This dissertation is both an attempt to contribute to a methodological expansion in the history of religions and Buddhist studies by focusing on visual images, as well as an effort to further our understanding of the dynamics of a specific point in the development of Buddhism in India. The Pala period, 750-1200 C.E., is a rich, complex period in Buddhist history, encompassing the continued ascendancy of the Mahayana schools, the rise of esoteric Buddhism, and the increased expansion of Buddhism into other parts of Asia.
Perhaps the central development during this period was the renewed focus on what might be called "salvifically efficacious" wisdom, or prajna. For Pala-period Buddhists, prajna was not only an intellectual goal to which to aspire, but also a quality to be visually represented and even an active deified presence to be venerated in much the same manner as the Buddha himself.
The specific focus of this dissertation is on the ways in which the production and use of artistic images involving prajna constituted a central part of Buddhist religious practice in the Pala milieu. The sculpture of the Pala period is saturated with prajna, and to look at such images--of Sakyamuni, of Prajnaparamita, Cunda, Tara, Avalokitesvara, Manjusrl--is to see prajna, visually and cognitively. Indeed, one of the integral aspects of such representations is the intimate relationship of seeing and knowing.
This study also pays considerable attention to the textual traditions that constituted the broad habitus of Pala-period Buddhism. This textual context includes the earlier Pali texts that deal with images and the broad issue of the "presence" of the Buddha, as well as the genre of texts known as the Prajnaparamita that describe the ways in which prajna is obtained, its transcendental qualities, and its practical effects. What emerges from this examination of the images and the textual traditions is a religious milieu in which prajna is the nexus of a dynamic dialectical interaction between text and image, image and text.
