Introduction
This chapter explains the theory of religion employed in the book, as well as the basic issues at play in the overlap of religion and literary theory that will be explored. Starting from the assumption that religion is a heuristic category rather than a real object in the world, the Introduction argues that, for the purposes of this project, religion is best understood as a network of influential relationships centered around something understood to be ultimate or unsurpassable. Theology, according to this definition, is the attempt to articulate, normatively or descriptively, the shape of this network from a position that accepts the ultimacy of its center. The Introduction then explains the fundamental set of philosophical issues driving the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in Kashmir in these centuries: namely, the relationship between appearances and essences, or between how things appear and what they really are.