Devotional tradition did not leave Bhrikuti as an ordinary queen. Later Tibetan Buddhism reads her, alongside Wencheng, as a human emanation of Tara, the bodhisattva of compassionate action who appears throughout Tibetan practice in many colored forms. Bhrikuti is paired with Green Tara and Wencheng with White Tara, so that the two foreign queens who married Songtsen Gampo and are credited with seeding Buddhism in Tibet become, in retrospect, the bodhisattva herself acting through history rather than two separate historical women who happened to favor the new religion.
This kind of identification, where a historical or legendary person is read as the earthly form of an already worshipped deity, is a recurring pattern in Tibetan Buddhism, and it does real devotional work: it lets a foundational national story be told as an act of the bodhisattva's compassion reaching into Tibet at the moment of its formation, rather than as a matter of seventh century diplomacy and dynastic marriage alone. Songtsen Gampo himself receives the same treatment, identified in later tradition as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion of whom Tara is sometimes described as an aspect or a tear, so that king and queens together become a single divine family enacting the introduction of the dharma to Tibet.
The name Bhrikuti itself, meaning furrowed brow, is also the name of a fierce faced form of Tara found independently in Buddhist iconography across South and Central Asia, which some scholars think may have encouraged, or even originated, the identification of the queen with the goddess rather than the other way around.