both the book and the goddess are, in fact, signs of the text, the Mahāmāyūrī sūtra, one indexical and the other symbolic, if we are to employ Piercean terms.⁶ The Mahāmāyūrī sūtra is an apotropaic text in which the Buddha explains the power of Mahāmāyūrī against various disasters, including snake bites. Amoghavajra’s (705–774) Chinese translation of the Mahāmāyūrī sūtra, Fo-mu-da-kong-qiaoming-wang-jing, which dates to the eighth century, begins with the story of a bhikṣu named Svāti () who was stung by a poisonous black snake. The snake bit his right foot and the venom quickly spread through his body. Ānanda sees Svāti in great pain and reports the situation to the Buddha and asks what is to be done. Hearing this, the Buddha mentions the great power of the Mahāmāyūrī-buddhamatṛikavidyārājñī dhāraṇī (, lit. “Great dhāraṇī of Mahāmāyūrī, the Buddha mother-wisdom queen”⁷), which destroys all sorts of poison, fear, calamity, and anguish. He instructs Ānanda to protect Svāti from calamity using this dhāraṇī.⁸ While the Chinese translation makes it clear that the text concerns the power of a dhāraṇī, in a later Sanskrit manuscript made in the eleventh century, the text is more ambiguous about what is signified in the epithet “mahāmāyūrī vidyārājñī,” because the word dhāraṇī is omitted in the Buddha’s instruction to save poor Svāti with this powerful tool.⁹ The context makes it clear that it denotes the dhāraṇī, but the term mahāmāyūrī-vidyārājñī could also be an epithet of the goddess Mahāmāyūrī as well as that of the entire text of the Mahāmāyūrī sūtra. Later in eastern India and Nepal, Mahāmāyūrī was subsumed into a group of five protective goddesses, called Pañcarakṣā, and all five goddesses are symbols of the texts that they are supposed to personify.¹⁰ In the context of the Pañcarakṣa cult, which eventually developed within the frame of the Buddhist book cult, the goddess is the text, and the book becomes a container of both the goddess and the text.¹¹ But this interpretation is not applicable yet in Cave 6 at Ellora. Here the book still remains a sign of the text, and the book and the goddess retain a more or less parallel semiotic relationship to the text.

      If the nature of the monk’s activity was not entirely clear in Cave 6, the Mahāmāyūrī panel in Cave 10, completed a few decades later, makes it clear that he is reading, or perhaps reciting, a book (see web 1-1). The panel is smaller in scale, and it is not as glamorous in its presentation. The body of the goddess also appears more robust in style. But the basic iconographic scheme remains the same. Mahāmāyūrī is standing in the middle, with a strutting peacock in the mid-left section. The monk squats in the lower left corner, and it is clear that he is holding a manuscript in his two hands with his eyes downcast, as if reading carefully from the text. One end of a long pothi manuscript hangs low from his right hand over the rectangular object underneath. This rectangular object may be a bookcase that sits on a simple cross-legged book stand. Our monk is probably reciting the sūtra, as his mouth seems slightly open, as a small gap in between his lips suggests. The efficacy of a dhāraṇī, and any mantra, is in sound. Given that surviving Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts are written in scriptura continua, which would have made “silent reading” quite difficult, it is only sensible to assume that these texts were recited and vocalized.¹² This panel, then, also suggests to us that Indian Buddhist monastic establishments were probably not as quiet as one might imagine, with many monks and novices reciting and reading out loud different texts simultaneously. According to this panel, the ritual of using a book for a cultic purpose required only two essential elements: a special book on a book stand to recite from and a reciter with an ability to read the text.

      HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRAJÑĀPĀRAMITĀ CULT

      Emergence of a book as a special object of worship is closely tied to the renewed popularity of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras in medieval India. The Prajñāpāramitā literature deals with the most fundamental Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy for many Mahāyāna Buddhist schools.¹³ But was this text a super hit from the time when it originally appeared in the beginning of our Common Era? It had an enormous impact on the philosophical development of Mahāyāna Buddhist schools and had enthusiasts, but it seems to have attained “no great cult,” at least not until the ninth century.¹⁴ The later, received status of the text contributed to its legendary historical importance in our understanding. The composition of the Prajñāpāramitā text has been dated to the early centuries of the Common Era, largely based on the dates of Chinese translations.¹⁵ The earliest Chinese translation of the Prajñāpāramitā literature was the translation of the AsP, done in 179–180 CE by Lokakṣema (Taisho 220).¹⁶ The AsP seems to have enjoyed a privileged status as a favored text of scholastic Buddhism from early on: it was translated into Chinese six times beginning with Lokaksema’s translation and ending with Dānapāla’s translation in 985 CE. However, the earlier Chinese translations do not exactly match the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts of the AsP, most of which date from the eleventh and the twelfth centuries.¹⁷ The fact that the AsP was translated six times in eight hundred years not only reflects the enthusiasm over this text but also suggests the possibility that this text may have evolved and changed in India, reflecting the changes in Buddhist doctrine and practice.¹⁸ When compared with the Chinese translations, the extant Sanskrit form of the AsP corresponds loosely to Dānapāla’s translation, with later interpolated sections that could have been included after the seventh century and well into the Pāla period (ca. eighth–twelfth centuries) when the Pāla kings ruled in the area of the modern day Bihar and West Bengal.

      During the Pāla period, almost eight hundred years after its proposed inception, the Prajñāpāramitā became one of the two foremost doctrines promoted in eastern India. According to Tāranātha, the Prajñāpāramitā was extensively propagated during the reign of the second Pāla king, Dharmapāla (reign ca. 775–812 CE):

      He (Dharmapāla) accepted as his