Among the relatively small number of women whose names appear in the literature of early Buddhism, one of the best known is the Buddha’s foster mother, Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī (Pāli Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī). She is most famous, perhaps, for her (ultimately successful) attempt to persuade the Buddha to establish an order of nuns. Yet the most extensive account of Mahāpajāpatī in the Pāli canon is found in the Apadāna section, where the focus is not on her life (or past lives) but on her death. In this paper I will examine two early Chinese renditions of the story (T144 and T145, which can now be assigned to the late 2nd -3rd centuries CE), which differ substantially from the Pāli as well as from other extant Chinese and Tibetan versions of the tale.
Jan Nattier did her undergraduate work in comparative religion (specializing in Buddhism) at Indiana University, where she also began graduate training in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University under the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies (specializing in classical Mongolian and Tibetan). She has taught at Macalester College, the University of Hawaii, Stanford University, Indiana University, and the University of Tokyo, in addition to serving as a member of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology (Soka University). Her monographs include Once Upon a Time: Studies in a Buddhist Philosophy of Decline (Asian Humanities Press, 1991) and A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchāsūtra) (UHP, 2003), and A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (IRIAB, Soka University, 2008). She is currently the Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.