"In Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism, Andy Rotman examines visual practices and how they function as a kind of skeleton key for opening up Buddhist conceptualizations about the world and the ways it should be navigated." "Rotman's analysis is based primarily on stories from the Divyavadana (Divine Stories), one of the largest and most important collections of ancient Buddhist stories from India. In trying to explain this connection between the religious and the visual, Rotman examines the functioning in these stories of the mental states of sraddha; and prasada - terms often, though problematically, translated as "faith." In particular, he analyzes how these mental states relate to practices of seeing (darsana) and giving (dana), and what this configuration of seeing, believing, and giving can tell us about Buddhist ethics, the power of images, the logic of pilgrimage, and the market-based morality of early Indian Buddhism."--Jacket.

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