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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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