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Wisdom of the Goddess: The Divine Feminine in South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art
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A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome back to the New Books and Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Falker. More importantly, it is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast Dr. Hilary Langberg, who is a visiting assistant professor in the department of Religion and Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College. She actually has curated a really fascinating online exhibit, indeed an exhibition called Wisdom of the Goddess, the Divine Feminine in South Asia. This is for the National Museum of Asian Art, the Smithsonian. It's an ongoing online exhibition. So not so much a book, but equally fascinating and perhaps even more far reaching. Welcome to Podcastle Reef.
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A
Thank you so much, Raj. Thank you for having me.
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B
Oh, my pleasure. I would love. We would love to hear a little bit about your academic journey. Right, like what, you know, you went from sort of caves and miscertaining to this. Tell us, you know, fill in the blanks for us.
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A
Yes. Well, I have to go back a little bit further and talk about how I came to academia, and that is through the knowledge of the power of the divine feminine in South Asia. I came from a Catholic background. Initially, I was baptized Catholic and my father was an evangelical when I was growing up. And once I got into my late teens, I started to question that. And I moved out to San Francisco on my own when I was 19 from Florida, where I grew up and met a woman named Shani Sharma, Chandni Sharma, and she is Hindu, grew up in Fiji, and she took me to a Durga temple for Navaratri. And I also was exposed to, you know, just going to places and seeing images of Durga and Kali. And I had no idea that, that there were places in the world where goddesses were worshiped. And this just kind of blew my mind and really started me on the path of questioning, not necessarily questioning my faith because I was already doing that, but just wanting to learn more about the traditions of South Asian religions and art history. And it just so happens that in San Francisco, there's an incredible collection at the Asian Art Museum there that used to be in the De Young. And that museum really was my motivation and inspiration for getting into academia and Studying it at UC Berkeley.
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B
Yeah, that's really, really fascinating. Sort of a number of things there. One, this, there's so much of this fascinating about innate thought, not least of which this ancient and striking notion that wait, God's a she. Wait, wait a minute, you know, God's a she. What, how's this possible in a patriarchal context? And this has been preserved and there's something both quite foreign and quite familiar with this concept. You know, you get a little hill of Shakti and you're hooked. And it really resonates because a lot of the teaching I do for out learners, very smart, often very smart and very spiritual learners, one of the most common areas of interest, I would say is all things Shakti, all things Goddess, various Goddess, whether, you know, Muslim goddesses and Devi Muhammad. My own dissertation topic and there's so much interest and I can completely understand why folks might be really hungry for different ways of contemplating divinity or contemplating even theology, philosophy through the lens of the temple. So really fascinating, you know, she roped you into to study.
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A
I don't think she realized it at the time, but it definitely planted a seed in me. And yeah, I ended up learning about Goddesses. And I did my undergraduate thesis on the origin of the Goddess Tara in, in the Western Deccan Caves in Maharashtra near Mumbai, Bombay, present day Mumbai. And so all the. So primarily at Kinhari is where we see these early images of the Goddess Tara. And I was questioning like, how do we know it's Tara? Why is she there? And that really set me off on trajectory of just academic inquiry for the next ten years at least. So I ended up doing my dissertation on that topic after I got an M.A. my M.A. is actually in South Asian art history and I focus on a sculpture at the Met Museum in New York City on Manjuva mandala. It's the 11th century stele of Manju Vajra, who's a tantric form of Manju Sri. So that, that helped me get my bearings and my foothold into how to write about the development of styles and sculpture and what the underlying meaning is there. And I wanted to know more about the underlying meaning. So I actually did my PhD in Asian studies and my supervisors were Janice Leoszko, who's an art historian, and Oliver Freiberger, who's a buddhologist. And so I've always tried to have one foot in religious studies and one foot in art history because that's where my interest really lies is bringing together the textual and the visual to understand the development of how we find Goddess worship in certain contexts, like Mahayana Buddhism in India.
