FIGURE 3-1Ms A1: AsP, Mahīpāla’s 6th year (ca. 983 CE), Asiatic Society, Kolkata G.4713.

      The systematic placement of these scenes in the side panels of Ms A1, Ms A2, Ms A3, and Ms A4 is designed to frame the central panels (see fig. 3–1). The central panels of the first two folios feature the Prajñāpāramitā deities, that is, the goddess Prajñāpāramitā and bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, a male personification of wisdom (Ms A2, Ms A3, Ms A4), or Amitābha and Prajñāpāramitā (Ms A1, Ms A7). Then, the iconographic program visually relates the Buddha’s enlightenment (represented by the Buddha’s life scenes) and the Prajñāpāramitā (represented by the Prajñāpāramitā deities and the text itself ) by putting them on the same plane of existence. The relationship between the Prajñāpāramitā and the Buddha’s enlightenment is central to the Buddhist book cult because it provides the foundation of the cult: a book of the Prajñāpāramitā is worthy of veneration because the Prajñāpāramitā is the root of one’s enlightenment. This fundamental reason for the worship of a book is illustrated on the body of a book through the Buddha’s life scenes and the Prajñāpāramitā deities.

      It is also important to note that the text also emphasizes the “seat,” or a locus. In the above-cited passage from the AsP, Indra explains the worship of his own seat in Sudharmā. Just as Indra’s empty seat is worthy of worship as a symbol of his presence, the visual representations of the Buddha’s life sites are all worthy of worship. The painted panels of the life scenes physically and visually locate the mahā-caityas inside a book. The eight life scenes of the Buddha not only represent the eight great moments but also signify the eight pilgrimage sites where these events took place. If the life-scene steles are designed to invite a practitioner on a symbolic pilgrimage to the eight sacred sites,⁹ the Buddha’s life scenes systematically placed in a manuscript, too, invoke a mental journey to these sites materialized in the space of a book. One may go through these sites on a symbolic pilgrimage, the goal of which is achieving enlightenment. In addition, the eight narrative scenes stand for the eight great caityas of the eight major Buddhist pilgrimage sites¹⁰ (as in the Aṣṭamahāsthānacaitya stotra).¹¹ Since the eight life scenes collectively signify the Buddha’s enlightenment,¹² these illustrated panels visually transform a book into the site of enlightenment. If the mahācaityas were worshipped with great vigor because the Buddha was powerfully present, so were these books. The presence of the Buddha’s life scenes enhances the cultic status of a book: the book is to be worshipped following the well-known code of worship of the Buddha, by offering flowers, incense, perfumes, and others.

      The AsP is well-known for its paradoxical rhetoric, later epitomized by one simple paradoxical phrase of “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”¹³ One of the main means employed to explain the philosophy of the Prajñāpāramitā is contradiction as exemplified by such sentences as “the perfection of wisdom is neither form nor other than form” or “the perfection of wisdom is neither feeling, perception, mental activities, consciousness, nor other than them.”¹⁴ Contradictions and negations are commonly used along with various similes as a didactical method to explain śūnyatā, or emptiness. This rhetorical strategy operates also at the meta level: two main themes of the text, emptiness and book cult, are contradictory, yet deeply interdependent. The text promotes its own cult and emphasizes the importance of worshipping the materiality of the book, when it also tries to show the ephemeral nature of the perceived world. The dichotomy between the two themes is not easily discernible in the text despite the abruptly inserted interpolations.¹⁵ Both the elaboration on the book cult and the discussion of emptiness are about the Perfection of Wisdom, and they are certainly interdependent in their didactic goals.

      The paintings illustrate these two big themes of the AsP text: the Buddha’s life scenes illustrate the practice of the book cult, while the Prajñāpāramitā deities represent the doctrinal teaching. At the meta level of a book, the images could collectively stand for the practice of the book cult as explained in the text, while the written words of the Buddha stand for the doctrinal teaching. In other words, it is not that the images are not related to the text but that our common perception of the text–image relationship in the modern book illustrations has perhaps hindered us from seeing the obvious relationship between them in the context of the South Asian Buddhist book cult.

      BOOK AS A STŪPA

      The placement of the life scenes in the outer folios of a manuscript, that is, the first and the last two folios, as seen in Ms A1, Ms A2, Ms A3, and Ms A4, renders a book comparable to a votive stūpa with the life scenes. A votive stūpa at site 12 in Nālandā has eight niches with architectural frames containing the eight scenes from the Buddha’s life (fig. 3–2). If we consider the panels in the clockwise order from the birth panel, the order is this: the birth, the enlightenment, the taming of the elephant, the miracle, the gift of honey, the Parinirvāṇa, the descent, and the first sermon. If we understand their placement according to their cardinal positions, we can discern a clear logic behind this arrangement of the scenes. As Hiram Woodward suggests, the enlightenment and the Parinirvāṇa form the primary east–west axis, and the intermediate events are ordered according to a visual symmetry that “seems to smooth the practitioner’s inward digestion of the path” to enlightenment.¹⁶ The fact that each scene is given an equal weight makes our comparison to the manuscript illustrations more compelling. That the arrangement of the life scenes in a manuscript are almost identical to what we see on a stūpa also suggests that the text was truly taken as the relic of the Buddha, a book was in a way conceived as encasing a relic.

      This is literally the case because the text on the first two folios of these manuscripts is not the text of the AsP. Almost all the AsP manuscripts from the period begin with the hymn to the goddess Prajñāpāramitā (Prajñāpāramitānāmastuti) composed by Nāgārjuna, and the actual text usually begins on the verso of the second folio with the famous phrase “evammaya śrutam,” or “thus I heard.” Likewise, the last two folios usually bear colophons, including the “ye dharma . . .” verse and the donor colophon. For example, in Ms A1, the last chapter of the AsP ends in the third line on folio 202 verso, and the rest of folio 202v and folio 203r are devoted to colophons. Despite the damage and loss on the final folio of Ms A2, it is possible to determine that the AsP text also ends on the verso of the penultimate folio, as in Ms A1. In Ms A3, the last folio of this manuscript has long been wrongly identified as a folio from a manuscript of the “Dharaṇīsaṅgraha (collection of dhāraṇīs),” because written on this folio is the Uṣṇiṣavijayā dhāraṇī along with the date and the donor colophon.¹⁷ Based on Eva Allinger’s recent study, which identifies two manuscript folios in a private collection as a part of this manuscript,¹⁸ we can safely confirm that the text of the AsP ends on the recto of folio 183. Here, too, the illustrated panels are next to the text of cultic importance, that is, a dhāraṇī and a donor colophon. Even when the text on the last illustrated folios reads that of the AsP, as in Ms A4, the final chapter of the AsP is cultic and practical in its character, since the Buddha emphasizes the merit of worshipping the Prajñāpāramitā one last time and transmits the teaching to Ānanda. The images placed on the last two folios, the life scenes and Avalokiteśvara (folio 299v center) and green Tārā (folio 300r center) in their boon-giving gestures, befit the text in their cultic signification (see fig. 2–1).