Women in the
Buddha’s Life

Resources for discovery, practice, and reflection

Introduction
What you will find here

The Buddha is remembered as suggesting that a life well-lived stands on two legs: “focused attention” (manasikāra) and “the voice of another” (paratoghosa). The latter points to anything, including texts, that can engender a change in one’s way of seeing and engaging the world, indeed engender a change in how one lives.

We plan to add two new modules per month, totaling 16 modules. Please check this website often for the latest stories and resources!

On this website, you will find stories about some of the women who were part of the Buddha’s life: his birth mother, his adoptive mother, his wife, as well some of his disciples. Their stories are gathered here as instances of “the voice of another,” and we hope they will serve as resources to help you reflect on how you see the world and how you live in it. Some of the stories found on this website are familiar, others are little known. They are from a variety of Buddhist traditions, although most of them come from South Asia.

Why gather these stories here? Why read them? Why reflect on them? Women’s voices are rarely given prominence in Buddhist literature, but they are part of the Buddha’s heritage, and they illuminate for us new or overlooked facets of the Buddha’s teachings. All Buddhist traditions agree that what the Buddha taught is not only true, it is always useful. Stories about women who were part of the Buddha’s life have these qualities too: they are true and they are useful. In them and through them, we can discover new sources of inspiration for how to think, how to imagine, and how to live.

When what we read in stories about the women in the Buddha’s life is absorbed and transformed in our thoughts and deeds, we discover the stories’ usefulness as well as their truth in our lives.

Prince Siddhartha (the future Buddha) and his wife, Gopa Image from Candi Borobudur, Java, Indonesia

The other leg that a life well lived stands on, “focused attention”—the activity of sustained reflection—is key if whatever we read is actually to become absorbed and transformed in our thoughts and deeds. Becoming self-conscious about how we read can help to prepare the mental ground that can encourage and enable focused attention to happen.

To this end, in addition to stories of women in the Buddha’s life themselves, you will find on this website a variety of resources and exercises to help you engage the stories on your own or with others. These are offered to encourage you to practice different ways of engaging the stories. For example, there are audio-files for each story that will allow you to hear the story being read aloud. You might try listening to the story being read aloud to see how this changes how you engage and absorb the story.

Some of the resources present practices that can be done on your own or together with others. Of course, you may create helpful reading practices of your own, and if you do, we hope you will share them with us, so we can share them with others. Other resources found with each story provide background information about the source of a story, identifications of persons named in it, glossaries, and suggestions for further reading.

The Bodhisattva enters Queen Maya’s Womb Image from Candi Borobudur, Java, Indonesia

Reflecting on Pronouns

One reading practice should be done with all of the stories gathered here.

The activities of focused attention and sustained reflection are key if whatever we read in these stories is actually to become absorbed and transformed in our thoughts and deeds. There may be no better place to begin focused attention and sustained reflection than by noting how gender appears in pronoun usage in the stories. 

The choice of pronouns in the translations follows that in the original languages of the stories, but the process of absorbing and transforming their lessons in our thoughts may be aided by experimenting, for example, with substituting gender-neutral pronouns, such as zie or the singular they, whenever “she” or “he” occurs in a translation; a “she” or a “he” is always accompanied in English by the tacit dichotomy of “he and she.” 

The practice of pronoun substitution can create room for other gender identities, both for the characters in the stories (whom we can imagine are frustrated themselves that the languages in which their stories are told do not have a gender-neutral or third-gender pronoun available, just as English historically did not, and thus misidentifies them) as well as for us readers of the stories (whatever gender we choose to use to self-ascribe ourselves). Experimenting with pronoun substitution when reading the stories can enlarge and enrich what we see in them, and it can nourish sustained reflection on their lessons. Indeed, this practice can enable the stories to say more to us than they actually articulate, and this is part of how what we read becomes absorbed and transformed in our lives.

A Note on
Transliteration

Transliteration in the translations of words from the original languages follows prevailing scholarly standards, such as those that are employed in the The Murty Classical Library of India for languages of South Asia, but without the use of diacritics. In the case of proper names, including the names of persons, places, doctrines, and the like, quasi-phonetic forms are used.

Gautami looking after Siddhartha Image from Candi Borobudur, Java, Indonesia

Thank You

We are grateful to The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation and Harvard Divinity School for their generosity in making the construction of the website possible.

About the
Women in the Buddha's Life Team

Wendy Garling

Wendy Garling is the author of the award-winning biography of the Buddha’s adoptive mother, The Woman Who Raised the Buddha, the Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati, with foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (2021, Shambhala Publications), and Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha’s Life (2016, Shambhala Publications), a groundbreaking new biography of the Buddha that relates his journey to awakening through the stories of Buddhism’s first women. She has a BA from Wellesley College and MA specializing in Sanskrit language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Wendy has studied with teachers of different schools and lineages, foremost her refuge lama His Holiness the 16th Karmapa, her kind root lama, the late Sera Je Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama whom she first met in 1979. In 1991-92, she coordinated the Georgia chapter of the International Year of Tibet bringing Tibetan cultural and religious events for the first time to Atlanta and Emory University.

In 2023, in the company of guest teacher Venerable Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, Wendy led a first-of its-kind 9-day pilgrimage from sacred sites in Buddhism’s Motherland of Nepal to Vaishali, India, tracing the footsteps of Mahaprajapati and the first Buddhist women. In addition to traveling to the traditional Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India, she has journeyed with Lama Tsultrim Allione to the sacred sites of Machig Labdron in Tibet.

Wendy lives in Concord, Massachusetts and can be reached at wendy.garling@yahoo.com.

Charles Hallisey

Charles Hallisey is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School where he teaches about Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist ethics as well as Pali language and literature.

His translation of the Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women was published in the Murty Classical Library of India in 2015.

Georgia Kashnig

Georgia Kashnig is a Zen practitioner, a dancer, and a facilitator of sacred reading spaces. They received an MTS in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School, an MA in the Regional Studies, East Asia department at Harvard University, and they are currently a doctoral student in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. Their research focuses on Chinese Buddhist literature, disability studies, queer theory, and developing contemplative methods of reading that foster reflection, connection, and transformation.

Janet Surrey

Janet Surrey, PhD is an Insight Dialogue Teacher. She teaches Insight Dialogue retreats worldwide and leads a longstanding practice group in the Boston area. Her first meditation teacher was Vimala Thakar. She has practiced in the Insight tradition for over 30 years and trained as a Community Dharma Leader at Spirit Rock.

Since 2007, Jan has worked intensively with Gregory Kramer and is currently serving on the Teachers Council of the Insight Dialogue Community. Jan is a practicing clinical psychologist and founding scholar of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is on the faculty and board of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. She is the author of The Buddha’s Wife: The Path of Awakening Together.