Pupating for more than thirty years, Viṣṇu’s Luminous Will is a critical textual and historical study of the Viṣṇudharmottara, a text composed in Kashmir in the eighth century. It focuses on the main topic of the text, the connection between liturgical practices, ritual, and kingship. Its main concern is to present the rules for puja, the attentive honouring of aesthetically striking icons in monumental temples.

The idea was that iconolatry would displace the Vedic sacrifice as the centrepiece of an imperial kingdom. The rulers of Kashmir, working in tandem with the Chinese emperor and Turkic warrior kings, carried out their version of this program and later kingdoms adopted it. Integral to this shift, the authors of the text also position Vaiṣṇavism as providing the ‘right way’, dharma, for turning a kingdom into a qualified terrestrial paradise. It thus advocates hegemony rather than domination and graded participation in imperial liturgies and polities rather than hierarchic exclusion from them. Anyone could, in his or her own way, honour the icon in a household shrine or temple.