Maya Devi: The Buddha's Mother and the Sacred Garden at Lumbini

The story of the Buddha's life begins with his mother. Queen Maya Devi was the wife of King Suddhodana, ruler of the Shakya clan of Kapilvastu, and the birth mother of Siddhartha Gautama. Her story is short - she died seven days after his birth - but it gave Buddhist art an image artists have returned to since at least the Gandharan carvings of the 2nd-3rd century CE (Wikipedia: Maya, mother of the Buddha): the queen standing in a garden, one arm raised to a flowering branch, at the moment her son entered the world.

The dream of the white elephant

The tradition tells that Maya dreamt of a white elephant holding a white lotus in its trunk, which walked around her three times and entered her womb through her right side; she awoke knowing she had conceived (Wikipedia: Maya, mother of the Buddha). When the time came, she set out for her family home at Devadaha, but her labour began on the way, in the gardens of Lumbini. There, standing and holding the branch of a sal tree - Shorea robusta, often confused with the Ashoka tree in the sources - she gave birth (Wikipedia: Maya, mother of the Buddha).

Maya died seven days after the birth, and the child was raised by her sister, Mahapajapati Gotami, who the tradition names as the first Buddhist nun ordained by the Buddha.

Lumbini today

Lumbini lies in the Rupandehi district of Nepal's southern Terai, and the Nepal Tourism Board describes it as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautam Buddha, where excavations at the Maya Devi Temple have revealed a "marker stone" identifying the exact spot of the birth (Nepal Tourism Board: Lumbini). The temple stands beside a sacred pool, known as the pushkarani, and a sacred garden; its oldest standing remains are brick buildings from the time of emperor Ashoka, who visited Lumbini around 249 BC (Wikipedia: Maya Devi Temple, Lumbini). The temple houses the marker stone and a nativity sculpture of the birth, and Lumbini as a whole is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, ringed today with monasteries built by Buddhist communities from many countries (Wikipedia: Maya Devi Temple, Lumbini; Nepal Tourism Board: Lumbini).

Maya Devi in our collection

Our Maya Devi Mandala Thangka is a handpainted mandala that, as the listing describes, depicts scenes from the lives of Mayadevi and her son the Buddha: a central figure within concentric patterned circles, four smaller mandalas at the corners and narrative scenes around the border.

The Wooden Mayadevi Statue is a hand-carved wooden figure with an aged, antique finish: the queen stands on a lotus base inside a carved leaf-shaped frame, her right arm raised overhead - the pose in which she is usually shown giving birth, reaching up to grasp a branch (Wikipedia: Maya, mother of the Buddha). You will find the thangka in our thangka collection and the statue in our statues collection.

Sources: Wikipedia: Maya, mother of the Buddha; Wikipedia: Maya Devi Temple, Lumbini; Nepal Tourism Board: Lumbini. Details of the thangka and the statue are from our own product listings.