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The Arrow
A JournAl of WAkeful Society, culture & PoliticS
The Arrow JournAl
38
Mahāprajāpatī: An Arrow Ancestor
JAMES K. ROwE
WHEN I SIT DOWN TO MEDITATE, I take time to honour the
lineage of teachers who make it possible for me to feel past egoic
grasping toward a sensation of grounded freedom. Since learning the story
of the Buddha’s aunt Mahāprajāpatī—who raised him since his mother died
shortly after giving birth—I’ve found myself dwelling in additional apprecia-
tion for her legacy.
As the story goes, Mahāprajāpatī approached the Buddha ve years after
he attained enlightenment and requested that women be granted entry to the
monastic order. Mahāprajāpatī’s petition was made on behalf of a large group
of women, many of whom had lost their husbands to the monastic life. How
did the awakened one respond? He denied their request.
After delivering his verdict, the Buddha hit the road for a teaching trip.
Mahāprajāpatī and the large gathering of women she spoke for shaved their
heads and donned monastic robes. ey followed the Buddha on his journey.
It would be anachronistic to read Mahāprajāpatī’s march as a feminist protest,
but the tactics she and her cohort deployed were meant to challenge power and
achieve inclusion. It is noteworthy that Mahāprajāpatī’s name means “leader
of a large assembly.”1
At one point in the journey, Mahāprajāpatī stood outside of the monas-
tery hall where the Buddha was staying. She was miserable and depressed. e
Buddha’s attendant Ananda encountered her and learned the reason for her
aicted state. He promised to take up her cause. Ananda then petitioned the
Buddha by rst asking, rhetorically, whether women can attain enlightenment.
e Buddha said yes. Ananda then reminded the Buddha of Mahāprajāpatī’s
mothering labor towards him. At this point, the Buddha accedes and oers
Mahāprajāpatī: an arrow ancestor
39
Volume 10 | Issue 3 | WInter 2023/2024
Mahāprajāpatī ordination if she is willing to abide by eight conditions. She
accepts, and the rst order of Buddhist nuns was born.2
Enlightened, But Still So Much to Learn
Much can be made of this story. A primary takeaway is that the Buddha was
unwilling to allow women into the monastic order without orchestrated pres-
sure from his aunt and the large assembly of women she represented. is is
to say that social forces from outside Buddhism were the primary catalyst for
the ultimate inclusion of women. According to Rita Gross, “it took persistent
women, fueled by their own experiences of suering caused by patriarchy, to
challenge him to do something unconventional and out of the ordinary regard-
ing gender arrangements.”3
e Buddha’s taming of existential anxiety and pursuit of egolessness were
insucient on their own to induce him to admit women into the sangha. Such
inclusion required collective action that could challenge the Buddha’s social
conditioning. Why? Because the Buddha had been shaped by social forces that
his journey through life did not explicitly address, thus leading him to rehearse
his patriarchal conditioning despite his deconstructive training.
For me, this story is a reminder that despite their transformative power,
contemplative practices alone are not enough to bring forth just societies. Even
enlightened beings can reproduce unjust power relations if injustice is not ex-
plicitly targeted.
Enlightened Society?
e lineage I honor at the beginning of my meditation sessions is a bit messy.
It includes the Buddha who messed up post-enlightenment. It also includes
Chögyam Trungpa, who founded the Shambhala Buddhist community where
I took refuge in 2014, and whose vision of “enlightened society” was a central
inspiration for this journal which explores how contemplative practice and
social justice politics inform one another. As Gabriel Dayley notes in his in-
troduction to this issue, “a painful irony during e Arrow’s rst decade of
publishing was the implosion of the global Shambhala community in the wake
of revelations of clergy sexual misconduct and abuse of power by its spiritual
leader and the founder’s son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.”4
is implosion did not leave Chögyam Trungpa’s legacy unscathed. As a
result of survivors bravely coming forward and sharing their abuse at the hands
of Mipham, some of Trungpa’s sexual conduct has been revisited. He regularly
slept with students, and in multiple U.S. states, sexual relations between clergy
JAMES K. ROwE
40 The Arrow JournAl
and congregants are now illegal because of power imbalances like this.5 Like-
wise, some former students have reported physically abusive behavior at the
hands of Trungpa.6 Despite being an advanced meditation teacher, Trungpa
lacked the wisdom to foresee the damage he wrought by pursuing sexual rela-
tions with students. Likewise, the fact that stories of physical abuse come pri-
marily from women suggest deep patriarchal conditioning that he was unable
or unwilling to undo.
