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Sati or Female Supremacy?: Feminist Appropriations of Gotami's Parinirvana

Liz Wilson, Miami University

Among the Buddha’s kinswomen, his aunt and adoptive mother Mahapajapati Gotami

stands out as one of the most accomplished. She was the founder and head of the female

monastic order (Pali, bhikkhuni sangha; Sanskrit, bhikshuni sangha) just as her stepson,

the Buddha, was the founder and head of the male monastic order (bhikkhu-sangha). She

achieved the aims of the religious life and became an Arhati (one liberated from the cycle

of birth and death) just as her son achieved nirvana. She is an exemplary figure for

women just as Gotama is an exemplar for men. Mahapajapati Gotami might thus be

described as a female counterpart of the Buddha (Walters, 1994). Indeed, at the end of

her life she seems to outshine the Buddha. She passes out of existence before the Buddha

himself achieves full nirvana (Parinirvana), and does so in a stupendous way, more

impressive in terms of pyrotechnics than that of the Buddha himself. Gotami’s biography

is preserved in Indian Buddhist texts composed in Pali and Sanskrit (and in some cases

preserved fully only in Chinese).i This essay draws on two biographical texts that relate

the story of Gotami’s death. One, the Gotami-Apadana, is part of a collection of

narratives composed in Pali and contained in the Khuddaka Nik¡ya of the Pali canon.ii

Sanskrit counterparts of the Pali Apadana are assembled in various Avad¡na collections.

Here, I draw on the Chinese translation of such a collection, namely the

Kalpanamanditika of Kumaralata.iii The speeches of various witnesses contained in the

texts stress the masterful calmness and control with which Gotami passes out of the world

of conditioned existence. As she achieves final nirvana, she touches the sun and moon

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with her hands, plunges into the earth as if it were a body of water, walks on water as if it

were earth, and then performs the miracle of the twins (Pali, yamaka-patihariya; Sanskrit,

yamaka-pratiharya)iv, gleaming with burning flames and showers, just as the Buddha did

on several occasions. It is an awe-inspiring exit, a true virtuoso performance (even in a

genre of death-scene descriptions that are characteristically full of displays of paranormal

powers). Not only does Gotami pass away in full glory, but she is accompanied by an

equally adept retinue. Her 500 female relatives decide that they too will pass away along

with the head of their order. And they are equally in control, equally astonishing at this

moment of passing out of conditioned existence. They emit fire and water, touch the sun

and the moon, and generally make dying into an occasion for teaching the Dharma.

(Huber, ed. 398-400).

But for feminists, there are troubling details in the texts that describe this passing

away. The Pali text is very clear that Gotami chooses to end her life because she cannot

face the deaths of her step-son, the Buddha, her biological son, Nanda, her step-grandson,

Rahula, and her nephew Ananda , as well as that of the Buddha's chief disciples. In the

Gotami Apadana she says:

I can’t bear to see

the Buddha's final passing,

nor that of his two chief disciples,

nor Rahula, Ananda, and Nanda.

Destroying life's elements

and giving up, I shall go out,

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sanctioned by the greatest sage,

by the lord of the world (Lilley, ed., 529). v

Why is Gotami so preoccupied with the fact that her sons and close kinsmen are soon to

pass from the world? A typical Buddhist reading that brackets gender issues might

suggest that Gotami’s apprehension shows her understanding of the impermanence of all

things and all beings. Such a reading might also underscore the often-expressed sentiment

that encountering a Buddha (“awakened one”) is a rare and precious privilege. Making

progress along the path is exponentially easier when one has the living example a Buddha

and his prominent disciples before one, examples serving as object lessons in the skillful

implementation of Buddhist principles. Thus the prospect of losing such an opportunity

naturally makes Gotami apprehensive.

A feminist reading that is sensitive to the historical context of Indian women’s

dependence on male relatives might suggest that Gotami frets about the death of male

kinsmen not only because she fears the loss of moral exemplars, but also because she

may end up as a socially stigmatized woman if she does not relinquish her life before the

deaths of her close kinsmen. Given the patriarchal cultural context in which Gotami lived

and narratives about her were composed, one must ask to what extent Brahminical values

might have played a role in the textual framing of Gotami’s decision to pass away before

the death of her son and male relatives. For all the rhetoric of equality in early Buddhist

texts, we know that early Buddhists were aware of and sensitive to criticism incurred for

violating contemporary Brahmanical social norms regarding women.vi Brahmanical

authorities in the Buddha’s day prescribed limitations on women’s autonomy similar to

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the stricture that would later receive its classical articulation in The Laws of Manu

(Manusmrti) 5.147. This classic Brahmanical prescription of women’s dependence on

men states that a woman should never be without male guardianship -- a girl's father is to

guard her until she is married, a woman's husband should guard her when she becomes a

wife, and a woman's eldest son, after the death of his father, must guard her once she

becomes a widow (Doniger and Smith115). Gotami’s Parinirvanacomes at a time when

her male guardians are soon to pass away, leaving her in the ambivalent role of a

superfluous woman.

