"Unveiled, for the first time, in the pages of the Encyclopaedia, is a panorama of Buddhist deities, demigods, godlings, saints and demons, with spotlight on the concretized, recognizable forms and the subtle symbolism they involve. In its nearly 8000 alphabetically arranged articles of varying lengths, it mixes gods and demons, bhiksus, and btsans, the aesthetic and the grotesque--in fact, nearly the whole range of good and evil forces which the inspired among the adherents of the Buddhist faith conceived so ingeniously!

Professor Bunce has painstakingly marshalled a wealth of data from authoritative language sources, notably, Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Newari/Nepalese, Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Siamese/Thai, Annamese/Viet Namese, Javanese, and Sinhalese, in his effort to capture almost the entire framework of Buddhist divinities: a multi-pantheonic framework, together with its classes, groups and hierarchies, ranging from Adi-Buddha to Arhats and yet beyond. Himself a distinguished scholar of oriental/Buddhist art, Dr. Bunce incorporates, in scrupulous detail, the iconographic attributes of deities: like colours, heads/eyes, hands, objects held, body, feet, asanas, mudras, ornaments, vahanas, emanatons, and whether calm or wrathful--which, with a generous supplement of illustrations: about 300 elegant line-drawings and several colour plates, highlight the distinctiveness of each individual figure. Also included in the Encyclopaedia are user's guide, glossaries (of asanas, mudras and attributes), identification charts, a hierarchic table, and bibliographic references." (publishers blurb) No. 8716