Trungpa had a social vision and was worried about “the threat of nuclear
war, widespread poverty and economic instability, social and political chaos,
and psychological upheavals of many kinds.”7 But this vision neglected to in-
ternalize a key lesson of Mahāprajāpatī’s story: power needs to be challenged
directly if it is to be fundamentally transformed. As Matthew Moore has ar-
gued, much of Buddhist philosophy assumes that “change ultimately comes
additively, from the many personal transformations of individual citizens.”8
What is missing from Trungpa’s view—from the Buddha’s, too—is a robust ac-
counting of how social structures bear down on individuals, shaping behavior
and frustrating change.
Trungpa’s inattention to structure is one possible reason for his inability
to adequately confront his own patriarchal conditioning. He was raised in a
Tibetan culture that he acknowledged was male dominated.9 In Buddhism Af-
ter Patriarchy, Rita Gross shares a story of Trungpa introducing an element of
Tibetan Buddhism, typically undertaken by men, to his American students.
He assumed that the precedent should continue in the United States. “When
women objected,” Gross recounts, “he acceded quite readily, but it had not
occurred to him to include women from the beginning.”10
e Power of Contemplative Practice
Mahāprajāpatī’s march continues. I see e Arrow very much in her lineage,
seeking to join social justice with contemplative practice. Mahāprajāpatī chal-
lenged the Buddha, but she did so because she wanted access to what she
thought were profound teachings about how to work with existential fears and
the compensatory desires for control they can fuel (desires for control that lead
to frustration and pain more than true liberation).
It is noteworthy that in her story, the Buddha changed his mind. Accord-
ing to Gross, “he changed his mind despite misgivings, practical diculties,
and negative anti-women public opinion.”11 And so it is possible to argue that
the Buddha’s meditative training softened his defenses, making him more open
to an inclusive community. While Gross does not make this point, it is im-
portant to note that the story of Mahāprajāpatī is included in the Pāli Canon,
Artwork by
Rae Minji Lee
JAMES K. ROwE
42 The Arrow JournAl
the earliest corpus of Buddhist teachings available in written form. Although
her “protest” was organized before she was Buddhist, that collective action is
now told as part of the tradition. It is internal to it. is is to say that there are
precedents for collective action targeting structural injustices within the earliest
Buddhist texts.
Mahāprajāpatī’s legacy has had uneven uptake in the tradition, but is alive
today in formations like intersectional Buddhist feminism, Engaged Buddhism,
Black Buddhism, Buddhist socialism, radical dharma, and what I call radical
mindfulness in a recent book.12 Contemplative communities need structural
analysis and collective action to avoid reproducing social inequities.
But more than this, the broader social justice world needs contemplative
practices that help soothe existential fears and the compensatory cravings for
power they fuel. e articles in this journal are like arrows, ring in both di-
rections, and like Mahāprajāpatī, encouraging contemplative communities to
embody deep and abiding liberation. And like the Buddha, encouraging all
humans to look inward, transform existential fear, and learn to love a life, body,
and earth that ends.
How Making Friends with Death Can Kill
Supremacy inking and Behavior
Most of my articles in e Arrow have been about death. is is not due to
some morbid fascination. Instead, I’ve been convinced by powerful thinkers
such as the Buddha, James Baldwin, Ernest Becker, and Simone de Beauvoir
that death denial plays a formative role in shaping a will to supremacy along
the axes of race, class, gender, and species.
