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Chapter 1 examines how Buddhist books were ritually used throughout history and locates the Mahāyāna Buddhist book cult in practice in medieval India by examining the representations of the cultic use of a book in Buddhist context. This chapter also explores the relationship between the Buddhist book cult and the development of the cult of the dharmarelics, and locates the function and significance of the illustrated manuscripts in the larger context of the production of Buddhist sacred objects.

This chapter examines the human agents behind the medieval Buddhist book cult-the donors, makers, and users of the illustrated manuscripts-based on a collective analysis of the colophons of thirty-six dated illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from India.The involvement of monastic donors, with the exception of monks from Tibet and elsewhere, is unexpectedly low, indicating that the Buddhist book cult remained a lay-based cultic practice, despite monastic production. The illustrated manuscripts prepared by nonmonastic ritual specialists during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries demonstrate how lay Buddhists claimed and affirmed their Buddhist identity through participation in the Buddhist book cult, an age-old Mahāyāna practice, when Buddhist monastic institutions were falling apart.

The introduction identifies the primary concerns of this study as an art-history and material-culture study of the illustrated manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult in medieval South Asia.An illustrated Buddhist manuscript in medieval India was designed as a three-dimensional object that could be animated and that could perform magical wonders, comparable to an app of an interactive digital book designed for an electronic device like an iPad.Buddhist bookmakers in medieval South Asia took the mutually reinforcing roles of text, image, and book to transform an already sacred text such as the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, a Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical treaty, into a suitable cultic object of Esoteric Buddhist practitioners.

This chapter introduces the notion of ritualized writing, a specific mode set apart from more quotidian forms. It traces the development of sutra transcription in terms of the “cult of the book” in the Buddhist tradition and highlights similar practices in a variety of religions around the world. It then outlines a practice based approach to ritual that focuses on ethical cultivation and social function, while arguing against a classic functionalist position. The introduction then turns to historiographical issues related to the “state Buddhism model” as well as its critics. It proposes new approaches to get beyond common elite/folk binaries. It outlines the structure and logic of the book and overviews the sources with a detailed description of Shōsōin documents, a collection of roughly 10,000 documents from the eighth century that deal primarily with sutra copying.

This chapter studies Lewis Grassic Gibbon and his famous trilogy, A Scots Quair, which is considered as ‘proletarian’. The first novel in the trilogy has become a cult book in the Scottish literary context. The discussion also looks at Gibbon's commitment to revolutionary socialism and his contribution to the national dimension of the interwar revival.

This chapter examines the contemporary ritual of the Prajñāpāramitā pūjā, performed in KwāBaha (Golden Temple) in Patan, Nepal. The ritual and the restoration carried out today not only testify to the changing yet unchanging cultic value of the book as a sacred object with great adaptability but also provide a mirror to reflect on the voices and actions of the people long lost in the body of the book.