Susan Sinberg Landesman ’82
Susan Sinberg Landesman ’82, a New York City-based scholar and educator, is author of “The Tārā Tantra: Tārā's Fundamental Ritual Text” (American Institute of Buddhist Studies and Wisdom Publications, 2020).
The volume is an English translation of the first half of the Tārā-mūla-kalpa,
a collection of Buddhist rituals, teachings, mantras, and meditations that capture
the emergence of the female Buddha Tara in seventh-century India. Landesman has nearly
completed a second volume, supported by a Critical Editions and Scholarly Translations
grant by the Ho Family Foundation.
In these early texts, Tara is always paired with Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion. “A myth states that she was born from tears of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara as he looked down at all the suffering,” Landesman says. “From those tears, Tara emerged inside a lotus. She is connected to him.”
As Tara’s popularity grew across Southeast Asia and Tibet, she became an independent goddess, revered as the “Mother” of the Tibetan people — serving as a meditation deity to practice compassion and loving kindness, realize emptiness, and protect devotees from danger.
“The Tara Tantra” developed out of Landesman’s dissertation, a partial translation of the Tārā-mūla-kalpa, featuring Tara in ancient Buddhist art and religion. Over the years, she translated the entire text for publication.
Hundreds of texts on Tara have been translated from Tibetan to English. So, why wasn’t one of the oldest texts on the female Buddha translated into English until now?
One reason, Landesman suggests, is because the original Sanskrit text was lost after it was translated to Tibetan, making it nearly impossible to catch scribal errors. There is also no known commentary on the text to aid the translation process. Her book mentions strategies used to solve problems of interpretation.
Landesman, originally from Pennsylvania, was an art major at Skidmore who earned her master’s degree in art history and her Ph.D. in Indian and Tibetan languages and cultures at Columbia University.
She mentions the many mentors she has had along the way, including Francois-Auguste de Montêquin, an art history professor at Skidmore who taught ancient non-Western traditions, including pre-Columbian, African, Islamic, and Asian art. “I think I found myself when I took his class, and he became an important mentor,” she says.