Because we feel small and anxious in the face of nitude, people regularly
impose their will on human and non-human others to pursue compensatory
power and aggrandizement. ere is a growing body of social psychology re-
search—Terror Management eory—which supports this link between fear
of death and dominative behaviour with robust experimental evidence, howev-
er, this reality is not yet reected in our politics.13
Finding ways to collectively face and metabolize the reality of death—
through meditation, ritual, psychedelics, or other mind-body practices—is not
only paramount for our personal wellbeing: it is politically vital. I am deeply
grateful that e Arrow exists as a venue to hone and volley this argument in
what is largely a death-denying culture.
As I argue in Radical Mindfulness, the culmination of the writing I’ve done
for e Arrow to date, the interlocking systems of white supremacy, capitalism,
Mahāprajāpatī: an arrow ancestor
43
Volume 10 | Issue 3 | WInter 2023/2024
human supremacy, and patriarchy con-
tinue to be shaped by aggregations of
existential fear. But these systems have
developed institutional logics that need
to be addressed specically through di-
rect action, union organizing, commu-
nity organizing, and state action. Em-
ployee mindfulness programs will not
result in a pay raise when wage suppres-
sion is institutionally incentivized be-
cause it helps powerful companies fulll
their duciary duty to maximize share-
holder value. As Mahāprajāpatī reminds
us, these institutional logics need to be
directly targeted.
While Mahāprajāpatī shadowed
and challenged the Buddha, she also
walked towards him with respect for
the profundity of his teachings. I hope
e Arrow continues its tradition of r-
ing in both these directions, challenging
contemplative communities to embody
deep and abiding justice, and encourag-
ing us all (including social justice activ-
ists) to look inward and see how our of-
ten-unconscious fears might be fuelling
a will to supremacy that keeps pushing
liberation o target.
jaMes K. rowe is associate professor of environmental studies and
cultural, social, and political thought at the University of Victoria. His
interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to understand
and strengthen social movements working towards social and ecological
justice. He has a forthcoming book called Radical Mindfulness: Why
Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital (Routledge 2023). His research
has been reported on by e Atlantic, e BBC, e CBC, HuPost, and
Jacobin.
Artwork by Chetna Mehta, featured in Volume 8, Issue 1 (2021)
JAMES K. ROwE
44 The Arrow JournAl
Notes
1. Reiko Ohnuma, Ties at Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 114.
2. ere is considerable debate over the eight conditions, which appear to place nuns in a
subordinate position to monks. For Rita Gross, they were exemplary of the mismatch
between the Buddhist view that sees all genders as capable of enlightenment and the
institutional reality: “e eight special rules presented no inherent barrier to women’s
spiritual development. ey mandated institutional subordination, not spiritual sub-
ordination”: Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction
of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 37. Nirmala Salgado, on
the other hand, presents evidence suggesting that the conditions were likely added after
the historical Buddha’s death. She also criticizes Western scholars such as Gross, whose
interpretation of the eight conditions reinforces a limited narrative about “an essentially
dependent and disempowered renunciant”: Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In
Search of the Female Renunciant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82.
3. Rita Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of
Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 35.
4. Gabriel Dayley, “Releasing the Bowstring Towards Wakeful Society, Culture, and Poli-
tics,” e Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics 10, no. 3 (2023): 7-30.
5. Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2019), 91.
6. Jackson Barnett, “Shambhala, the Boulder-Born Buddhist Organization, Suppressed
Allegations of Abuse, Ex-members Say,” e Denver Post, July 7, 2019, https://www.
denverpost.com/2019/07/07/shambhala-sexual-abuse/.
7. Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: e Sacred Path of the Warrior (Boston: Shambhala Pub-
lications, 1984), 9.
8. Matthew Moore, Buddhism and Political eory (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 137.
9. Diana Mukpo, Dragon under: My Life with Chögyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambhala
Publications, 2006), 352.
10. Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy, 35.
11. Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy, 39.
12. James K. Rowe, Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital
(New York: Routledge, 2023).
13. James K. Rowe and Darcy Mathews, “Death Denial, Human Supremacy, and Ecological
Crisis: Indigenous and Euro-American Perspectives,” e Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful So-
ciety, Culture, and Politics 8, no. 1 (2021): 13-32, https://arrow-journal.org/death-deni-
al-human-supremacy-and-ecological-crisis-indigenous-and-euro-american-perspectives/.
