Mother-Love and Mother-Grief: South Asian Buddhist Variations on a Theme

In this article, Ohnuma examines maternal love and maternal grief in premodern South Asian Buddhist texts and discusses the manner in which patriarchal religious traditions negotiate both symbols. Inasmuch as South Asian Buddhism constitutes a dominant, patriarchal tradition, Ohnuma shows how it ambivalently accommodates the particularity of a mother's love for her own children. On the one hand, canonical Buddhist texts exalt mother-love as a paradigmatic symbol for the universal love and compassion of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. On the other hand, mother-love is also condemned as a manifestation of selfish attachment, as exemplified in the suffering of the grieving mother, who is disparaged in Buddhist texts as antithetical to the spiritual goals of dispassion, detachment, and overcoming suffering. Thus, while mother-love as a symbol is exalted, mother-love as an actual entity is ultimately devalued and undermined. Ohnuma concludes the article by focusing on the Buddhist goddess Hārītī and suggests that this tradition might represent Buddhism's attempt to incorporate lower-level folk traditions that were perhaps more compatible with mother-love.