Female-authored texts are very rare in Indian Buddhism. Though there are numerous mentions of women in epigraphs as well as texts, there is only a single known work of explicit female authorship in the Indian Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions, namely the Pāli poetry-anthology Therīgāthā.
Yet, in the eighth to eleventh centuries a number of female masters appeared in the Buddhist Tantric tradition, fourteen of whom composed works that are of explicit female authorship. Nonetheless, the authorships of Tantric literature generally remain highly underresearched and questions of authenticity abound.
Some scholars have argued that women played no active role in Tantric Buddhism whatsoever or that women could not compose texts in certain genres that belonged to the male domain. Hence, the present lecture will examine the genres in which female Tantric masters are thought to have written in order to consider the question of the authenticity of female authorship.