Buddhist Manuscript Culture is a welcome addition to the expanding scholarly discourse on Buddhism and materiality. The editors, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober, and Claudia Brown, have done an admirable job of bring together a diverse and nicely balanced set of perspectives on Buddhist texts, on their production and use and care in specific contexts and locations, and the reader comes away with a much deeper understanding of what texts have been and have meant for particular Buddhist communities and individuals on the ground. After an orienting introduction, the book is divided into four major sections: “Ideologies,” “Production,” “Curating,” and “Art and Architecture.”

In the first section, Richard Solomon focuses on several collections of manuscripts—some of them quite fragmentary—that seem to have been buried in clay pots. Why did some Buddhists in Gandhāra bury Buddhist manuscripts? He presents four hypotheses: they did so to make merit; they did so to ritually “dispose” of old manuscripts; they did so as part of funeral practices for deceased monks; or they did so to preserve and protect the dharma. Berkowitz seeks in his chapter to make a “scholarly presumption” about the emphasis on canonical texts in Theravāda Buddhism, and argues that when we look carefully at actual manuscripts and how they were produced and used, we gain a view of Buddhist literature that is much more fluid than what most scholarly studies have presented. He argues that when we look at specific collections of texts from monasteries in Sri Lanka, we find that monks engaged in a kind of ad hoc textual practice and used a wide variety of texts and textual genres, some canonical, some commentaries, and some very local vernacular texts. Some texts were read and were significant because of the dharma they contained, while others seemed to be primarily objects of merit.

Peter Skilling opens the “Production” section with a chapter that focuses on how the various canons were formed in Indian Buddhism. He argues for the need to look beyond the “official” Buddhist view of canon formation and to historicize the processes by which the canons were formed. Far from being the result of a unified process of canonization, he argues, the different scriptural collections of different Buddhist schools in early Buddhism were the product of specific debates and processes. Vesna Wallace turns to the textual traditions of Mongolian Buddhists and presents a rich and varied textual tradition, describing four major types of texts and then moving to the ways in which these texts have been produced and embellished and decorated. In the last chapter of this section, Jens-Uwe Hartmann traces the transition from oral to written texts in early Indian Buddhism, moving from the early production of texts to the development of manuscript illustrations in the Pala-Sena milieu, probably sometime around 1000 ce. Hartmann then turns his attention to manuscripts as ritual objects, objects that were significant not as texts to be read, but as embodiments—even in fragmented form—of the Buddha's dharma and in his presence.

The “Curating” section consists of three chapters. Natasha Heller examines the relationship between the physical form of texts and their content. Specifically, she focuses on letters written by the statesman, monk, and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). What is particularly interesting here is the discussion of Zhao's letters as evidence of the interaction between monks and laypeople. Justin McDaniel focuses on the Northern Thai context, and the ways in which mobile monks traded, copied, and shared manuscripts—notably vernacular, “local” manuscripts—across various borders in the nineteenth century. He argues that these texts tell us a great deal about how education was actually conducted in specific contexts; they demonstrate that Buddhism in this context did not have an institutional authoritative center, but was the product of fluid local contexts, communities whose boarders and boundaries were constantly shifting, intersecting, and overlapping. The topic of Christopher Emmrich's chapter is a single Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā manuscript, produced in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal in the thirteenth century, and various practices that revolve around it. Here is a text that is anything but fixed or static, and Emmrich provides a fascinating window into the ritual and material life of the text; this is a particularly rich portrait of what the editors of this volume call “manuscript culture.”

Bilinda Devage Nandadeva argues that painted palm leaf covers that were produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sri Lanka should not be understood primarily as mere decoration, but instead as representations of real flowers offered to the dharma contained within the texts. In the final chapter of the volume, M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati examines Buddhism in Sukkothai and Sinhalese influences and elements in the temples there. She moves the discussion out of the realm of texts here, and considers the way in which other physical objects—temples, images, particular sculptural motifs—were also copied.