The empress, like many other rulers at the time, legitimized her reign through Buddhism, portraying herself either as a ...

In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager Ling ruled over an empire called the Northern Wei.

As I argue in my book, she did so by capitalizing on the idea that first her son, and then her granddaughter, were thought of as the bodhisattva Maitreya, a being of infinite compassion who is ...