SoFCB Keynote Lecture: Transporting Visions, Transcending Boundaries

Date: 22 May 2025
Time: 9:15–10:45 am
Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Lecture Hall, 3355 Woodland Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School

Join the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School (SoFCB) for an in-person keynote lecture at the Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.

This event is in-person only, free, and open to the public. Advanced registration is required. To learn more about this event and to register, click here.

Jinah Kim is the George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. Her lecture explores the mobility of pothi-format books from Buddhist South Asia and their circulation and impact as sacred objects beyond the Himalayas through a few case studies. Certain pothi-format Sanskrit Buddhist books from medieval India bear physical traces of their transregional journeys and subsequent veneration and use by Buddhist communities elsewhere. Of particular importance is how the pothi format itself became a powerful symbol of spiritual authenticity beyond South Asia. As Esoteric Buddhism moved across cultural boundaries, the distinctive material form of the pothi evoked legitimacy and authority, even when the language underwent translation, and their medium shifted from palm leaf to paper. The analytical focus on a book’s format and materiality help challenge the unidirectionality of influences often assumed in the history of Esoteric Buddhism. For example, an early fifteenth-century xylograph copy of a compendium of Esoteric Buddhist vision texts made in Hangzhou (Southeastern China) for a Tibetan Buddhist master— featuring Newar stylistic elements—traveled to Bhaktapur, Nepal, where it inspired the transformation of this Chinese-made concertina book into a pothi-format Nepalese manuscript in the seventeenth century. This remarkable journey illustrates the multi-directional flows in the development of the Buddhist book art, which was catalyzed by the pothi as a mobile sacred object.