The Green Goddess Who Won Over a Skeptic

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha by James William Coleman (Bloomsbury Academic)

I’ll admit I opened Searching for Tara expecting a certain kind of book. The subtitle, the lotus on the cover, the foreword by a Tibetan Buddhist lama: everything signaled the sort of gentle spiritual uplift that goes down easy and leaves no trace. I was wrong, and I was wrong by page one.

The book begins not with incense but with an operating room. In 2016, James William Coleman, a sociologist of religion who had spent his career studying how other people believe, went in for routine cataract surgery and came out with a detached retina. Three more emergency surgeries followed, then a gas bubble in his eye and a doctor’s order to keep his head face-down for three weeks. So he sat cross-legged with his forehead on his desk, eight hours a day, terrified of going blind, and did the only thing he knew how to do: he meditated. Eventually he landed on White Tara, a figure he barely knew, and something happened that he still can’t fully explain. The barriers dissolved, he writes. After that, the fear stopped mattering the way it had.

What follows is Coleman’s attempt to understand what hit him, and the attempt is the book. He is too much a scholar to simply testify, so he goes looking for Tara through archaeology, ethnography, mythology, and the history of religion, from the cave paintings of the Paleolithic through the goddess cultures of Old Europe, the rise of the jealous male gods, the Axial Age, and the strange, transgressive tantric movement of medieval India where Tara took her current form. It is a lot of ground for a short book, and Coleman covers it with the brisk confidence of someone who taught this material for decades. I learned things on nearly every page.

Two things kept me reading past the history. The first is Coleman’s refusal to sand down Tara’s edges. Most Western readers know her as the serene green figure of yoga-studio art. Coleman insists on the other Taras too: the one in rural Bengal who still receives goat sacrifices, the one who stands on a corpse devouring entrails, the one who, in a Hindu text, “likes blood.” His argument is that a spirituality with only the gentle Tara is exactly the kind of half-feminine the patriarchy has always been comfortable with, and that we lose something real when we accept it.

The second is the book’s central idea, drawn from the Jungian Erich Neumann: that the human psyche has moved from the Goddess to the Hero to something not yet fully born, and that Tara, serene but with one leg extended to leap into the world, is the clearest image we have of what comes next. You don’t have to buy this to find it bracing. Coleman himself hedges, calling his account “as much a myth as a statement of fact.” I found the honesty disarming.

The final chapter hands the reader an actual practice, and the appendix a text to do it with. I haven’t tried it. But I have, more than once since finishing, caught myself picturing a green woman with her foot forward, ready to move. That is more than most books leave behind.

Nicole Killian