Available From UC Press

In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, Receptacle of the Sacred explores how and why the South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia to the present. A book “manuscript” should be understood as a form of sacred space: a temple in microcosm, not only imbued with divine presence but also layered with the memories of many generations of users. Jinah Kim argues that illustrating a manuscript with Buddhist imagery not only empowered it as a three-dimensional sacred object, but also made it a suitable tool for the spiritual transformation of medieval Indian practitioners. Through a detailed historical analysis of Sanskrit colophons on patronage, production, and use of illustrated manuscripts, she suggests that while Buddhism’s disappearance in eastern India was a slow and gradual process, the Buddhist book-cult played an important role in sustaining its identity. In addition, by examining the physical traces left by later Nepalese users and the contemporary ritual use of the book in Nepal, Kim shows how human agency was critical in perpetuating and intensifying the potency of a manuscript as a sacred object throughout time.

Jinah Kim is Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University.

"This is an important work on the well known but little-studied Buddhist manuscripts created in eastern India during the last centuries of major Buddhist activity there. Her use of contemporary evidence in Nepal wonderfully grounds historical imagining of the cultic practices associated with books. Simply put, Jinah Kim has produced a scholarly jewel." —Dr. Janice Leoshko, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

"A dazzling demonstration of the centrality of the Buddhist book cult in medieval India and Nepal. Illuminated books come alive in the hands of their scribes, painters, and donors, and for the reader as well. The most important work on late Esoteric Buddhism and its relationship to Mahayana and society at large since Ronald M. Davidson’s 2002 Indian Esoteric Buddhism." —Rob Linrothe, Associate Professor at Northwestern University