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B
Yeah, that's great. So in the Tapestry of Hillary, we've got theology thread or sort of Indology, broadly, we've got the Goddess thread, we've got sort of images and text and the sort of the dialogue between them. Now help us understand how this ends up in the museum space or working in a museum space or even in terms of sort of like public scholarship in general. How does that thread fit into the tackle stream?
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A
Yeah, well, I had the incredible good fortune of being awarded a Buddhism Public Scholar Fellowship through the Robert H.N. ho Family Foundation. And what the scholarship or fellowship does. Did I say scholarship? I meant fellowship. What it does Is allow recent PhDs to go into institutions that are non academic or not traditionally considered academic, such as museums and Wisdom Publications has been one of the institutions. I know, Tricycle magazine is another. This year they have Lions Roar. So it basically allows the recent PhD graduate to bring their knowledge to one of these institutions and at the same time receive a whole new skill set that they wouldn't otherwise have, which is wonderful in a very tough, competitive job market. So what I did was I was able to teach at Bard for two and a half years and then I was at the National Museum of Asian Art for two years as a Buddhist and public scholar there, as the Buddhist and public scholar from 2022 to 2024. And I worked closely with the curators, especially Deborah diamond and Emma Stein, who are just wonderful, just wonderful mentors and really. And showed me the ropes and helped me to learn everything that a curator does from start to finish and building an exhibition. And what I did with this particular online exhibition, it was kind of my capstone project for the fellowship and I had to propose it to the museum's web team. And any sort of web feature has to be proposed. And so I had a proposal and I was allowed to kind of do my own, do it on my own and become the head curator of that exhibition after co curating with Emma and Deborah on an installation in the museum that's currently ongoing called the Art of Knowing. And it's reinstallation of their permanent exhibition, excuse me, of their permanent collection of both south and Southeast Asian and Himalayan art. And so it's kind of a spin off of that, but focusing just on goddesses. And it allowed me to bring together what was most salient in the museum's collection in terms of both Hindu and Buddhist goddesses. I wasn't able to bring in Jain goddesses because there wasn't enough material, but it was an incredible experience. And I was able to write labels and, you know, basically kind of intro chats for each goddess. So that if you look at the website, if you go to Google and just type in Wisdom of the Goddess, it'll come up. And it's the National Museum of Asian Art online exhibition. And. And there are nine goddesses, both in Hindu and Buddhist contexts. And I love that because it allows me to kind of problematize the way that scholars or people in general think of goddesses as being specifically Hindu or specifically Buddhist. And we can get into that in a minute. But if you click on each of the goddesses, it'll take you to their section and then you'll see a little selection of artworks for each. And there's also an instructive essay. So this is geared towards both college students and lifelong learners. And so there's an essay that can be used in a classroom and I should say also advanced high school students. So it's not just college students. There's a little essay that will take students through the basics of visual analysis, which is the fundamental sort of building block of art history. If it's not an art history class, that might be helpful. And also how these goddesses function in both Buddhist and Hindu contexts. So there's an informative essay for them to read, as well as a glossary and a bibliography for further reading.
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B
Yeah, there are a number of interesting points there to touch on. I would say the frame of, you know, the very fame of Wisdom of the Goddess. Can you tell us a bit about your eternally where your selection of that as an overarching frame, maybe even say more about the extent to which, hey, we can look at these quote unquote in the goddesses, such that while there might be demarcations, Allah, Buddhism versus Hinduism, really, this can nevertheless serve as a unit that kind of sort of transcends those boundaries.
