Of Mud and Lotuses: Dreaming the Lives of Buddhist Women

A unique blend of personal reflection, creative histories, and interview-based nonfiction that vividly imagines the lives of Buddhist women over 2,500 years. Of Mud and Lotuses illuminates the hardships, resilience, and creative ways in which Buddhist women have applied the Dharma to daily life—often in ways that history has ignored. With lyrical storytelling and a perspective informed by decades as a Japanese American scholar of women in Buddhism, Paula Arai conjures the kitchens, temples, and intimate moments of Buddhist women’s lives across India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and the contemporary U.S. A mother and daughter circle a stupa amidst a scent of jasmine. The Buddha exchanges letters with Mahaprajapati, his aunt and adoptive mother. An ancient Indian queen proclaims the womb as the very cradle of Buddha-nature. A woman in fifth-century Sri Lanka expresses the Dharma by cooking for the local bhikkhus even as she cares for her ill sister-in-law. A widow finds solace in the communal rituals of a Japanese nunnery. In these creative histories, motherhood is sacred and everyday, caregiving is both burden and liberation, and the “womb of the Buddha” pulses at the heart of spiritual awakening. Complementing these fictional pieces are Arai’s personal and scholarly reflections on Buddhist women’s history, as well as several nonfiction narratives of contemporary American Buddhist women whose struggles and triumphs reveal a striking continuity with the ancestors who preceded them.