The Institute of Buddhist Studies provides graduate level education in the entirety of the Buddhist tradition with specialized instruction supporting Jodo Shinshu Buddhist ministry.
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Mark Epstein on Maya Devi
After writing a Mother’s Day blog post about Maya Devi, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she dies so shortly after giving birth to the Buddha. Isn’t this sad? We usually think about the Buddha’s early life as being protected from suffering, that he “would not be troubled by cold or heat, dust or grit or dew…” (Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism, translated from the Anguttara Nikaya), and yet he suffers a profound loss when he’s just a week old. Mark Epstein has been doing some deep thinking on the Buddha’s mother and touched on her death in the recent PBS documentary The Buddha. More » -
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The Buddha's Mother
Happy Mothers Day! The story goes like this: At the time of the Buddha's birth more than 2,500 years ago, Lumbini was a grove of natural grandeur, bursting with rare and beautiful flowers, where bees of five different colors hummed. Queen Maya Devi was passing through this earthly paradise on the way to her parent's house in Devadaha, capital of the Koliya kingdom, from Kapilavastu when the pangs of labor hit. After bathing in a nearby pond the queen walked 25 paces, took support of a Saal tree branch and gave birth standing up. She died a week later. The photo above is of a recreation of Pushkarini, the sacred pond where Maya Devi is believed to have bathed before giving birth to Siddhartha. More »
