- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE — dates inferential: she was the elder generation of the Buddha's own family, and every date in her life moves with the disputed dates of his; born into the Koliya clan at Devadaha, married into the Śākya capital Kapilavatthu (Kapilavastu, on the India–Nepal border), died — tradition says at 120 — at Vaiśālī
- Field:
- founder and first elder of the bhikkhunī saṅgha, the Buddhist order of nuns — the first Buddhist nun
- The Big Idea:
- A century of brilliant Indian women had been admitted to the life of the mind one at a time, as exceptions. Mahāpajāpatī refused the exception and demanded the institution — an order with rules, robes, teachers and a lineage, so that a woman seeking liberation would never again need anyone's special permission.
- In their words:
- "I have reached the state where everything stops." (her poem in the Therīgāthā, Thig 6.6, in Susan Murcott's rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- The Buddha's own foster-mother — the woman who nursed him — shaved her head, walked some 250 kilometres barefoot, stood at his gate with swollen feet and refused to go home, and was told no three times before the door opened; and the order of nuns she forced into existence is still being fought over, twenty-five centuries later.