Böcker av Wendy Garling

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.

A contemporary and provocative examination of the life of the Buddha highlighting the influence of women from his journey to awakening through his teaching career--based on overlooked or neglected stories from ancient source material. In this retelling of the ancient legends of the women in the Buddha’s intimate circle, lesser-known stories from Sanskrit and Pali sources are for the first time woven into an illuminating, coherent narrative that follows his life from his birth to his parinirvana or death. Interspersed with original insights, fresh interpretations, and bold challenges to the status quo, the stories are both entertaining and thought-provoking—some may even appear controversial. Focusing first on laywomen from the time before the Buddha’s enlightenment—his birth mother and stepmother, his co-wives, and members of his harem when he was known as Prince Siddhartha—then moving on to the Buddha’s first female disciples, early nuns, and to female patrons, Wendy Garling invites us to open our minds to a new understanding of their roles.