The article examines the ritual treatment of sacred texts in Buddhism, known in the scientific literature as the “cult of books”. This phenomenon became known after the appearance of works linking the formation of the early Mahayana with the emergence of institutional centers associated with the religious veneration of the texts of the Mahayana sutras. Subsequently, the term “cult of books” became a designation of Buddhist ritual book culture in general. The article analyzes the dogmatic foundations of the cult of books in the form of the Buddhist concept of religious merit (punya), as well as the textual foundations of the cult in the form of instructions from the Mahayana sutras about their own veneration. The main attention is paid to the Far Eastern variant of the cult of books. One of the manifestations of the Far Eastern cult of books was the so-called “Revolving Sutra Libraries” - special cabinet for books of the canon mounted on a vertical axis. One turn of this construction was equivalent to reading all the books of the canon in the sense that it brought the same amount of religious merit. In conclusion, it is shown that the understudy of the Buddhist cult is due to the methodological prerequisites adopted in Russian Buddhology, which focuses on the study of the doctrinal and philosophical side of Buddhism and marginalizes the Buddhist cult as a form of “folk” religion.
