| Detailed descriptions of the preparation, assembling and conservation of palm leaf books in South and Southeast Asia are readily available. The motifs and patterns that characterize the decoration of palm leaf book covers, however, have received little scholarly attention. Noting that much scholarly literature presumes a lack of relatedness between a manuscript's visual program and literary contents, this dissertation is the first study to examine the relationship between the genres of Sinhala Buddhist literature and the embellishments that accompany them.;This study relies on archaeological and codicological methodologies to determine the underlying patterns of belief and religious structures that were expressed through the physical structure of the manuscripts. First, data on the materials and techniques of production of one-hundred and fifty-six Sinhala Buddhist manuscript specimens were compiled. The corpus was tabulated for textual genealogy and genre and a standard repertoire of visual subjects that appear on the binding boards was identified. The data sets were then cross-tabulated to determine the relative degrees of cohesion between text and images.;The results reveal that the relationship between particular texts and their iconographic programs was neither arbitrary nor coincidental. The relative scarcity of embellished manuscript specimens suggests that they were valued as ritual texts rather than working copies. Buddhist biography occupies a special status in the literary as well as the artistic survivals. The literary contents, in the forms of canonical sermons and collections of Buddhist stories, make the Buddha present to the reader or listener while the embellishments function as visual pūjā. Sinhala Buddhist manuscript practices, therefore, evoke the presence of the Buddha much as sacred architecture does for the pilgrim that approaches the relics enshrined in stūpas and images. To attribute the production of embellished Buddhist manuscripts to illustrations for the illiterate and to merit-making practices fails to account for complex processes of function and reception that included medieval rhetorical strategies that remained eloquent to audiences in the late colonial period. |
