Making a Canon: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka, and the Place of Buddhist Art

The story of how one scholar’s experiences in Sri Lanka shaped the contours of the Buddhist visual canon.

An early interpreter of Buddhist art to the West, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy laid the foundation of what would become the South Asian visual canon, particularly through his efforts to understand how Buddhist art emerged and developed. In Making a Canon, Janice Leoshko examines how Coomaraswamy’s experience as the director of a mineralogical survey in Sri Lanka shaped his understanding of South Asian art and religion. Along the way, she reveals how Coomaraswamy’s distinctive repetition of Sri Lankan visual images in his work influenced the direction of South Asia’s canon formation and left a lasting impression on our understanding of Buddhist art.

Janice Leoshko is associate professor of South Asian art at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in South Asia.