Buddhist Goddesses of India. By Miranda Shaw. . Princeton University Press, 2006. 602 pages. $35.00.
摘要
Buddhist studies is a field that, like most other fields, has tended to emphasize some religious phenomena at the expense of others. Historically, the field of Buddhist studies has largely been textually focused, with a particular emphasis placed on works deemed to have philosophical or ethical import. On the other hand, practice has received much less attention. There has thus been a tendency to ignore the archeological record, which preserves evidence of what past communities actually did. The study of contemporary Buddhist communities has also been downplayed, and largely left to anthropologists. This tendency reflects what Gregory Schopen has termed the “Protestant presuppositions” of Buddhist studies.
The relative dearth of scholarship on Buddhist goddesses and the traditions of worship and ritual centering upon them is one of the consequences of the history of the logocentrism—and, arguably, the androcentrism—of the field. Depictions of “goddesses” (i.e., female beings, of likely divine or semi-divine nature) are prominent from the earliest to latest strata of the Buddhist archeological record in South Asia, and descriptions of them are also found within all of the canons of Buddhist literature. However, the literary record seems to indicate that the worship of Buddhist goddesses increased over time, gaining greatest strength during the tantric period, from the eighth century onward. Past generations of Buddhist scholars who sought to discover the “original” and “pure” form of Buddhism, free of “Hindu” influence and “superstitious” practices, typically overlooked the worship of goddesses, deeming it to be a latter development, one which was possibly “degenerate” and “un-Buddhist.”
Miranda Shaw's latest work is clearly intended to …
