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INTRODUCTION

The gross bodies of men and women are equally suited, But if a woman has strong aspiration, she has higher potential.

From beginningless time you have accrued merit from virtue and awareness,

And now, faultless, endowed with a Buddha’s Qualities, Superior woman, you are a human Bodhisattva.

This is you I am speaking of, happy girl, is it not?

Now that you have achieved your own enlightenment, Work for others, for the sake of other beings.

— Vicki MacKenzie, Cave in the Snow

TO SAY THAT THE ANCIENT women who lived during the time of the Buddha 2,500 years ago had difficult lives may be the understatement of several millennia. Tucked into plains shadowed by the mountains of Nepal, each woman lived with the three seasons of desert heat, downpours, and bone-chilling cold year after year. They depended utterly on the harvests of local farms for food and on the goodwill of spouses and extended families for shelter. They lost their babies, their children, their lovers, their beauty, their youth, and sometimes their hope.

What’s amazing about their stories, long hidden from Western eyes, is how familiar they are. Their struggles, their heartbreaks, are ours. Abandonment, affairs, loneliness, and jealousy—these women lived through all of them. Capa, a beautiful young woman, daughter of a trapper, lost her heart to a young monk. Deeply in love with him, she survived his abandonment of her with a spunkiness that would make any woman proud. Plus, she realized that not only could she live without him, but she could use his leaving as a springboard for her own spiritual work. Patacara watched her two small children die before her very eyes on the same day she lost her husband and her parents. The wildness of her despair even moved the Buddha. She learned what it meant to dig deep within herself to find solace. And she learned that what she needed to go on living was already within her heart. Queen Mallika would have blowout battles with her husband, while Magandiya was so overtaken with jealousy that she killed her husband’s lover. Pajapati, already brokenhearted that her son deserted their royal family in search of enlightenment, faced ongoing hardships as her community, abandoned, sank into poverty and ultimately warred with neighboring kingdoms. Out of her despair grew a determination to deepen her own spiritual practice so she could be helpful to other women suffering the same losses.

Each of these women did more than survive. They are remembered in Buddhist texts because they were able to transform the tragedies of their lives into their own deep experience of enlightenment. There is an old Buddhist saying: If you meet the tiger in the jungle and he opens his mouth to eat you, you must put your head all the way into his mouth. That’s exactly what these ancient women did. In embracing the truth of their situations and not running from their emotions, by allowing despair to surface and provide grist for their spiritual work, each woman was transformed. Today we would call them saints.

A new millennium is an auspicious time to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients. Their stories have been hidden for too long. It’s not just that the female followers of Buddha have been less exposed to us—although that is true—it’s that things have been tougher for women in this tradition. As a result, their stories are fewer and farther between, so the energy we could draw from them has been largely left untapped. Okay, there’s Tara in the Tibetan tradition and Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion in Zen, but for every Tara and Kuan Yin we’ve heard of handfuls of male Milarepas and Dalai Lamas and masters like Dogen and Hakuin and Chinul.

What a loss.

And yet what a joy to find again life stories that offer up the truth of everyday enlightenment and different perspectives on how to heal heartbreak. If these women could suffer the inevitable hardships life brings, transform their difficulties into a search for their own wisdom hearts, so can we—whether we are working mothers, working fathers, housewives, househusbands, single, not single, or sort of single. Not only do these women provide inspiration, they also prove the universality of enlightenment. It’s one thing to be a prince who decides to dedicate his life to spiritual seeking. It’s another to be an old woman, rejected by your entire extended family, who manages to discover the path to happiness not just in spite of it all but by using it all. That’s why it is the experience of women, not men, that is so significant in these times of relationship confusion writ large.

Let’s face it: Times are tough. The speed of change has made most of our lives chaotic. Issues have become more complex. It’s a good time to clear up and hunker down. A new century offers the perfect opportunity for embracing a different approach to living—one that is direct, open, compassionate, and wise. It offers us an opportunity to try out alternative ways, maybe even ancient ones, of responding to our world.

Not that I’m pointing any fingers, but you and I could still be stuck in the rut of reacting to difficult situations in the same way. A lover leaves and we obsess about getting even. The new wife is nasty and we’re drawn to doing what we can to make her life miserable. The community we live in is fraying around the edges, yet we don’t even know the names of our neighbors. Lowering crime statistics notwithstanding, we dash from car to home each night, battening down our physical and psychological hatches until the morning comes and we get back into the fray. Loneliness has taken over many of our days, while we continue to lose whole decades in the blink of an eye.

Let’s try looking backward for some emotional and spiritual help. Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha offered up some powerful teachings on how we could climb our way out of our unhappiness. His four noble truths—that life brings with it suffering, that we suffer because we are always wanting something more, that there is a path out of suffering, and that path consists of deep morality mixed with a bare attention to our lives—have become the centerpiece for a formula followed by millions of spiritual seekers, starting with the ancients, wanting to find the place of deep contentment and joy that we are actually beginning to believe is our birthright.

Ancient Buddhist women have shown us that by sinking our teeth into our spiritual practice, we allow to surface an abiding wisdom that can help us survive the worst possible personal tragedies. This wisdom, this crazy wisdom, as often as not contradicts conventional wisdom, offering whole new possibilities for approaching the gunk of our lives. Crazy wisdom is literally a form a wisdom that seems crazy at first but, through the lens of time, proves to be exactly right for the situation. It can seed unimagined solutions to problems that have made us writhe in pain for years. It can create community as we begin to actually talk to each other and hear the words and feelings coming out of our mouths. It offers up the possibility of peace and a world held precious by its inhabitants. Finally, at its most ripe, crazy wisdom is the complete manifestation of the four perfections—equanimity, joy, compassion, and loving kindness—the elements of our own enlightenment.

Love Dharma is a collection of stories that illustrate the impact crazy wisdom has on people’s lives. These stories of the early female followers of the Buddha, women who have been largely unknown outside Buddhist academic circles, make up the heart of this book. Each woman had to lean into her own crazy wisdom to survive and eventually discover her own enlightened heart. For each chapter, I have pulled the theme of each woman’s story forward to this century to demonstrate how the same crazy wisdom offers something for today. These women really lived. They really suffered. They have so much to teach.

My purpose? To remind each of us of the ruts we allow ourselves to get into and to suggest that not only are there alternative approaches to our problems but that these alternatives could be more effective. And that there is delight in exploring crazy wisdom. As our trust in this wilder aspect of our lives grows, so will a deepening sense of fun and fearlessness, not to mention a swell of clearheaded joy.

I bow in gratitude to those women who, almost three thousand years ago, got off the floor; shaved their heads; and broke their own rules, habits, and cultural norms and in so doing raised happiness, joy, and delight to new levels.

May all beings be as lucky.

This book is divided into nine chapters. Following an introduction to the women as a group, each of the remaining chapters introduces a difficult situation such as the loss of a spouse, the betrayal of a lover, or facing the pull of an affair. Stories of how the ancients faced these difficulties show up in every chapter. In addition, quotes from the ancients’ “enlightenment poems” or personal stories of awakening are inserted all over the place as reminders that awakening is our path no matter what tragedies happen between now and then. Finally, examples of how the same crazy wisdom could work today—or already does—complete each chapter: heart dharma for our survival toolbox.