ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I turn to an examination of the various strategies available to medieval Indian Buddhists for making the Buddha present. In particular, I shall consider the surprisingly few references to making and worshiping visual images of the Buddha in both early (that is, in Pali and espousing a basically Theravada worldview) and later texts (that is, in Sanskrit and espousing a basically Mahayana worldview). I am also concerned, however, with a closely related subject: the importance placed on being in the physical presence of the historical Buddha in this literature, and with the strategies employed when this physical presence is no longer available. I will then turn to the concept of buddhanusmrti (Pali anussati), or "recollecting the Buddha." Although this technique is explicitly meditational, and therefore involves a cognitive or imaginative act of "making present" the Buddha in the mind, I want to argue that it too is an essential part of the Pala-period habitus of Buddha images. These layers are necessary components of the larger field of Buddhist artistic representation in medieval northeast India. Or, to put it another way, they are all components of the devotional and intellectual parampara relating to Buddhist images.
