Abstract

Reading Medieval Buddhist Manuscripts: Thoughts on Text and Image

Highlights

  • Perhaps one of the longest ranging debates about illuminated Buddhist manuscripts concerns the relationship of the finely painted images to the written texts

  • Scholars have often noted that the illustrations on Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts have little or no obvious connection with the text

  • Some scholars have concluded that the images on these manuscripts are not related to the written words and have no specific religious meaning, but serve more generally to beautify the manuscript or somehow make it more auspicious

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Summary

Introduction

Perhaps one of the longest ranging debates about illuminated Buddhist manuscripts concerns the relationship of the finely painted images to the written texts. In a few cases, a seemingly discordant image may even reflect manuscript painting in an entirely different religious tradition This is Jainism with its highly developed tradition of manuscript painting. I would suggest that, most of the Prajñāpāramitā manuscripts that scholars have studied belong in this group As another example of a manuscript with images unrelated to the text I consider folios of a Gaṇḍavyūha sūtra, in the Cleveland Museum of Art. For my second group of manuscripts, those in which images and text are closely linked, I turn to a Pañcarakṣā manuscript, in the Cambridge University Library, where I believe we have missed the close relationship between the illustrations and the text.. Times images are wrongly placed and no amount of ingenuity on our part will lead to a coherent explanation of how they got there

The Cambridge Library Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā
The Cleveland Gaṇḍavyūha
The Nayapāla Manuscript33
The Rāmapāla Manuscript in the Cleveland Museum36
Conclusions
Full Text
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