The idea that a woman should not remain after the death of her principle male

guardians links this Brahmanical prescription to the controversial practice of widow-

immolation (sati, a term derived from the epithet for goodness earned by a wife who

immolates herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre).vii Gotami’s decision to

predecease her male kinsmen would seem to be motivated by sentiments similar to those

attributed to Hindu women who earn the title of sati by joining their husbands in death - -

- it can be read as an expression of feminine fears about being bereft of male

guardianship. Gotami’s actions might thus be comparable to purvanumarana, a form of

sati in which a woman whose husband is about to die takes her own life in anticipation of

her husband’s death (Datta 41).viii We have literary evidence that indicates that the

practice of sati was known to Buddhist redactors of narrative literature in Nepal who

lived several centuries after the composition of our key texts. Todd Lewis reports that in a

Newari recension of the Srngabheri Avadana, the practice of sati is mentioned in passing,

without comment, suggesting that such a custom was nothing unusual (Lewis 1994). But

even without evidence that later Buddhist communities in South Asia knew of the

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practice of sati, it is abundantly clear that concerns about unguarded women were present

in the early centuries of the Common Era, when Gotami’s story was redacted, and that

Gotami’s decision to predecease her kinsmen can be seen as a logical response to such

concerns.

If interpreted through this sociologically tinted feminist lens, the actions of

Gotami and her kinswomen express the dependent status of women vis-à-vis male

relatives in South Asian communities of the early centuries of the Common Era. Gotami

wishes to avoid the fate of the surplus woman, the woman without male guardianship. To

avoid this fate, she beats her kinsmen to the finish line of Parinirvana. But before she

steps over the line to the state of full and complete nirvana, before passing away from the

world of birth and death in the ultimate act of religious achievement, Gotami first seeks

and obtains permission from the male relatives whose death she anticipates (namely, the

Buddha, Rahula, Ananda, and Nanda – all male kinsmen of hers) (Gotami-Apadana

verses 55-57). Even in beating her kinsmen to the finishing line, she must first obtain

their permission to do so.

Gotami strikes me as a figure who poses the potential problem of female

autonomy for an evolving Buddhist community that grew from countercultural roots in

the 5th and 4th centuries BCE to mainline respectability in the early centuries of the

Common Era, a community that consistently valued autonomy for men but came to

behave more circumspectly in regard to its women as the community grew in stature and

sought standing in the wider cultural sphere. I see Gotami's literary depiction as a woman

who exits the scene rather than remain as a surplus woman as a vivid illustration of the

growing institutional androcentrism that Alan Sponberg argues accompanied the

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establishment of Buddhism in India and South Asia (Sponberg 4-7).ix While Buddhists

and Jains initially took bold steps in admitting women into their orders as nuns, both

groups -- or at least factions within the Buddhist and Jain folds -- eventually buckled

under social pressure when the status of their nuns became a point of contention. Since

Brahmanical authorities regarded the idea of women leading autonomous lives without

male guardians as socially and religiously suspect, some Buddhist factions (like some

Jain factions) responded by minimizing opportunities for women to exercise independent

decision-making.

My feminist interpretation of Gotami's decision to predecease as a reflection of

authorial wariness about independent women is strengthened, I believe, by the fact that

her death was not the first time Gotami acted so as to avoid living without a male

guardian. Gotami's decision to go forth as a nun was prompted by the death of her

husband.x Gotami's decision to seek ordination as a nun after the death of her husband

makes sense given the culturally pervasive Brahminical view that a woman needs no

independent religious life while her husband exists, for marriage is to her what initiation

and religious learning are to him. A woman's religious duty (str•-dharma) consists in

serving her husband.xi The timing of Gotami's renunciation also makes sense as a

pragmatic move to avoid the hardships of the widow's life by seeking refuge in the

Buddhist sangha. The five-hundred women of the Sakya clan who accompany Gotami

into the women’s monastic order are also reacting to a loss of male authority in their

lives: their husbands have all renounced the world and left them virtual widows.

