Wendy Garling

The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The first full biography of Mahaprajapati Gautami, the woman who raised the Buddha--examining her life through stories and canonical records. The Woman Who Raised the Buddha tells the life story of the Buddha's adoptive mother, Mahaprajapati. She is the only mother he 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 Buddha's biography, this detail remains consistent across all Buddhist traditions and literature. Most present-day accounts are one-off stories or story fragments that focus on Mahaprajapati's life as a nun. The Woman Who Raised the Buddha looks at her entire life, with attention to her early years as a laywoman in her role as sister, queen, matriarch, and mother, as well as her later years as foremost nun and preceptor to the sangha of nuns. For the first time, her life is woven into a single narrative, drawing from story fragments and canonical records. The Sanskrit and Pali sources open windows into the past, revealing just how exceptional Mahaprajapati's role was in helping the Buddha establish an equal fourfold community of lay and monastic women and men. Mother to the Buddha, mother to early Buddhist women, mother to the Buddhist faith, Mahaprajapati's journey is finally presented as one interwoven with the founding of Buddhism.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Shambhala
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. März 2021
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 225mm x 150mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 408g
• ISBN-13: 9781611806694
• ISBN-10: 1611806690
• Artikelnr.: 60613840

Autorenporträt

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 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. For many years Wendy has taught women's spirituality focusing on Buddhist traditions, while also pursuing original research into women's stories from ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature. As a freelance writer and editor, Wendy was on the editorial team at the Boston Women's 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 Wendy's 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 Buddhism's 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 [e-mail].