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A
Yeah, and I didn't go very deep into that, although in my scholarship I do. But with goddesses like Saraswati, for example, or Lakshmi, who's also called Sri Lanka, we see Saraswati in the Vedas, we see her in Jainism, in her earliest known sculpture. And we also see her in a sutra called the Sutra Golden Light or Golden Radiance, Suvarna, Prabha, Suttama that I've written about. And so she doesn't belong to just one tradition. Historically, she actually has a pretty. And the same can be said for Sri or Lakshmi. And it's what's. What's interesting. I found that they also have a pretty strong presence in Japanese Buddhist culture because of the way that the sutras traveled there. So it's hard to. I'm teaching. Well, I just finished teaching a seminar called Goddesses of India, and it was interesting to try to get the students to understand that they aren't just belonging to one tradition or another, that they show up sort of because they're powerful. And then the major traditions like Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism, Jainism, those overarching religious traditions, I don't want to say, still incorporate them in some ways, or those who. The practitioners also worship them. So it happens in both directions, I think, because they're powerful, and so they don't necessarily belong to any one tradition. And again, so that's. I'll stop there.
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B
Yeah. Fascinating. So why the wisdom frame? Tell us about that.
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A
The wisdom frame. Okay, so the wisdom frame came from the frame of the Art of Knowing, that is the. In gallery exhibition that the Wisdom of the Goddesses is a sort of online cognate exhibition to. And Art of Knowing is following the flows of not only artistic making from South Asia to Southeast Asia to the Himalayas, but also how wisdom and knowledge figures into these religious traditions so importantly, so significantly. And it was interesting to frame the goddesses that way because we don't always see them framed in terms of wisdom. Some of them, like Prajnaparamhita, are also embody wisdom, but others, such as Kali, for example, you don't necessarily think of as a goddess of wisdom, but she's the supreme goddess in shocktism. So of course, she's all knowing, omnipotent. So that was a predetermined frame that actually came together really beautifully to encompass the nine goddesses in the exhibition.
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B
Yeah, There seems to be sort of a meta idea here that all of the goddesses, on some level, can be said to relate to knowledge or wisdom or insight. And yet at first glance, I imagine, especially for fung learners who may or may not have that knowledge or may be aware of, say, bands of goddesses of Mahavage, as, you know, wisdom of the Goddess. It's the wisdom of including goddesses, period. Right. Here's, you know, here's Goddess wisdom in the sense that, you know, it's. It is a meta sort of level of, you know, here is the wisdom that of including these various and whatever they may represent. So I think you mentioned it in the passing, but tell us, tell us the nine. Maybe say a bit about the. The choice of why these nine, the.
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A
Reason I chose the nine that I did. And I'm just going to look at the. The website. They're not all specific goddesses. I had to work with what was in the collection, and so that was the primary governing factor. So these are artworks from the 9th to, I believe, the 19th century, or maybe even the 20th century. It says 19th there. And they're from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. Like the in gallery exhibition. They are individual goddesses, but also there's a typology, like Yogenese and Dakanese is one of the nine, so not a specific goddess in that case. And then another is forms of Kali, because the exhibition, excuse me, the museum's collection had atypical, maybe what you might think of as atypical images of Kali and Mahavidyas. So I kind of snuck in a mahavidya there, a mahavidya goddess who is actually Tara, but who is very closely connected to Kali.
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B
Yeah, Mahavidyas certainly belong in an eximical wisdom of the goddess, either. India's great fierce country, sometimes fierce wisdom goddesses. So could you say a bit about. And you talk about it in passing, but you. You rely on the Devi Mahatma. You mentioned the Devi Mahatmya, particularly with Durga and Kali. Do you want to say a little bit about that?
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A
Yeah, I talk about the Devi Mahatmya in terms of Durga and her role in the text and how she gets her start in that specific Purana section of the Purana. Markandea Purana. Yeah, yeah. And I also talk about how Kali is believed to be sort of born from Dorgus forehead, I think. But that there. That she's very much her own goddess in her own. Right. Well, we first kind of see her in the Devi Mahatmya and the worship of Kali shifts and changes over time. So she's initially Chamunda and very emaciated, and she becomes this beautiful goddess, but still with these fearsome aspects and is very paradoxical in some ways, both mother and dangerous. And so she's an interesting, fascinating figure, actually, that I wanted to sort of, in a very short space that was available, try to unpack the breadth of her identity and power. And that starts in the Devi Mahatmya, certainly.