Another piece of evidence buttressing a feminist interpretation is the parallel

between the Buddha’s stepmother and the Buddha’s chief wife.xii The Buddha’s wife, too,

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decides to predecease the Buddha.xiii Moreover, even though the Buddha abandons his

wife to pursue his religious quest, she nevertheless remains loyal to him and identifies

with his religious mission. She dons saffron robes and practices austerities parallel to

those of Buddha for six years while he practices extreme asceticism. According to one

source which has it that the child Rahula was born on the day that the Buddha attained

awakening, six years after leaving the palace, the Buddha’s wife carried their son in her

womb for six years.xiv All the while, she tried to practice the very austerities that her

husband was practicing. Subsisting on tiny meals consisting of as little as one bean or one

grain of rice, her ascetic exercises suspend the embryo's development in the womb. One

could say that the Buddha’s wife acts autonomously in this serious pursuit of asceticism,

and that she prizes her autonomous spiritual development over her fulfillment of the

child-bearer role to such an extent that she puts the life of her child at risk. However, it is

equally possible to see the delayed gestation of the fetus in the womb as a literary device

for highlighting the parallel between father and son. Just as the father’s spiritual

development is suspended while he practices an ineffectual path, so too the son’s physical

development is retarded. It is clear from the way this text glosses Rahula’s name (as a

derivative of Rahu, the deity who eclipses the moon rather than as a term meaning

“fetter,” the gloss favored by Therav¡dins) that it seeks to establish a parallel between the

Buddha and his son Rahula: while the Buddha is said to outshine the sun at the moment

of his enlightenment, his son, being born at the very same time, outshines the moon.xv

Thus while the Buddha’s wife shows ascetic ardor, perhaps in the end she is outshined by

the salvific drama enacted by her husband and son.xvi

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In looking at the choice that Gotami made to predecease her son, we are faced

with an interpretative dilemma: the Buddha’s stepmother can be seen as an honored,

uniquely privileged figure who outstrips even the Buddha himself in preceding him to

full nirvana, or she can be seen as absenting herself from the world in conformity with

patriarchal demands that she die rather than live without male guardians. Reiko

Ohnuma’s insightful reading of Indian Buddhist narrative literature with an eye toward

the ways that Indian family structures shape the attitudes of literary redactors provides

support for the view that Gotami’s continued existence in the absence of male

guardianship poses problems for a variety of Buddhist. Ohnuma suggests that the death of

Gotami’s husband posed an immediate problem for the Buddha, who had renounced

family ties but owed his de facto mother Gotami the obligation to care for her in

exchange for her having cared for him as a child (Ohnuma). In a careful and systematic

analysis of textual portraits of the founding of the nuns’ order, Ohnuma suggests that the

Buddha was finally persuaded to admit women into monastic life, against his better

judgment, because Gotami, as a widow, had no other place to go and because he owed

her this obligation as a repayment for the debt of raising him. Ohnuma asserts that

Buddhologists have been so consistently shaped by Enlightenment values such as the

privileging of individual rights and equality that often we have been blind to and glossed

over those passages in Buddhist literature that devalue individual rights in favor of other

values, such as the good of the collective, particularly the family. Her analysis shows

that in making decisions made about the role of women, the equality of men and women

may have been recognized (as many accounts of the founding of the nuns’ order do

recognize), but this equality of the genders was not always a key factor. Other

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considerations of a collectivist nature trumped egalitarian considerations of an

individualist nature.

Clearly, there are numerous ways to analyze the role of gender in narratives that

depict relationships between male Buddhist renouncers and their close female kin. Work

like that of Ohnuma suggests that we must consider the extent to which modern liberal

values of Western origin have shaped the way scholars regard Buddhist literature.

Ohnuma’s work would perhaps suggest that Walters’ triumphalist reading of Gotami’s

death scene, with its insistence on parity between mother and son in level of achievement,

is an example of a view impeded by the usual blind spots created by the insistence on the

priority of Enlightenment values in Buddhological analysis. To insist on an interpretation

that places issues of female equality and autonomy front and center may be to overlook

collective considerations of family harmony and social respectability that were perhaps

more important to the editors who redacted our texts than the equality-oriented issues that

capture our attention.

Is it possible, then, to do justice to South Asian Buddhist texts using feminist

methodologies? In engaging in feminist analysis of South Asian texts, are we imposing

Western Enlightenment values on texts that do not share those values? The next section

attempts to anticipate some of the major objections to the feminist appropriation of South

Asian Buddhist texts and to provide arguments against those objections. It offers

suggestions for placing feminist analysis of South Asian Buddhist texts on a firm

epistemological foundation that recognizes limitations in hermeneutical authority but is

not immobilized by those limitations.

