According to Buddhist texts, the gods worshipped Śākyamuni Buddha during his lifetime, as did humans. Gods and humans began the heartfelt ritual veneration of the Buddha's material remains as soon as he abandoned his mortal body. The term pūjā refers to such acts of ritualized worship. Relics, trees, mortuary monuments, and eventually images and texts associated with the three jewels (the Buddha, the teachings, and the community of Buddhists) as well as a wide range of pacific or ferocious buddhas and bodhisattvas were made the objects of worship. Yet conflicting interpretations of Śākyamuni's instructions, together with the philosophically subtle condition of possibility that the Buddha was both absent and immanent for such veneration, yielded a creative tension in the intellectual understanding of pūjā within the developing Buddhist traditions. Moreover, as the tradition developed local forms, which...