Images in Asian Religions

Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinoharaare both professors in the Department of Religious Studies at YaleUniversity.

• ContributorsForewordAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Part 1: Defining Images: The Sacred Objects of IndianReligions1. Images and Their Ritual Use in Medieval India: Hesitations andContradictions2. Theology as History: Divine Images, Imagination, and Rituals inIndia3. Of Metal and Clothes: The Location of Distinctive Features inDivine Iconography Part 2: Images and the Elite Intellectual Culture:Accommodations and Ambiguities4. At the Right Side of the Teacher: Imagination, Imagery, and Imagein Vedic and Saiva Initiation5. The Competing Hermeneutics of Image Worship in Hinduism (Fifth toEleventh Century AD6. Stories of Miraculous Images and Paying Respect to the ThreeJewels: A Discourse on Image Worship in Seventh-Century China Part 3: Recreating the Context of Image Worship: CaseStudies7. Icon and Incantation: The Goddess Zhunti and the Role of Imagesin the Occult Buddhism of China8. The Tenjukoku Shucho Mandara: Reconstruction of the Iconographyand Ritual Context9. Obaku Zen Portrait Painting and Its Sino-Japanese Heritage10. Ritual and Image at Angkor Wat Index

The essays are uniformly informative and well written. All of the essays in this collection are well-written and insightful. They certainly fulfill their mandate of dealing with images in Asian religions. - Alexander Soucy, St. Mary's University (Studies in Religion, 34/3-4, 2005)