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Imperial and Post-Colonial Feminisms

One reason to be circumspect in bringing feminist interpretations to bear on South Asian

texts is out of awareness of the ambivalent historical legacy of Western imperialism in

South Asia and the role that feminist activism and feminist legislation played in justifying

British rule in India. Although a variety of social reform movements with feminist goals

have thrived in South Asia since the nineteenth century,xvii some emerging out of the

colonial encounter with the British and some emerging from indigenous contexts,xviii

there were so many ways in which British authorities in India monopolized feminism for

their own ends that the legacy of feminist interventions in South Asia is on the whole

rather unsavory.

Feminism and Western colonial domination were so closely linked in the

nineteenth century that one can speak of “imperial feminism,” a strand of feminism that

supports imperial ambitions. Some advocates of colonialism undeniably used feminist

discourse opportunistically, as a means of justifying the presence of British colonizers of

the Indian subcontinent. Colonialists did not push for feminist reforms out of a pure sense

of moral imperative but often because it often suited their political purposes to do so. As

Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi have argued, the British had an interest in promoting

women's rights as an indication of their civilizing mission but they also had an interest in

maintaining women's subordination to show that India was not yet fit for self-rule (Liddle

and Joshi, 1985, 149). These authors have argued, moreover, that many early British

reform efforts intended to promote equality actually had an adverse effect on lower-caste

women. Such women lost rights they had enjoyed -- divorce, widow-remarriage, and

female inheritance, for example -- when, in 1772, British law made Hindu laws

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pertaining to Brahmin women binding for all castes (Ibid 150). The record on temple

dancers or devadasis is also very ambivalent, with some contemporary feminists

concluding that their Victorian foremothers underestimated the cost to women that would

result from their successful efforts to outlaw devadasis (Jordan). The devadasi institution,

it has been argued, benefited women by offering them unparalleled opportunities for

education, property ownership, and personal autonomy.

Feminist sentiments were also used in British India to justify maintaining social

distance between the ruling class and the subject races. In his The History of British India

(required reading for British citizens training for civil service in India), James Mill

expressed what many Victorians regarded as axiomatic: "among rude people the women

are generally degraded, among civilized people they are exalted" (Mill 279). xix Annette

Beveridge, a woman who went to India on a philanthropic mission and eventually

married a member of the Indian Civil Service, provides us with an historical example of a

feminist instantiation of such axiomatic thinking. In 1883, she wrote an indignant letter

protesting the Ilbert Bill, which proposed that Indian judges be allowed to try British

subjects on criminal charges. Beveridge wrote that she was vehemently opposed to "Mr.

Ilbert's proposal to subject civilized women to the jurisdiction of men who have done

little or nothing to redeem the women of their own races, and whose social ideas are still

on the outer verge of civilization."xx Such examples suggest the ambivalent heritage of

feminist reform in India.

In order to justify bringing feminist lenses to bear on South Asian materials,

feminist scholars must find a firmer epistemological foundation for their analyses than

the naive assumption of universal sisterhood that guided that efforts of so many 19th and

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early 20th century feminist writers. Many post-colonial feminist theorists have called into

question the assumption that we can understand the experiences of other women simply

by virtue of being women ourselves.xxi I think this challenge is important and that

feminist researchers would do well to recognize that we are not automatically authorized

to speak about other women's lives. But at the same time, I do not want to suggest that

Westerners are automatically disqualified from speaking on matters of importance to

non-Western women simply on the grounds of ethnicity. I do not believe that the only

persons authorized to speak for women outside the First World are those who pass the

sort of ad hoc ethnicity litmus tests we have come to associate with identity politics.

Anthony Appia and others have problematized the notion of ethnic types that under girds

much identity politics (Appiah). Suggesting that our present notion of race derives largely

from a reductionistic nineteenth-century construct that pays little attention to cultural

difference, Appia argues that references to "the African race," for example, mislead by

obscuring the cultural diversity of the African continent. If the notion of race that

underlies identity politics has indeed been under theorized as Appiah claims, then rather

than insisting that only Asian and Middle Eastern women are authorized to speak about

the history and status of women in these parts of the world, we would do well to rethink

the notion of race that glosses over important differences in culture, subculture, and

social location that problematize simplistic forms of identity politics.

Bestowing the oracular role of racial or ethnic spokesperson upon an individual

for whom race or ethnicity is only one element in the nexus of factors that locate that

individual as a social being, identity politics can obscure the complexity of a variety of

social issues. It should be clear from the example given above of how rights for lower

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class Hindu women were compromised when British efforts to promote equality for

women took the norms associated with Brahmin women as paradigmatic for all Hindu

women that class matters as much as religion and ethnicity. From this example of British

legislation enforcing ‘reforms’ that did not take class differences into consideration, it is

painfully clear that class matters a great deal in accurately assessing and addressing

women’s rights. Chandra Talpade Mohanty has suggested a related problem with

contemporary identity politics: individuals with their unique life-experiences,

dispositions, personal views and idiosyncrasies are perceived as authentically embodying

the collective experience of their race (Mohanty). "This," Mohanty argues, "results in the

reduction or averaging of Third World peoples in terms of individual personality

characteristics: complex ethical and political issues are glossed over." (Mohanty 194).

