Pustaka Pūjā: A Study of Sūtra Worship in Mahāyāna Buddhism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study deals with the questions of why Mahāyāna texts advocate book worship, what forms of worship they advocate, and what their worship was like historically and in the present day. In answering these questions, it first employs a textual study of Mahāyāna Buddhist, non-Mahāyāna Buddhist, and Brahmanical textual references to book worship or the agency of speech. Secondly, it engages with contemporary Newar Buddhist texts and practices related to Buddhist book wor-ship in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. The methodological approach of this study is based in the fields of the study of orality, paratexts, materiality, and book history. Going beyond the bounds of the disciplinary silos of Buddhist studies and South Asian studies, it shows how a trans-sectarian understanding of agency and orality is necessary to explain trends in the development of Buddhist and Brahmanical manuscript culture and worship. On that basis, this study suggests that while South Asian religions view divine speech as imbued with ritual agency, Mahāyāna Buddhist book worship used the same logic with the physical book in advocating their worship. Furthermore, while not renouncing orality, Mahāyāna Buddhist literature hardwired self-referential prescriptions for their worship within the body of their texts to promote themselves in physical form in a way that freed it from reliance upon the system of oral transmission upon which the non-Mahāyāna nikāya and āgama literature relied. Tracing the form of that worship throughout the first millennium, this thesis shows how it became increasingly tantricised, resulting in the incorporation of the Mahāyāna sūtras within maṇḍalas. A continuity of ancient forms of book worship and recitation, as well as a continually evolving and adapting tradition, is explored in the case of Newar Buddhist book worship and recitation in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, revealing the continued effects of the agency of these books as texts, objects, and deities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".