The Mother of All the Buddhas

The most striking of Prajnaparamita's titles is the Mother of all the Buddhas. The reasoning behind it is precise and important: since it is the perfection of wisdom, the realisation of emptiness, that makes a buddha a buddha, and since every buddha of the past, present and future attains awakening through that same wisdom, the perfection of wisdom is the womb from which all buddhas are born.

To personify it as a mother-goddess is thus not decoration but doctrine: it names the feminine principle of wisdom as the source of enlightenment itself. This gave the Mahayana a great female figure at the very centre of its understanding of awakening, and Prajnaparamita became an object of both philosophical study and devotional visualisation, contemplated as a means of realising the wisdom she embodies. She holds together, in a single figure, the three things a tradition most reveres, its scripture, its highest insight, and a divine presence, and stands as one of the clearest expressions in Buddhism of the sacredness of wisdom.