Instantiating cultures in the form of individual persons and personalities can also abolish

the possibility of a genuine reckoning with controversial ethical and political issues as

"an ambiguous and more easily manageable ethos of the 'personal' and the 'interpersonal'

takes [the] place [of complex ethical and political issues] (ibid)."

In the light of critiques of white middle-class feminist discourse as imperial and

hegemonic (Lorde, Amos and Parmar), it might seem that first-world white academics

ought to suppress the urge to speak for others as an unwarranted exercise of cultural

privilege and strictly limit what they say to what can be said of themselves. But Linda

Alcoff has persuasively argued that the situation is much more complicated than that, as

one can see once one examines the epistemological and metaphysical issues involved in

speaking only for oneself (Alcoff). In Alcoff's analysis, to claim that one only speaks for

oneself is to assume a theoretically problematic conception of selfhood. This stance

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presupposes the reality of the world of discrete, autonomous individuals articulated by

classical liberal theory (20). Alcoff argues that there can be no discursive location "in

which one's words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others” (ibid).

Given the fact that there is no way to demarcate a clear boundary between oneself and

others, then the declaration that one is only speaking for oneself constitutes, in Alcoff's

view, a retreat from "responsibility and accountability for one's effects on others” (ibid).

Death As Mastery

The last section argued for the legitimacy of using feminist lenses to analyze Indian

Buddhist texts. This section raises the question of whether Gotami’s story is adequately

analyzed using only feminist methods. I suggest that such an analysis would be

incomplete. In focusing on the patriarchal social obligations behind Gotami’s decision to

take her own life, a feminist treatment does not do full justice to her situation. To fully

appreciate the importance of the Buddha’s mother and the actions she took in ending her

life, we need to set those actions in the context of other instances of voluntary death in

South Asian religions. Even a cursory investigation of the topic suggests that in many

Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain circles, voluntary death goes hand in hand with sainthood

(Wilson 2003). It is highly valorized as an index of sanctity. Many South Asian religious

traditions attempt to limit the contingency of death by offering ritualized means of

achieving mastery over the end of life. The Jain practice of sallekhana, or death through

fasting, allows a person whose life is nearly at its end to take control of the circumstances

of his or her death and consciously abandon attachment to one’s body and the social

landscape. Sallekhana is both an act of compassion and an act of self-purification. It

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allows one to atone for having inadvertently destroyed various life-forces in the course of

daily living. In eating meals throughout one’s life, life-forms in the natural world are

destroyed, and a major aspect of the Jaina path consists in living so as to avoid doing

harm to the life-forms we encounter every day. By fasting at the end of one’s life, one

can live in a purified manner that sets the stage for a tranquil and self-possessed death

(Settar). But Jains are not alone in revering the example of those who invite death. The

ideal death that many contemporary Hindus strive for is one in which the dying person

gives up the life-force willingly and passes away surrounded by family members, in full

control of his or her faculties, having previously predicted the time of his or her death

(Parry 158ff). Less accomplished people are caught unprepared for death and their

passing from this world is anything but a ritual act. Such persons, Hindus believe,

inevitably cling to life in ways that endanger the well being of the living; their

dissatisfaction at being forced to relinquish their lives prematurely translates into

malevolence as they continue to seek gratification in the world of the living from which

they have been so unceremoniously wrenched. By contrast with the 'bad' or unanticipated

death of such persons, the 'good' death that Hindus aspire to is a controlled, highly

ritualized release of life. The more spiritually accomplished the dying person, the more

control he or she has over the circumstances of death. Jonathon Parry describes the case

of one exemplary man who performed intense austerities for nine months prior to his

death, predicted the moment of his death, and died sitting upright while listening to a

recitation of Hindu scripture. As this pious man's body was being cremated, Parry’s

informants told him, it successively manifested itself in the forms of several deities and

famous religious teachers (Parry 161).

