- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE (dates ride on the Buddha's contested chronology) · born at Sāgala in the Madra country (modern Sialkot, Punjab, Pakistan) → queen at Rājagaha in Magadha, then a wandering nun across the Gangetic kingdoms
- Field:
- Buddhist teacher and philosopher — declared by the Buddha "foremost in wisdom" among the nuns, the exact counterpart of Sāriputta among the monks
- The Big Idea:
- Some questions are not to be answered but taken apart. Asked by a king whether an enlightened being exists after death, she replied that he might as well hire an accountant to count the sand of the Ganges — and the canon later gives her answer to the Buddha himself, in the same words.
- In their words:
- "A realized one is freed from reckoning in terms of form. They're deep, immeasurable, and hard to fathom, like the ocean." (Saṃyutta Nikāya 44.1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato)
- If you remember one thing:
- When King Pasenadi put to the Buddha the same four questions he had put to the nun Khemā, he received her answers back phrase for phrase — the oldest scriptures of a world religion preserving a woman's formulation as the founder's own doctrine, and preserving the king's astonishment that they matched.