Although
Buddhism is often depicted as a religion of meditators and philosophers, some
of the earliest writings extant in India offer a very different portrait of the
Buddhist practitioner. In Indian Buddhist narratives from the early centuries
of the Common Era, most lay religious practice consists not of reading,
praying, or meditating, but of visually engaging with certain kinds of objects.
These visual practices, moreover, are represented as the primary means of
cultivating faith, a necessary precondition for proceeding along the Buddhist
spiritual path. In Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian
Buddhism, Andy Rotman examines these visual practices and how they function as
a kind of skeleton key for opening up Buddhist conceptualizations about the
world and the ways it should be navigated.
Rotman's
analysis is based primarily on stories from the Divyavadana (Divine Stories),
one of the most important collections of ancient Buddhist narratives from
India. Though discourses of the Buddha are well known for their opening words,
"thus have I heard" - for Buddhist teachings were first preserved and
transmitted orally - the Divyavadana presents a very different model for
disseminating the Buddhist dharma. Devotees are enjoined to look, not just
hear, and visual legacies and lineages are shown to trump their oral
counterparts. As Rotman makes clear, this configuration of the visual
fundamentally transforms the world of the Buddhist practitioner, changing what
one sees, what one believes, and what one does.