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Buddhist literature also places a high premium on taking control of the

circumstances of one's passing from this world. Not only is the decision to terminate life

at a moment of one's choosing an act commonly attributed to Buddhas and Buddhist

saints, but Buddhist texts even go so far as to suggest that every Buddha voluntarily

relinquishes the remainder of his allotted lifespan. Buddhas voluntarily pass away, and

various saints likewise pass out of conditioned existence when Buddhas are born and

when they die. When Shakyamuni took the form of a white elephant in order to enter his

mother's body, the Mahavastu reports, five hundred pratyekabuddhas assembled at Deer

Park (the site where Shakyamuni would later teach the Dharma) and passed out of

existence in a phenomenal manner. The appearance of the Buddha of this epoch

rendering their continued existence in this world superfluous, they immolated themselves

by rising up in the air to a height of seven palm trees and bursting into flames

(Mahavastu 1: 357).xxii Thousands of arhats are reported to have entered into complete

nirvana upon hearing of the death of the Buddha. The Tibetan Vinaya, for example,

reports that 18,000 arhats passed away on that day (Rockhill 148). Typical of those saints

who herald the passing away of the Buddha with their own final passing is the arhat

Gavampati.xxiii Gavampati not only went out in a shower of flames but also orchestrated

an elaborate display at the moment of his passage. Declaring that there was no point in

his remaining any longer since no abiding essence ever remains, the "active elements of

life, being accumulated, disappear at once, in a flash -- you must know that there is no

such thing!", Gavampati emitted both fire and water from his body (thus imitating the

miracle of gleaming with burning flames and showers that Shakyamuni performed). xxiv

The death of the aged monk Subhadra (Pali, Subhadda) provides an even closer parallel

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to the death of Gotami. He reportedly terminated his existence for the same reason as

Gotami and her five-hundred companions: he did not wish to live to see the Buddha pass

away. Subhadra learned of the immanent death of the Buddha in a dream and went to the

dying master to ask about the path. Achieving arhatship upon hearing the Buddha's

answers to his questions, Subhadra thought to himself, "I should not enter Parinirvana

after the Buddha” (T25.80c4-81a11 [fasc.3])"xxv He then seated himself in the lotus

position before the Buddha and incinerated his body completely, passing into final

nirvana as the Buddha lay dying.

As these many examples indicate, Gotami is not alone in responding to the

immanent death of the Buddha by orchestrating her own death. She is only one of many

saints who made this choice. And the texts insist that Gotami chose well: it is a rare honor

to die when Gotami and her nuns did. Their passing away is unique because it is a swan

song to a full house, if you will. They pass away while the sangha still thrives, before the

passing away of the Buddha and his chief disciples. It is a prestigious thing to die when

Gotami did because her cremation is attended by the Buddha himself. And not only the

Buddha -- every one of her male kinsmen is called to come and pay homage to Gotami.

Ananda calls an assembly of the entire bhikkhu-sangha to come to the cremation of

Gotami and her nuns; he says that every son of the Buddha should come to honor the

Buddha’s mother (Gotami-Apadana verse 160; Sutralamkara p. 400). Everyone who is a

pupil of the Buddha and hence Gotama’s adoptive son should come to pay homage to the

sage’s mother. If we understand these pseudo-familial ties as expressive of ideal social

relations, then every one of these monks is to treat Gotami with the respect he would

accord his own grandmother.

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Is Gotami’s illustrious status an indication that she is equivalent to a Buddha? Is

her death, as Jonathan Walters suggests, an indication that she should be regarded as a

female Buddha? To my mind, this death scene is an extremely curious episode in the

history of the early Indian sangha. Walters has pointed out the significant parallels

between Gotami's Parinirvana and that of the Buddha himself (Walters 374-5) We are

told in the Mahaparinibbanasutt that when a Buddha decides to pass away from the

world of conditioned existence, this decision is heralded by a quaking of the earth. Since

Gotami's decision is accompanied by such an earthquake, one might infer that she is to be

classified as a Buddha. But the Mahaparinibbanasutta also suggests that a Buddha’s

remains are to be enshrined in a reliquary in the manner of a cakravartin. Gotami’s

remains, however, are not treated in this way. As Gregory Schopen has pointed out,

Gotami's passing is not marked by a monumental building project. No stupa is built as a

site for remembering her.xxvi So if Gotami is a female Buddha, she is not treated in the

manner paradigmatic for Buddhas.