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B
I have a question for Moravir, but a logical training. Is there a tension perhaps in terms of Mahayana? And, you know, it could be my. My own perception, but the notion that sort of female bodhisattvas are rather sparse and yet we have the inclusion of these goddesses. Is there a tension there with the feminine divine?
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A
Do you See, Yeah. So what I. One of my major questions is, how is it possible that we have these major female bodhisattvas like Tara, in a tradition that initially prohibits the attainment of advanced levels of Bodhisattva hood in a female body? So it says in the Prajna paramita in 8,000 lines, the Astha Sahasrika Prajnaparnamita, that one has to be reborn in a male body in order to be reborn in a Buddha field like Abhirati, a Buddha field. So that creates a problem for the introduction of goddesses in Mahayana Buddhism, not only for female practitioners who want to become future Buddhas, but it also creates sort of an issue where when goddesses are showing up in these texts, they're often. I mean, there's a lot of very classic stories like the Naga Princess who gives her jewel to the Buddha. I think this is in the Lotus Sutra. And one of the disciples says, why don't you change your sex? And she does. It's just to show that how powerful she is, and she doesn't change it back. But then when we get to possibly a slightly later text or text in a different trajectory of thought, the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, the goddess does change her sex, and she's the goddess who lives in Vimalakirti's house. She says, obviously everything is empty and gender makes no difference. So that you see that sort of line of thinking in the early sutras and in the Gandha Viuha Sutra, which I study as one of the texts that I'll explain more into that I actually mined in my dissertation for this question, we see that the goddesses, there are 53 different Kalyana Mitras, or virtuous friends, who teach the pilgrim sudhana. And they're both male and female, and they're all bodhisattvas. They're all incredibly advanced and powerful bodhisattvas who can change their form at will and appear in the sky and penetrate infinite numbers of Buddha fields and Buddhist teachings. So here we have 11 goddesses. How is that possible? Is one question. And one of the ways that that happens is through this idea of emanation. And the other way is by, in a different sutra, the constitue of golden light. Where we see. That I referred to earlier, where we see Saraswati and Sri show up is their powerful rituals are couched in sort of a Buddhist hierarchy where the praise has to be given, the worship has to be given first to the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas and then to the goddess. Even though the specific ritual is focused on the Goddess, the ritual itself is focused on that specific goddess, and she's the one giving the benefits. She's then sort of. Her ritual is marked by who has to be given praise first. So there's that ritual hierarchy and this idea of the emanation of male bodhisattvas like Manjushri or Avalokiteshwara. And that's how the text authors, the Buddhist decision makers, sort of get around this prohibition of advanced female bodhisattvas initially. And they also don't call them bodhisattvas. Very rarely do we see these goddesses in the Mahayana Sutras called goddesses. They're sort of obliquely called goddesses. And maybe in the intro or it's never overt, and I'm just giving you two examples. But even when we see Tara in the Manjushriya Mulakalpa, which dates to about the 6th to 8th century, she's not called a Bodhisattva either. And of course, that doesn't last. And she really gains ground and becomes a figure of worship in her own right in about the 7th and 8th centuries and obviously becomes very important in Tibetan Buddhism.
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B
Is that the thread of your forthcoming book? There you go.
