Tathālokā Therī
December 7, 2015
This afternoon and evening i had the good fortune to join for the last session of the UC Berkeley Seminar in Buddhism and Buddhist Texts: "Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī" with Jan Nattier. It was the last session and Karen Muldoon-Hules was guest lecturer.
What a great opportunity to learn from these excellent scholars on ancient bhikkhunis and women in Buddhism!
Below is a description of the Seminar.
"Among the relatively small number of women whose names appear in the literature of early Buddhism, one of the best known is Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī (Pāli Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī). As a lay woman, she is renowned for having been the foster mother of the future Buddha; later in life she is celebrated for being the first woman to become a Buddhist nun. In this seminar we will examine a variety of narratives concerning the life of Mahāprajāpatī found in Buddhist canonical sources. While our main emphasis will be on texts preserved in Chinese, students who specialize in other languages are welcome to focus on versions of these tales found in Pāli, Sanskrit, and/or Tibetan. Supplementing the reading of these primary sources with the use of translations into English, French, and other modern languages (where available) and selected secondary literature, we will compare the quite diverse accounts of Mahāprajāpatī’s life as a lay woman, her ordination as a nun, and her glorious death. In so doing we will be able to explore a number of topics ranging from problems of textual transmission (in various languages) to issues of gender and hierarchy to the social context of early Buddhist monasticism. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of at least one Buddhist canonical language."
A recording of Jan Nattier's earlier lecture on Mahapajapati at Sati Center for Buddhist Studies is here.