Buddhist Goddesses of India is a comprehensive study that unravels Buddhism's long-standing engagement with female divinities. It contends that scholars have downplayed the significance of the goddesses that have formed a cardinal part of Indian Buddhism since its inception. In a thorough examination of a wide range of texts, mythology, iconography and ritual practice, Miranda Shaw reconstructs the rich and fascinating history of Buddhist goddesses.

The study provides in-depth explorations of individual goddesses in their respective chronological domains. It is divided into three sections, covering Indian Buddhism in its entirety: the first examines early Buddhist goddesses, such as the Yakṣiṇīs and Hārītī, bearing on the relations between Buddhism and local cults (c. third century BCE); the second examines Mahāyāna goddesses (first to seventh century CE), such as Mārīcī, Sarasvatī, and Tārā, and their role in the monastic and lay life as patronesses and savouresses who are attuned to the needs and desires of their worshippers; the third section investigates the ascent of enlightened Tantric female Buddhas, such as Vajrayoginī and Chinnamundā, to the pinnacle of the pantheon, and their prominent role in the esoteric Buddhist soteriology (seventh to twelfth century CE). The study demonstrates that goddesses were intrinsic to Buddhist practice and paralleled its evolution in India as well as Nepal and Tibet.

The structure of the book is both its weakness and its strength. Spanning fifteen centuries and divided into twenty-two meticulously researched and beautifully written chapters, each dedicated to a different goddess, this book is a point of entry to the world of Buddhist goddesses. A pantheon, however, remains missing. In its stead, goddesses, at times only loosely connected to one another, are assembled to form what Shaw refers to as a “female pantheon” (p. 2).

IS THERE A FEMALE PANTHEON?

Shaw situates her research within the field of Goddess Studies – a feminist pursuit that emerged as an attempt to trace the neglected history of matriarchal deities and reinstate them in the pantheon, and also to examine the societies that worshipped them. Motivated by feminist agendas, these studies often seek to provide women with models of empowerment that are embedded in the religious systems that supported social imbalance. Under this theoretical rubric, the pantheon came to be seen as an arena of contention between the sexes. To correct the perception of imbalance between male and female divinities created by previous generations of scholars, those working within the field of Goddess Studies naturally focused solely on the female aspect of divinity. However, as a result, a complex mythological field in which various types of male and female deities in constant flux produce changing notions of gender and sexuality often is oversimplified, and deities are devoided of their multifacial nature. Following this ideological framework to illuminate the world of Buddhist goddesses, the book suffers from similar weaknesses. But Shaw touches on central thematic threads and inner structures of the pantheon and provides fascinating portraits of the goddesses, which are crucial to our understanding of Buddhism.

In the first section of the book we encounter the yakṣiṇīs, female nature spirits that were incorporated into Buddhism from indigenous cults and were part of a group of divine and demonic, male and female deities, known as yakṣa. Their worship was a major form of cultic activity, associated with geographical, political and cosmological notions, and also with fertility, thus rendering male and female aspects inseparable. The assimilation of the yakṣa into Buddhism and their subordination therein heralds the relations between Buddhism and local cults, which throughout Asia took the form of the conversion of local deities to Buddhism and their inclusion as protectors of the Buddhist faith. The role of the yakṣa thus first and foremost manifests the formation of a multi-layered Buddhist pantheon.

Examining the yakṣiṇīs without their male counterparts and placing them among Buddhist goddesses is problematic. But Shaw interestingly reveals the central role of the yakṣiṇī in the development of the iconography of Buddhist goddesses, such as Māyādevī, the Buddha's mother. Despite being deities of distinct types and origins, Shaw traces the feminine thread that connects these deities in form and function. The proximity of the iconography of Māyādevī to the yakṣiṇī in the scene of nativity not only renders the Buddha's birth divine, it also enthrones Māyādevī, similarily to the yakṣiṇī, as a goddess of fertility. The importance of the yakṣiṇīs also manifests itself in the rise of the translocal goddess Hārītī, who with her conversion to Buddhism, turned from a demoness and a devourer of infants to a bestower and protector of children, and was the first female deity to receive a central independent cult in Buddhism. As Shaw indicates, while being a yakṣiṇī, her iconography is distinct among the yakṣiṇīs, and she thus exemplifies the creation of individual Buddhist goddess cults. Such inter-relations among goddesses come to light in a gender-oriented analysis. However, as in the case of Hārītī and the yakṣiṇīs, the thread that connects female deities may belong to the realm of the demonic rather than the divine, a realm which is lost when the term goddess is applied throughout to portray an integrated pantheon. Hārītī indeed became a “goddess of motherly love” but her conversion was never complete and she retained some of her demonic aspects (as an epidemic deity, for instance). In this context it is worth asking why demonic female divinities, such as the dakinis, matrikas, or rakasīs, were excluded from the “female pantheon” assembled in this study, if such a term exists at all.

THE INDIVIDUAL MODEL

The structure of the book favours an individual approach to deities. The goddesses are portrayed separately from one another and much emphasis is given to their particular iconography. Shaw is also careful to correct past mistakes relating to the identification of the goddesses, which in Buddhist iconography often share traits, circumstances that have resulted in much scholarly misunderstanding. Such is the case of the four-armed goddesses Cundā and Prajñāpāramitā, whose proximate iconographies had led to such confusion. But as Shaw demonstrates, they can be distinguished from one another by the vessel in Cundā's hand, a detail that holds her identity.

At the same time, working towards the creation of an integrated female pantheon, Shaw's investigation also evidences the tension between the individuality of a deity and her structures of assimilation within the pantheon, which as she herself contends, renders female Buddhas as ultimately inseparable from one another. Shaw presents interesting cases of assimilation, refraction and dissolution of goddesses that unravel the intricate networks connecting them, which may be based on iconography, function, historical or cultic context. These networks challenge the individual model, and call for a structural analysis of the pantheon and of deities that often encompass multiple and contradictory faces and functions.

Cundā's rise and demise demonstrate the ambiguity, multiplicity and inter-changeablity of a goddess. Shaw suggests that Cundā's multiplicity of iconographies, that is, her inherent multi-facial nature, was the reason behind her demise when more specialized deities came to the fore. In Tibet, Shaw explains, Cundā disappeared as an individual deity, and based on their functional similarity as savouresses, she dissolved into Tārā, creating a combinatory deity known as Cundā-Tārā. Other cases, however, seem to indicate that a deity's individuality is beyond its function. Sitātapatrā, for instance, shared both attribute and function with the protecting goddess Aparājitā. The two goddesses emerged simultaneously and developed independently from one another. There seem to be no consistent rules in the pantheon, and as Shaw interestingly demonstrates, a deity's rise and fall often depend on reasons external to the mythology. Cundā emerged as a patroness of the first Pāla ruler and was widely worshipped throughout the Pāla dynasty (eighth to twelfth centuries CE) before her fall. Her case points to the significance of political factors in the lives of gods.

Despite the individual model favoured by Shaw, her study demonstrates that goddesses are ultimately inter-related entities. And perhaps more significantly, rather than entities connected solely by gender, her research points to complicated relations between polity and mythology, function and representation, ritual and social practice, and at the multiplicity inherent in a single deity, all of which are topics that require further investigation.