Dear Friends,
This week Annie will facilitate.
We will explore our mindfulness/Buddhist ancestors, focusing on one of our spiritual ancestors, the mother of the Buddha, also known as Mahāpajāpatī Gotami, and her students.
Mahāpajāpatī was not the biological mother of Siddhartha, but she raised him from the time he was only a few days old, after the death of her older sister Maya after she gave birth to Siddhartha.
Pajāpatī and her sister Maya were both married off to a chief of the Sakya clan, Suddhodana, and lived with him in the capital town of Kapilavatthu. Maya became pregnant and when it was time to give birth, she traveled to her hometown, as was the custom. They stopped at Lumbini for a rest, and Maya gave birth to Siddhartha under an asoka tree.
After Maya's death, Pajāpatī raised Siddhartha as her own child and said good-bye to him when he left home as a young man and new father. When he returned to Kapilavatthu after his enlightenment, Pajāpatī greeted him warmly, and listened to his teachings.
Eventually, Pajāpatī became a student of her son. As a result of her wisdom, she became the one who women came to seeking advice and support. Many of these women had been left by husbands who were looking for enlightenment many of whom had become monks in the Buddha's sangha.
Eventually, Pajāpatī realized that she and the other women without familial responsibilities would best be able to continue on the path to enlightenment by becoming monastics themselves, and living and practicing with the Buddha. She brought "five hundred" women with her to ask the Buddha whether they could ordain. Until then, only men had been allowed to ordain and join the sangha.
At first the Buddha said no. But when his attendant Ananda reminded him of the non-dual nature of his teachings ("Aren't women competent? Can't they understand the same as men?"), he allowed it, and Pajāpatī and the women formed the first female monastic order. While the rules for monastics remained imbalanced toward the men, Pajāpatī did her best to change what she could.
When Pajāpatī died, many miracles occurred which were said to be equal to those that happened when the Buddha passed.
There is a book of gathas written by these first female monastics called the Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. It is part of the Pali canon, but very rarely referenced (from my somewhat limited experience.)
Below are a few of the gathas written by the women that we can read together, inviting these women ancestors to support and be with us in our sangha.
Pajāpatī:
For a long time I've wandered
through lives, being mother, father, brother, son, grandparent,
never understanding things or finding what I need.
But that is done. Shattered is the round of rebirth. This is the last body.
No more Pajāpatī shall come to be!
---
Dantika
Having come out
from where I had spent the day on Mount Gijjhakuta,
I saw an elephant on the reiverank that had come out
from the river it had plunged into.
A man holding a goad told the elephant, "Hold up your foot."
and the elephant put its foot forward and the man climbed on.
I saw how the untamed was tamed,
how the animal was ruled by the human.
I concentrated my mind,
I went to the forest just for that.
---
Soma (responding to Mara saying that it is not possible for a woman to reach the place that sages reach):
What does being a woman have to do with it?
What counts in that the heart is settled
and that one sees what really is.
What you take as pleasures are not for me,
the mass of mental darkness is split open.
Know this, evil one, you are defeated, you are finished.
---
Mittakali
Life is short,
old age and illness already crush me,
there's no time to waste
before this body is broken by old age.
Looking at a person and
seeing that a person is made only of impersonal parts,
seeing those as they changed over time,
waxing and waning,
I stood up, my mind freed,
the Buddha's teaching done.
---
with love,
annie.
**Read an excerpt from the introduction to The Hidden Lamp, a book about our Buddhist women ancestors - CLICK HERE.
(books used: Therigatha translated by Charles Hallisey; Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 years of Buddhist Wisdom by Sallie Tisdale; First Buddhist Women:Poems and Stories of Awakening by Susan Murcott.)