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How can we explain the diversity of Indic Buddhism, its many different images of worship and its (apparently) dramatic alterations in doctrine? This book demonstrates that they reflect the tensions between the meanings of Buddha's absence and presence and the wide variety of combinatory resolutions of those tensions which were brought into being. The meanings of absence and presence were encoded in separate systems of meaning-signified, respectively, in words and in images. Albeit antithetical, these meanings operated in a complementary manner. However, the nature of that complementarity altered during the course of three different phases of the religion's history.