本书收录了有关佛教思想、寺院法器、佛寺文物、僧尼生活、佛教艺术等国际研讨会的几十篇论文。
此书为寺院财富与世俗供养国际学术研讨会论文集。

The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples in murals painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world.
Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang.
The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination.

宿白先生是中国佛教考古的开创者和权威，本书正是他在石窟寺考古方面的典范性研究。本书一共收录了二十三篇文章，主要是宿先生从50年代起陆续写就发表的，内容包括对克孜尔、敦煌、云冈、龙门等著名石窟的造像形象、窟龛形制、艺术风格进行的比较分析，进而确定各窟的开凿年代、发展变化、阶段特征等，用语科学谨慎，论断明晰有力。

《佛像的历史(图文版)》内容简介：九一八事变之后，日军侵华已经剑拔弩张，梁思成、林徽因等人感到时间的紧迫，他们日夜兼程地赶路，要赶在侵略者入侵以前把华北、中原地区一的古建筑全部调查完毕，要在日军毁坏这些珍贵的庙宇、石雕、佛像前把它们拍摄下来、记录下来，因为很有可能这是它们留在人世的最后影像。时至今日，它们中有一部分已经不复存在了。让我们跟随梁思成的文字和照片去体味中国雕塑那失落已久的美。

2014年，成都文物考古研究院对成都下同仁路进行了抢救发掘，发现了2个佛教造像坑、14个生活遗物坑以及2个水井。造像坑中出土了佛像、菩萨像、天王像、背屏式组合造像等多种类型的佛教造像，分析其年代在南北朝至唐代时期，其中尤以南北朝时期占多数，据推测这批造像中的一部分或与梁代海安寺存在联系。生活遗物坑及水井中出土了瓷器、陶器、石器等生活用品，推测其年代为西汉中晚期至明代早期。
《成都下同仁路：佛教造像坑及城市生活遗址发掘报告》分别从地层堆积与遗迹单位、出土遗物、初步研究等方面对该次考古发掘成果进行了汇报。
《成都下同仁路：佛教造像坑及城市生活遗址发掘报告》的出版将为研究巴蜀地区南北朝时期的佛教文化提供一批新资料。

《犍陀罗美术寻踪》通过精炼的选材、缜密的阐述、科学的分析，从纷繁的印度、犍陀罗美术作品中理清出各自的特点、它们之间的区别和联系，并进一步阐明了佛教美术、佛像、大乘佛教美术起源和发展序列。同时，不单纯是作品的记述，而是试图从某个视角来考察；笔者所说的某个视角亦即“起源”“起始”，换言之，笔者试图从“起源”这一视解来进行研究。