Wendy Garling

Wendy Garling will be leading an historic pilgrimage Nov. 1-9, 2023, from Lumbini, Nepal to Vaishali, India, "In the Footsteps of Gautami and the First Buddhist Women." For information contact: G500pilgrimage@gmail.com or see our website https://www.upayaconsulting.org/in-the-footsteps-of-gautami-and-the-first-buddhist-women

Wendy Garling has a BA from Wellesley College and an MA specializing in Sanskrit language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and authorized dharma teacher who has studied with Buddhist teachers of different schools and lineages, primarily His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the late Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden.

For many years Wendy has taught women's spirituality focusing on Buddhist traditions, including original research into ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature investigating seemingly “forgotten” women's stories, especially those embedded in the earliest biographies of the Buddha. In Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha's Life (Shambhala, 2016), Wendy re-introduces these ancient women’s stories, weaving them into a refreshing new biography of the Buddha that shifts the traditional patriarchal paradigm to a more accurate, gender-balanced and female friendly understanding of his life and early Buddhism.

Garling's second book is a biography of the Buddha's adoptive mother: The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati (Shambhala, 2021) with the foreword written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and named a 2022 Nautilus Award Winner. Here we learn about a remarkable woman who was revered and respected during her time, but mostly forgotten in Buddhist records and world history. She was a queen, mother, sister, wife and - later in life - a nun, renowned as a leader of women who stood up to patriarchy on behalf of women who had no voice.

Garling continues to research and write about early Buddhist women. Her dream is to reawaken their voices to ensure that their stories are not just told, but remembered and valorized as integral to the roots of Buddhism. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts and is available for author events and workshops. Contact her at wendy.garling@yahoo.com.