ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, I have examined a great many individual visual features relating to prajna, and, furthermore, I have argued that these various pieces of evidence do, in fact, conglomerate into something like a whole. Thus, for instance, as we have seen in the last chapter, an individual representation of a book set up on a pedestal fits into, and indeed only makes sense as part of, a much broader context that includes: the early discourse on the presence and absence of the Buddha and the essential equation of seeing the Buddha and seeing the dharma; the centrality of prajna in both the Nikayas and the Mahayana, particularly its discursive elevation in the Prajnaparamita genre; and, perhaps most saliently, the discourse concerning the superiority of the book as an object of veneration, and the actual representation of Prajnaparamita both as a deity and as a book per se,
Connerton is correct, of course, in saying that understanding and interpreting the whole in such a case is a more or less explicit guess. Indeed, what I have done in this study is a bit like what a paleontologist does in constructing a model of a dinosaur: out of a few bones, or even bone fragments, a whole animal is constructed, but this whole is based on a range of guesses; in reality, of course, we have no way to know, with any certainty, what an ichthyosaur really looked like. In the same way, we can never really know what, exactly,
a specific Buddhist might have seen in, or thought about, a specific image.