There are many more questions that these fascinating texts raise. But in the final

analysis, I think we can safely conclude that the Gotami whom our texts construct was a

woman of her times. Like other women who joined the Buddha’s sangha during his

lifetime, she struggled with the ambivalent situation of being a pioneer at a time when

institutions of female renunciation were few and met with a certain amount of social

disapproval. While her abilities were considered equal to that of men, her very presence

in the order as a female renouncer posed a public relations problem for the fledgling

Buddhist community in India. The early sangha sought financial support from lay

Buddhists who tended to look askance at deviations from the established social norms for

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female behavior. Thus the task of those redactors responsible for creating literary

portraits of early Buddhist women like Gotami was very delicate indeed. Those portraits

had to reflect the courage and achievements of the women pioneers who renounced the

social world to follow the Dharma while at the same time preserve many of the norms of

the society that the women had left behind. Gotami’s literary portraits present a woman

who is every bit as accomplished as her son and other male authority figures. But they

also show a woman who considers male authority before she acts, a woman who defers to

male authority in her decisions about how to conduct her life. Since these portraits were

probably intended for the broadest possible audience, we should not expect otherwise.

i Other scriptural references to Gotami are found in conjunction with her role as

the founder of the Buddhist nuns’ order. For an analysis of all accounts of her ordination,

see Heirman. For a review of Therav¡da accounts, see Hüsken. ii Mary E. Lilley, ed., The Apadana of the Khuddaka Nikaya, 2 vols. (London, Pali

Text Society, 1925): 2. 529-543.

iiiiiiSanskrit fragments of this text have been edited by Lüders. The complete text,

extant only in Chinese, was translated into French by Édouard Huber, who misidentified

the text as the Sutralamkara of Ashvaghosha (Kumaralata may have been a junior

colleague of Ashvaghosha). Jean Przyluski (1940) discusses the different attributions

(authorial and titular). See also Hahn and Kariyawasan.

20 Wilson

iv The description of miracles here is from the Kalpanamanditika (see Huber 398-

400). The miracle of the twins is explained as a matter of mastery over the elements

attained through meditation on the cardinal elements such as fire, water, and earth. By

entering into meditation on fire (tejokasinasamapattivasena), the Dhammapad¡††hakath¡

explains, the Buddha was able to emit a ball of fire from his upper body; by entering into

meditation on water (apokasinasamapattivasena), he was able to emit a torrent of water

from his lower body. The Buddha then proceeded to emit fire and water from various

other parts of his body, including his eyes, ears, nostrils, shoulders, hands, fingers, and

pores. See Norman 3: 213-16. See also Fausboll, 4:139. For a discussion of

representations of this scene in Indian Buddhist art, see Foucher. v Gotami-Apadana, verse 3. All translations from the Pali, Sanskrit, and French

here are mine unless otherwise specified. Cf Kalpanamanditika /Sutralamkara: "I do not

want to see the nirvana of the Buddha in my lifetime; before the Blessed One and his

chief disciples have disappeared, I will enter into nirvana." See Huber, p. 387. vi On the inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality as regards women in

Buddhism, see Gross, 1993. vii On the topic of sati see Garzilli, Weinberger-Thomas, Mani, Courtright,

Hawley, Oldenburg, and Leslie. viii Although we have no direct eyewitness accounts evidence of the practice of

sati during the first four or five centuries of the Common Era, the time period when large

segments of Indian Buddhist story literature narrating the achievements of Gotami and

other Buddhist exemplars were being redacted, Greek and Latin historians refer to the

practice of sati in India; in addition, Hindu legal codes (dharmashastras) redacted after

the 3rd century CE mention the practice. See Garzilli. ix On page 18, Sponberg concludes: “For all its commitment to inclusiveness at

the doctrinal level, institutional Buddhism was not able to (or saw no reason to) challenge

prevailing attitudes about gender roles in society.” One consequence of this, Sponberg

suggests, is that the nuns’ order became more and more marginalized. Likewise Nancy

Falk suggests that ambivalence about the presence of autonomous women in monastic

life led to the decline and eventual disappearance of Theravada nuns.

21 Wilson

x Dhammapala's preface to the commentary on the Therigatha states: "Now it

came thereafter to pass, while the Master was staying at the Hall of the Gabled House

near Vesali, that King Suddhodana attained Arhatship and passed away. Then in Great

Pajapati arose the thought of renouncing the world." Trans. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Psalms

of the Sisters (London: Pali Text Society, 1909), p. 6. The Anguttara Nikaya suggests that

it was actually her son Nanda's ordination that prompted Gotami to renounce. See

Anguttara Nikaya; R. Morris and E. Hardy, eds., Anguttara Nikaya, 5 vols. (London: Pali

Text Society, 1885-1900): 4.276. For a sociological analysis of Gotami’s request for

ordination as a socially mandated response to the lack of male guardianship, see my

Charming Cadavers, pp. 141-48. xi On the historical evolution of the concept of duty for Brahmanical and Hindu

women, see Young and Leslie. xii The Buddha’s chief wife is known under a variety of names, including Bhadda

Kaccana and Rahulamata (in Pali) and Yashodhara (in Sanskrit). For Buddhist sources on

the wife of the Buddha, see André Bareau, “Un personnage bien mystérieux: l’ épouse du

Buddha,” in Indological and Buddhist Studies: Volume in Honour of Prof. J. W. de Jong,

ed. L. A. Hercus et al (Canberra: Faculty of Asian Studies, 1982), pp. 31-59. xiii See Mary E. Lilley, ed., The Apadana of the Khuddaka Nikaya, 2 vols.

