- Lived:
- c. 282–203 BCE (Sri Lankan tradition) · born at Ujjayinī (Ujjain) → Pāṭaliputra (Patna) → Anurādhapura, Sri Lanka, where she spent her last forty-five years and died
- Field:
- Buddhist nun and missionary — founder of the bhikkhunī (nuns') order of Sri Lanka, and bearer of the Bodhi tree cutting that is now the oldest living human-planted tree on earth with a known planting date
- The Big Idea:
- Her great-grandmother-in-dharma had built the nuns' order so that only women could admit women. When an island full of women wanted in and had no nuns to admit them, that rule summoned an emperor's daughter across the sea — carrying a living tree as her luggage.
- In their words:
- "Weighty is the word of my brother, O great king; many are they that must receive the pabbajjā, therefore must I depart thither." (her answer to Aśoka's grief, Mahāvaṃsa XVIII, tr. Wilhelm Geiger, 1912)
- If you remember one thing:
- A tree she planted around 2,250 years ago is still alive at Anuradhapura, tended without interruption ever since — and the ordination lineage she planted beside it, extinguished at home a thousand years later, survived because it had emigrated to China, and sailed home again in 1998.