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A
Yes. So the book that I'm working on right now is called Goddesses of the Great the Centering of the Divine Feminine in Indian Buddhism. And I start. What's interesting, and this is kind of a challenge, I'll say, is to put the text into conversation with the visual material. We have to understand that the visual material doesn't exist before the late 5th and early 6th centuries at places like Kanhari. There are a few sculptures of Tara from Sarnat that are earlier. What's so valuable about the cave sculpture is that there, in situ, they're in their original place of production. We can see how the goddesses are situated next to the bodhisattvas, like Avalokiteswara or Buddhas, and what those visual. The ritual hierarchies look like in visual terms. So I'm thinking about these two threads, not only in the visual material, but also going back into the sutras in sort of a micro canon, if you will, like a smaller corpus of texts that the Manjushri Mulakalpa itself cites for resuscitation. So this includes the Gandhavuha, the Suture of Golden Light, the Suvarna Prabhasottama. It also talks about the Mahamayori Vidrajani I don't talk about that one too much, although I think I will. And I introduced another text called the. I'm blanking on the name right now. The curse of the podcast. I'm blanking on the name.
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B
That's all right. Just say another text.
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A
Yeah. So then it also mentions the Prajna Parmita, Dashta Sahasika, Prajna Paramita. But there's a 6th century text called basically the. I can't remember it right now, the Sarvottagta Adhisthana Sutra. There he is. There it is. That is not mentioned in the Manjushri Mulakalpa, but also has very similar rituals. So I'm looking at the development of the importance of goddesses in Mahayana Buddhism, but also how Mahayana is both proto Tantric, if you want to use that term, and develops into the tantric traditions via goddesses who are directly connected with mantras and embody mantras.
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B
Yeah, the associations and the overlaps between shaktas and tantra as even. Even in the. In Buddhist traditions. I mean, there really is a fast alien interplay there. What would you. So there's this beautiful curation that's available to new online. The link is in the podcast notes. Would you comment a bit about the online nature of this? I mean, what are the pros and cons? What do you make of this?
- [29:52]
A
I think the online exhibition is incredibly useful for people to have a resource to understand goddesses that's backed by scholarship. I was the lead curator, but also Deborah diamond and Emma Stein were there to make sure that the writing was beautiful and accessible and, you know, make sure I didn't color outside the lines, so to speak. So it's definitely an accurate and authoritative source and it's not something that you can easily find. So I think it fills a gap, especially for those who want to discuss goddesses in either of these religious traditions in the classroom. Whether it's our nart history course, our nert religions course. It does what I do in my scholarship and sort of bridges those two disciplines in a way that is also accessible. So that's definitely the upside. I say the downside is that it's not the same to see something online as it is in person. It's always a great idea to go to a museum if you happen to be in a city like Boston or Washington D.C. or San Francisco or Minneapolis or Cleveland. Go and see these wonderful sculptures in person and they'll inspire you and really can be life changing, as they were for me.
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B
Yeah, it's really fascinating tension. I'm not sure how that all of my work, 90% of my work these days, video talks, teaching, counseling, coaching, markets, podcasting, of course, for the most part strikes me as effective, knowing, as viable. And yet, you know, I, I take the, I take, I take the effort to, to travel for in person experiences because it's a different thing having retreat or an in person talk. So, you know, it's sort of, sort of a little bit of a brave new world that we're all charting and we're all making sense of this extraordinary tool called the Internet. The place in which we can technologically and not askingly project across spaces.
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A
Wonderful.
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B
Yeah. I've been loved to touch on something we touched at the beginning that I think you are well situated to comment on. And for lack of a better word, this notion of perhaps public scholarship or the extent to which, you know, I think a great many scholars historically are used to a particular audience at the writing floor in their niche. And of course the editors at press tiffs like SUNY or, or whatever will sort of maybe coax a little bit more of a broader articulation of their findings. You may speak to undergrads as you do at Bard College, or certainly they may go to conferences at the ar, et cetera, et cetera. And then folks like you and I for one, are able to toggle into the register of the lifelong learner. And maybe once upon a time, either that space might have been envisioned as a different sort of space in terms of level of engagement. But I can say that the vast majority of the adult learners who come to me, they have advanced ways. They're doctor, lawyers, engineers. Their brains work just fine. They're looking for solid content, rigorous content, but perhaps presented in a way that doesn't require advanced training in Hinduism. And I think I just, I don't really have a particular answer to mine. I just really note the synergy and the novelty and the vitality of the space you're holding. If there's a particular bridge that's not dissimilar for my own, I'd love your thoughts on that.
