Collett, Alice. Women in Early Indian Buddhism: Comparative Textual Studies. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2014. Print.

In beginning my search for the perfect “Shelfie” book, I used the keyword “Buddhism” to find the area in the library where the books about Buddhism were located. I knew I wanted to find a book about Buddhist women, so I chose the book Women in Early Indian Buddhism. I chose this book because for my research paper, I would like to compare and contrast women in Buddhism with women in Hinduism, so I thought beginning to assess some potential sources wouldn’t hurt.

In the Table of Contents, I found chapters about the Order of Nuns, female sexuality in Buddhism, womanly virtue, marriage, Nanda (Sister of Buddha), and other similar topics pertaining to women’s role in Buddhism. Flipping through the book, I discovered many graphics and images to enhance understanding of the text on the opposite page. I expected there to be many quotations and excerpts from several early Buddhist texts, as the subtitle of the book is Comparative Textual Studies. This reminded of the work we’ve done in class where we have extracted information about Buddhist women from the ancient texts, rather than reading a list of facts about them. Other texts surrounding this book were titles such as “Buddhist Women in Social Justice”, “Buddhist Goddesses of India”, “Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet”. After seeing these titles, I am even more inclided to pursue this topic and hope that there are similar titles in the Hinduism section of the library.