I received the picture of Tara which forms the frontispiece of this book from Anna (Allott) when I was a couple of months into my research on Myanmar. The picture had been drawn by Aung San Suu Kyi in the early 1980s and sent to Anna as a printed card on the occasion of the new year of 1993. It was accompanied by a poem extolling the beauty of Tara by the Fifth Dalai Lama and a touching message from Dr Michael Aris on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi who was then serving a long sentence of house arrest. The picture took me by some surprise, not only at Aung San Suu Kyi's artistic skills of which I had been unaware but because the Tara I met here was nothing like the Hindu goddess I knew since a child. The Tara who adorned our family altar and in front of whom my father had been in the habit of saying a quick prayer for protection before he dashed off for his day's work had looked far more fierce. She wore a garland of severed heads and her unblinking third eye sent shivers down my spine. The Tara Aung San Suu Kyi had drawn formed the heart of Mahayana Buddhism. She was far gentler, her right hand lifted in a gesture of benevolence, her eyes bestowing encouragement and blessings on all sentient beings. She was obviously a part of the crucial process of adaption by which imported ideologies and deities were localised by the Buddhist societies of South and Southeast Asia. Was she also a part of the gender sensitivity to which Andaya refers while writing of Hindu deities who had been subsequently divested of their androgyny and who were central to Southeast Asia's religious history? Perhaps yes.

For me the new Tara I encountered was an embodiment of the centuries of cultural exchange between India and Southeast Asia on which was founded the early civilizations of the region. In equal measure she personified human virtues of compassion and courage which remained extremely relevant to the subject matter of this book. I had read of Sujata or Maddi but these images of virtue and kindness from Buddhist literature were more than countered by other jataka narratives which portrayed women as seductresses, hindering men's spiritual progress with their feminine wiles.