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A
You've said that beautifully. I had to learn or maybe unlearn how to write like a scholar for the museum space. And it actually made my writing much better because I was able to, I was able to realize because you only get 75 words for a label, don't tell the scholars. It may it you only get a certain amount of space and you have to make it, you know, as punchy and as accessible and not kind of leave the diacritics behind. I was, you know, hanging on to those diacritics for dear life beforehand before I made it to the museum and then realized that they don't need those at all. And it's, it's really the whole process opened my eyes to how much or how much more accessible the, the academic world can be in just the. The use of language and defining terms and maybe leaving, you know, gasp, Sanskrit, diacritic society or Tibetan, or just, just making it the words pronounceable and maybe defining the term that maybe people who don't have prior experience wouldn't know. So it forces me, it forced me to think about a broader audience and to not use terms that would make people feel like they didn't know enough to be in that context. You don't want to make people feel like they're lacking something and study. Yeah, exactly. And also I was able to take that into the classroom, back into the classroom after the fellowship ended, and realize that I can make my teaching more accessible in just certain easier ways that I wasn't doing before. And so I would urge academics not to make their work less rigorous, but just to think about audience and especially in teaching students in the classroom and maybe making their, their work also a bit more accessible. There are certain scholars I know who are tuned into that, but not typically making their work accessible in the level that is explained. And hopefully I'm making that clear. But it's just taking the time to think through how much people would actually know if they had no prior training. And it's not something that comes automatically to us as academics. It takes time to get into that headspace and also to stay. It's hard to kind of stay there, but I think it's possible and it ultimately will make. I think it's beneficial for both parties. It's beneficial for academics because I think people often see academia as something like that's not in touch with the public, that's out of reach, that's not important even because they're only speaking, talking to each other, and not trying to reach out and then teach the everyday person. If that resonates with me personally.
- [37:56]
B
It does resonate. So much of what I do is sort of translating and bridge building. I find myself, you know, on the same day, sort of in the same week. I may be speaking to undergrads, I may be speaking to lifelong learners. I may be speaking to public talk that is more from an edict perspective. I may be speaking to a group of practitioners and just sort of the code switching across all the registers. And it's actually mutually informative in terms of. It makes you really think cautiously about the registry in which one is speaking. And really that sweet spot, that sweet spot of really, really living into, breathing into the notion that we are making this accessible. Not because these people are teaching hyperbolic, not because it's a room full of dullards, it's a room full of intelligent people, often quite accomplished, but people who do not have a decade of a particular training and all of the jargon and apparatus and methodology that comes with that training. It's no different from when you have public intellectuals in, in medicine, in physics, who, whose rigorous sound. But they're able to communicate cutting edge ideas to audiences who are very much interested in a way where it's mutually beneficial because they're forced to think clearly about what this means without all of the jargon apparatus in their brain. And also the audience is now forced to accept the relevance and importance of this, of what's being said. And so I think you're absolutely right about that piece where, and I don't know it's necessarily that everyone's, certainly not everyone's called to be a public scholar, but I think that this, this public scholarship initiation is super important and I think probably will be growing because you've got the interested public who, you know, they now know, they now can tell that so much of what they get online is fast food. And they don't want fast food, they want some fine diet. You know, they're not from the culinary path, but they want, you know, and so there. So a lot of people are looking to separate the meat from the chaff in terms of credentialing and rigor in the sort of online learning and online situations. But it's a tension, it's a challenge, but it's really a useful challenge. And I think one of the first hoops to jump through is suspensing with the notion that accessibility necessarily amounts to dilution. Not at all of the ideas, I don't think so.
