Representing the Perfection of Wisdom, Embodying the Holy Sites
Representing the Perfection of Wisdom, Embodying the Holy Sites
This chapter explains how the scenes from the life of the Buddha, often seen to be unrelated to the text of the Prajnāpāramitā sūtra, illustrate the main message of the text when understood together as a group. A Buddhist book with systematic placement of illustrated panels with the Buddha’s life scenes is like a stūpa. I also suggest that the seemingly random placement of many holy sites within a single manuscript can invoke a mental journey or an imagined pilgrimage to these sacred sites, thus allowing a Buddhist practitioner to roam freely beyond the spatial boundaries and physical limits of his surroundings.
Keywords: Prajnāpāramitā sūtra, Buddha’s life scenes, book as a stūpa, imagined pilgrimage, Buddhist holy sites, prime object, replication, visual map, 3D mandala
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
