The Woman Who Raised the Buddha, The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati
By Wendy Garling
Mar 23, 2021
ISBN 9781611806694
Shambhala Publications
From the Publisher:
About The Woman Who Raised the Buddha
The first full biography of Mahaprajapati Gautami, the woman who raised the Buddhaâexamining her life through stories and canonical records.
Mahaprajapati was the only mother the Buddha ever knew. His birth mother, Maya, died shortly after childbirth, and her sister Mahaprajapati took the infant to her breast, nurturing and raising him into adulthood. While there is a lot of ambiguity overall in the Buddhaâs biography, this detail remains consistent across all Buddhist traditions and literature.
In this first full biography of Mahaprajapati, The Woman Who Raised the Buddha presents her life story, with attention to her early years as sister, queen, matriarch, and mother, as well as her later years as a nun. Drawing from story fragments and canonical records, Wendy Garling reveals just how exceptional Mahaprajapatiâs role was as leader of the first generation of Buddhist women, helping the Buddha establish an equal community of lay and monastic women and men. Mother to the Buddha, mother to early Buddhist women, mother to the Buddhist faith, Mahaprajapatiâs journey is finally presented as one interwoven with the founding of Buddhism.
About the Author
From her page on the publisherâs website.
Wendy Garling is a writer, mother, gardener, independent scholar, and authorized dharma teacher with a BA from Wellesley College and MA in Sanskrit language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddhaâs Life (2016, Shambhala Publications), a groundbreaking new biography of the Buddha that relates his journey to awakening through the stories of Buddhismâs first women. For many years Wendy has taught womenâs spirituality focusing on Buddhist traditions, while also pursuing original research into womenâs stories from ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature. As a freelance writer and editor, Wendy was on the editorial team at the Boston Womenâs Health Collective for the 2005 edition of Our Bodies Ourselves and several subsequent BWHC publications. She also wrote business articles for The Palladium Group, published through Harvard Business Publishing.
A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Wendy has studied with teachers of different schools and lineages, foremost her refuge lama His Holiness the 16th Karmapa (who gave her the name Karma Dhonden Lhamo), her kind root lama, the late Sera Je Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama whom she first met in 1979. From 1991-92 she coordinated the Georgia chapter of the International Year of Tibet, helping to bring many Tibetan cultural and religious events to Atlanta and Emory University. Pilgrimage has played an important role in Wendyâs life: in 2007 she journeyed to the sites of women saints in Tibet, and in 2012 and 2018 to sacred sites of the Buddha in India. Her dream is to bring back the stories of Buddhismâs first women, reawaken their voices, and ensure that they are not just remembered, but valorized as integral to the roots of Buddhism. Wendy lives in Concord, Massachusetts and can be reached at wendy.garling@yahoo.com.
Book Reviews
Interview
Video
- Wendy Garling on Mahaprajapati (Vimeo, 9 min.)
- Mothers in the Buddhaâs Lifestory, Wendy Garling and Prof. Vanessa Sasson LumbiniMuseum.org (Youtube)
From the Introduction, p. 38
Assembling the stories of Mahaprajapati for this book was like making a crazy quilt, with swatches of different sizes, colors, patterns, and textures, some tattered and torn, others like new, spread out on a table then pieced together with threads of the aforementioned instinct, intuition, and common sense. By no means a conventionalâand certainly not an academicâapproach, but one that allows for each piece to take its place in a whole that would be greater than the sum of its parts. Too, this method allows for new ideas, patterns, and stories to emerge. That said, many gaps and inconsistencies in Mahaprajapatiâs story persist despite my best efforts to present the arc of her life and at least begin to color in those areas that have been neglected, such as her years as a sister, queen, and mother before she ordained as a nun. As always in the vast and fascinating corpus of Buddhist literature, there is plenty of room for further research, translation, and discourse. May this book provide a helpful resource. May it also provide an entry point for a deeper understanding of the subjective layers, such as motherâs love, that became woven into the foundations of Buddhism.
Related primary texts cited in the book
- The Stories about the Foremost Elder Nuns (AN & AA 8.51-53)
- Three Discourses concerning MahÄpajÄpatÄ« GotamÄ« (AN 8.51-53)
- Therigatha with commentary, Psalms Of The Sisters, By Mrs. Rhys Davids, M.A.
- The Mahavastu (great story) by J. J. Jones | 1949
- Legends of the Buddhist Saints, ApadÄnapÄli, Translated by Jonathan S. Walters, Whitman College
- The NidÄnakathÄ, or Introduction to the JÄtaka Stories
- The Buddha Carita or The Life of the Buddha E.B. Cowellâs translation of AĆvaghoáčŁaâs Buddhacarita
- The Play in Full [Lalitavistara]. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2013.
Is anyone else reading this book? Iâd love to hear your thoughts. The author uses both EBTs and later texts so I thought it was appropriate to discuss here.