Buddhist Goddesses of India

Miranda Shaw is a scholar of Buddhist studies, and this Princeton University Press book is her academic survey of the goddess figures of Indian and Himalayan Buddhism, examining figures such as Tara against the wider Mahayana tradition's attitudes toward women practitioners. Its strength is a specific and debated argument, that motherhood and female agency are more central to how these goddess figures were conceived than earlier, more male centered scholarship recognized, made through close reading of Sanskrit and Tibetan primary sources rather than general survey alone. Its limit is that it is an argument as much as a survey, so where Shaw's specific interpretive claims are contested by other Buddhist studies scholars, a reader should check the wider secondary literature rather than treat this book's reading as the field's settled consensus.