(London, Pali Text Society, 1925), 2:584-592. xiv This version is told in the Mulasarvastivada-vinaya. See The Gilgit Manuscript

of the Samghabhedavastu, Being the 17th and Last Section of the Vinaya of the

Mulasarvastivadin, ed. Raniero Gnoli (Rome: Istituto Italiono per id Medio ed Estremo

Oriente, 1977), 1:78-119. See transl. by John S. Strong, The Experience of Buddhism:

Sources and Interpretations (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1995), pp. 10-

18. xv For the light imagery as clue to the parallelism of father and son, see Strong, p

10. I thank my student Matt Barr for suggesting that Rahula’s delayed gestation

symbolizes his father’s pursuit of a false path.

22 Wilson

xvi In any case, when her husband after many years of starvation decides that these

austerities were useless, his wife also abandons her asceticism and the embryo starts to

develop naturally. xvii See Ali, Ray, Gedalof, Menon, Kumar, Liddle and Joshi, 1986. xviii Radha Kumar mentions the case of the social reformer Ram Mohan Roy, who

championed women’s rights, as a case where the indigenous context was as important as

the colonial encounter. Roy was as much influenced by Sufi arguments for religious

reform as by European modes of rationalism in his creation of the Brahma Samaj, a

reformed version of Hinduism. See Kumar, p. 8. xix On Mill's moral vision and the place of feminism in his critique of Hinduism,

see Copley. xx Quotation from William Henry Beveridge, India Called Them, (London: G.

Allen & Unwin, 1947), p 228. On the Ilbert Bill, see Ballhatchet, p. 6. xxi The question of representation is adroitly raised by Spivak in her influential

essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1994). On the “illusion of alliance,” see Stacey. An apt

and early illustration of the illusion of alliance in action is a work entitled Our Muslim

Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness, edited by van Sommer and Zwemer.

xxii See also Étienne Lamotte, "Le Suicide religieux dans le bouddhisme ancien,"

Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres at des Sciences . . . de l'Académie Royale de Belgique 51

(1965): 159.

xxiiiJean Przyluski includes a chapter on this Buddhist saint, who enjoys a strong

cult following in Southeast Asia, in his Le concile de Rajagrha: Introduction a l'histoire

des canons et des sectes Bouddhiques (Paris: Paul Geunther, 1926), pp. 239-256.

xxiv Translation adapted from that of E. Obermiller, Bu-ston Rin-chen-grub,

History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung), 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Harrassowitz, 1932), 2. 73-77.

xxv See also Avadanashataka, ed. J.S. Speyer (St Petersburg: Imperial Academy of

Sciences, 1902-1906) 2 vols., 1.228.3ff; transl. Leon Feer, Avadana-shataka: Cent

legends bouddhiques, Annales du Musée Guimet Vol 18 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1891), pp.

151-9.

xxvi Gregory Schopen says that “neither in the Apadana nor elsewhere in

23 Wilson

canonical literature, in so far as I know, is there any reference to a stupa for

Mah¡praj¡pat•.” See “The Suppression of Nuns and the Ritual Murder of their Special

Dead in Two Buddhist Monastic Texts,” in The Living and the Dead: The Social

Dimensions of Death in South Asian Religions, Liz Wilson, ed., (Albany: SUNY Press,

2003), p. 146. Our texts are mixed on this point. The Gotami Apadana ends with the

Buddha holding his mother’s bones in his hands, with no suggestion of building a stupa.

At the end of the Kalpanamanditika, Ananda suggests that a collective monument be

built out of the bones of all the women: “As soon as the flame of the cremation fire is

extinct, let us collect their bones to set up a stupa so that all beings will venerate them”

(Huber, p. 402: Dés que la flamme du ye-soun sera éteinte, ramassons leurs os pour

ériger un stupa pour que tous les etres les véne``rent). That Ananda envisions a

collective stupa for Gotami and all her retinue underscores Schopen’s point, I believe.

Gotami’s bones, if they are indeed preserved in a stupa in the end (the text is unclear), are

to be mixed with those of the 500 women in her retinue. It is comparable to a mass grave,

if you will, rather than a monument singling out Gotami as a unique exemplar.

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