New Books In Buddhist Studies

Eric Huntington’s Creating the Universe: Depictions of the Cosmos in Himalayan Buddhism (University of Washington Press, 2018) explores the various ways that Buddhists have imagined and represented the cosmos over the last nearly two thousand years of Buddhist history in Tibet, Nepal and India. It is a lushly illustrated volume, which trains readers to think beyond the textual, and enter the wider world of Buddhist art, material culture, architecture, archeology, and ritual practice.Throughout the book, Huntington provides extensive visual annotations to the images under discussion, enabling the uninitiated reader to grasp the complexity — as well as the diversity and variation — that imbue cosmological images, while appreciating what those variations might reveal about the specific agendas that underlie the production and use of particular cosmological representations. One of Huntington’s main arguments is that cosmological thinking is more than just a derivative feature of Buddhist thought but, rather, is c