At the outset of Reinventing the Wheel, Stephen Teiser recounts an episode from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that sets into motion the primary theme of his study. In this episode, the British curator of the Lahore Museum and a Tibetan lama exchange views in which the former presents Buddhism as a sweeping phenomenon framed by the panorama of book knowledge, while the latter intimates that the true fruits of the religion are found more locally in one’s own awareness and experience. Likewise, the modern scholar must negotiate similar tensions in the study of Buddhist art. While the undeniable similarities of pan-Asian Buddhist iconography tempt generalizations, the regional distinctions of an increasingly deconstructed “Asia” demand specificity. Teiser tackles this challenge of negotiating the local within the transnational through a compelling analysis of painted wheels of rebirth. These are illustrations of Buddhist transmigration that not only appear in sites from India to Tibet, Central Asia and China, but also provide a powerful lens onto the diverse artistic, social, and ritual conditions that have shaped their representation over time and place. Since Buddhist existence is defined by the cyclical terms of endless rebirth rather than the linear terms of life and death, the very...