ABSTRACT
This is a book about Buddhist images, about why Buddhists at a particular time and in a particular place made images, about why these Buddhists looked at and venerated such images, and about what such Buddhists did with and thought about the images that they made. This is also a book about how we, as students and scholars of religion, deal with religious images; or, to be more precise, it is a book about how we have tended not to deal with images. At the heart of our own scholarly approach to images is the thorny question of the presence of the divine in apparently inanimate objects. This is, to be sure, a very old issue. Indeed, historians and anthropologists and sociologists of religion have been grappling with, and fighting about, this basic issue at least since the nineteenth-century discussions of totemism in the works of William Robertson Smith, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. However, as with so many contested issues in academe, we have come to something of a theoretical and methodological impasse, with two distinct, opposed, and monothetic camps solidifying and defending their respective positions: either the object in question - be it a totem, a sculpture, wine, or a cucumber - really is considered to be or to embody the thing represented (the divine, the sacred, a/the god); or the object in question is considered to be a representation of the divine, a symbol or signifier.
