This innovative book, illustrated with the V&A's unrivalled collection of South-Asian sculpture, looks at Indian temple sculpture in context, as an instrument of worship which embodies powerful religious experience. John Guy considers its cosmological meaning, its origins, the temple setting and the role of sculpture within it and reveals the vivid rituals and traditions still in practice today. It is also an absorbing introduction to the principal iconographic forms in the three traditional religions of the Indian subcontinent, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, with the principal deities presented through their myths and manifestations.