- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE · Sāvatthī (Shravasti, Uttar Pradesh), capital of Kosala — the commentaries make it both her birthplace and the city where, having lost everything, she was healed, ordained and became a teacher
- Field:
- Buddhist nun, poet and jurist — declared by the Buddha foremost among the nuns in mastery of the Vinaya, the monastic law; the counterpart among women of Upāli among men
- The Big Idea:
- When the early Buddhist community needed someone to send its grieving mothers to, it sent them to the woman who had lost husband, children, parents and brother in the space of days and been mad in the streets — and she taught them with the plainest images on earth: wash-water sinking into dust, a lamp's wick drawn down.
- In their words:
- "Then, grabbing the pin, / I drew out the wick. / The liberation of my heart / was like the quenching of the lamp." (Therīgāthā 5.10, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato)
- If you remember one thing:
- The tradition's answer to unbearable grief was not a doctrine but a person — a person who had borne it — and the same shattered woman became the order's living law-book: grief and law, the two things a community of the bereft most needs, carried in one biography.