- [40:38]
A
I don't think it does. I think it just is a different framework of presentation. It takes a little bit of introductory explanation, but it's always incredibly striking to me how much people can respond and engage with this material, like just my students, for one, when we just take the time to. Even though it seems like this incredibly complex idea like emptiness or that they'll grasp onto it, the three bodies of the Buddha and how the goddesses are, you know, manifesting on earth from the dharmakaya and the Buddha fields and how that all works. And it blows my mind that when I make the effort to put that into as clear terms as possible, how those topics are, then those subjects are engaged with by students and mirrored back to me so that I can actually see what's important to them and what they're picking up on. And that helps me in my own writing and realizing like, yeah, yeah, I should definitely talk about that there's a gap in scholarship there that people aren't really realizing. So it shows what is possible in that dialogue that sort of maybe been skipped over because it was got to be too challenging in the past. And like I said, it's mutual, mutually beneficial. I think my students are definitely helping me to see how I can make write a book that is legible. That is legible. Absolutely, completely legible. But also incorporating things I hadn't thought to incorporate just because I'm so used to it in my own head that it wouldn't even necessarily be something I would mention like oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [42:45]
B
I've undergone it. I was recently teaching on Mahabharata talks and ideas on the opening frame, the gender major. Well, either way, I was teaching Ahmedabar and the online school and questions that were being asked really helped me to understand. Wait a minute, this needs to be an article. I take it all for granted. Right. I've taken all these insights for granted and there are questions and some of them are familiar with Mahabharata scholarship. We understand. Wait a minute. I'm taking all this for granted. But this needs to, this, this is, this is a, this is a frame of, an intellectual frame of my own that I'm adopting to, to make sense of this frame. And there, there is an, there is an internalized argument here that actually needs to be hashed out. You know, it's, it's really interesting. It's always so ironic to me. Actually one of the lifelong learners point me towards more focused scholarship.
- [43:41]
A
Exactly. That's exactly what I'm getting at. Yeah.
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B
Well, anyhow, it was great chatting with you about your journey, about the, the, the online exhibit, about your thoughts on public scholarship. Is there anything else that you hope you touch on for tonight?
- [43:57]
A
I want to touch on a couple of things. One is that I'm working on a project called the Tantric World. And I have to mention it, it's a book that I'm co editing with Hugh Urban, Anna Golovkova and shaman Hatley. That's 40 chapters and there are both up and coming scholars and eminent, well known scholars and cort men of all disciplines, including art history and textual studies and from different regions. So we're trying look at Tantra globally and that's going to be coming out. It's already under contract with Rutledge and it's coming out hopefully. Well, yes, early 2027. The other thing I wanted to point people to is folks who have recently graduated with their PhDs in Buddhist studies. Whether you have a background in art history or not, definitely check out the Buddhism public scholars Robert H.N. ho Buddhism Foundation. Let me start over. Robert H.N. ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholars Fellowship that's available through ACLS. So go to acls.org and the deadline is at the end of the month. There are wonderful opportunities in five different institutions, including museums and Tricycle, I think, and Lion's Roar. So I definitely want to give a shout out to the Buddhism Public Scholars program and thank them for everything that I've been able to do because of that.
- [45:53]
B
Fascinating. Well, that's great. We'll have to cover the Tantric world when it's out and I'm so intrigued to learn more about the thriving avenues of public scholarship Buddhism otherwise. Well, thank you very much for being on the podcast today.
- [46:08]
A
Thank you so much, Raj. It's such a pleasure to be on this podcast. I really appreciate you having me.
- [46:15]
B
You're welcome. No such thing. We've been speaking with Dr. Hilary Landberg on a brand new online exhibition Smithsonian called Wisdom of the Goddess, the Divine Feminine in South Asia, Southeast Asian and Himalayan Art. The link is in the podcast notes. By all means, have a look. Have a look at her glossary and various other teaching tools. Whether you are lifelong learner or just, you know, a window file of sorts or maybe even teaching a course. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating the wisdom of the Goddess. Take.