From the seventeenth century, Japanese printers produced picture-based texts that let people recite Buddhist sutras without reading. Each drawn image, such as a saw, a rice paddy or a monkey, was named aloud and sounded out a Chinese syllable, so a sequence of pictures turned into a chant. Villagers chanting in their local dialect could approximate the sounds of educated clerics. The most famous example is the Heart Sutra, which was reproduced in a 1795 travelogue by Tachibana Nankei and in early twentieth-century editions. The system used a rebus principle, like a puzzle where pictures stand for sounds.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.