Mother’s Day offers an opportunity to reflect on what motherhood means in different religions and cultures. As a scholar of Buddhism and gender, I know how complicated Buddhist attitudes toward mothers can be.
The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, taught that family ties were obstacles to enlightenment. According to the Buddha, attachment to family causes suffering because family relationships eventually end and cannot offer lasting contentment. The main goal of Buddhism is to break the cycle of rebirth, which is characterized by suffering.
However, one family tie remained important for the Buddha – his relationship with his mother. Even after the Buddha left home, he continued to honor two mother figures – his biological mother, Maya, and his foster mother, known as Mahaprajapati Gautami in Sanskrit and Mahapajapati Gotami in the Pali language, which was used for early Buddhist scriptures in ancient India. These women played key roles in the Buddha’s life story, and they continue to inspire Buddhists today. Mahaprajapati specifically inspires women as the first Buddhist nun.
Many Buddhist scriptures describe reproduction and pregnancy in negative terms because they continue the cycle of rebirth. But Buddhist scriptures also express love and gratitude for mothers, especially the Buddha’s two mother figures.
Maya and Mahaprajapati were sisters who both married the Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, who ruled the region of Kapilavastu along the India-Nepal border. Maya’s name means “illusion,” which refers to a Hindu and Buddhist concept that the material world conceals the true nature of reality.
Miracles related to Maya appear throughout stories of the future Buddha Siddhartha’s conception, gestation and delivery. Siddhartha is the Buddha of the current world cycle, but in Buddhist tradition there were other Buddhas in the past and there will be more Buddhas in the future. Each one goes through many rebirths before they attain Buddhahood, and each Buddha’s final rebirth follows the same pattern. According to Buddhist texts, Buddhas-to-be wait for the right time to be born, they choose their own parents, and they are not conceived through sexual intercourse.
Early Buddhist texts claim that Siddhartha chose Maya as his mother because of her purity and entered her right side in the form of an elephant while she was sleeping. According to some Buddhist scriptures, during Maya’s pregnancy the future Buddha never actually touched her womb, which was considered impure in early Indian Buddhism. When Siddhartha was born, he is said to have emerged from Maya’s right side as she stood, holding onto a tree branch.
Maya died seven days after her son’s birth, meaning that she did not live to see him become an enlightened Buddha. As the Buddha, even though Siddhartha encouraged his followers to leave domestic life and cut family ties, he never forgot his birth mother.
Thanks to her good karma, Maya had been reborn in the heavens as a god, but in Buddhism gods are not as spiritually advanced as Buddhas. The Buddha used his spiritual powers to travel to the heavens, where he preached to Maya and encouraged her progress on the Buddhist path.
One Chinese text claims that Maya spontaneously lactated upon hearing her son’s words, showing that the bond between mother and son remained strong even after her death.
Siddhartha’s aunt Mahaprajapati became his foster mother after Maya died. She cared for the young Siddhartha and breastfed him, having just given birth to her own biological son, Nanda.
When Siddhartha was preparing to leave home to follow a spiritual path, the chariot driver tried to convince him to stay by reminding Siddhartha how Mahaprajapati nursed him and telling Siddhartha he should be grateful for her motherly kindness.
Siddhartha left home anyway, which caused Mahaprajapati to collapse out of grief. According to the Mahavastu, the earliest Sanskrit biography of the Buddha, her “eyes, as a result of her tears and grief, had become covered as with scales, and she had become blind.” It was only after Siddhartha returned as the Buddha that her sight was restored.
At around the same time as the Buddha’s return to his kingdom of Kapilavastu, his father Suddhodana died, making Mahaprajapati a widow. The books with rules for Buddhist monks and nuns, known as the Vinaya, report that Mahaprajapati approached the Buddha to ask whether women like her, as well as women whose husbands had become monks, could leave home to join the Buddha’s monastic order.
The Buddha eventually agreed to this request but warned that including women as nuns would cut short the lifespan of Buddhist teachings in the world from 1,000 years to 500 years. Mahaprajapati became the first Buddhist nun, reaching enlightenment before passing away at the age of 120.
Scholars of Buddhism do not necessarily treat this episode as literally true, but instead see it as a reflection of mixed attitudes toward admitting women as nuns in the early Buddhist community. These mixed attitudes can still be seen today – for example, in the unwillingness to reinstate the order of nuns in Southeast Asia, which died out centuries ago.
In Buddhism, nuns must be ordained by a group of 10 fully ordained monks and fully ordained nuns. An order of nuns still survives in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, where Mahayana Buddhism is practiced. However, the monastic leaders in Southeast Asia, where Theravada Buddhism is practiced, decided that Mahayana nuns could not ordain Theravada nuns, leaving countries such as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar without fully ordained nuns.
Both Maya and Mahaprajapati were loving mothers in the Buddha’s life story, but it is Mahaprajapati who has remained more of an inspiration for Buddhist women.
Reiko Ohnuma, a scholar of South Asian Buddhism, argues that Maya is remembered in Buddhist tradition as an idealized, if passive, maternal figure. Her death shortly after the future Buddha’s birth serves as a reminder that life is impermanent and characterized by suffering.
In contrast, Mahaprajapati lived a full life and played an active role in both raising the future Buddha and in advocating for women to join the monastic community. Early Buddhists may not have fully supported the inclusion of women in the Buddhist monastic community, but the nuns’ order was established nonetheless.
Mahaprajapati made this opportunity possible thanks to her unique position as the Buddha’s foster mother.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Megan Bryson, University of Tennessee
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Megan Bryson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
