Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Figures

Maya

Also Known As Queen Maya Titled form, and the one that separates the mother of the Buddha from maya the doctrine and the Maya culture.
Matriarchs

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Maya, also called Mahamaya, is the mother of the Buddha in every branch of Buddhist tradition: queen of the Shakyas, wife of Suddhodana of Kapilavastu, and the woman whose dream of a white elephant with six tusks entering her side announces the conception. The birth accounts place her at Lumbini, travelling to her parents' home, where she stops in a grove and gives birth standing, holding the branch of a sala tree. She dies seven days afterwards and is reborn in the Trayastrimsa heaven, and the tradition holds that the Buddha ascended there many years later to teach her the higher doctrine for three months, descending again at Sankassa, an episode kept as a festival across Theravada Asia.

Facts
Disputed
Historicity
Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record 1
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2014) treats the claim that the Buddha had a mother, Maya, who died soon after his birth as uncontested within the tradition and historically unremarkable given high maternal mortality in the period. The dictionary's editors examine the elaborated details attached to her, the dream of the white elephant, the painless birth from her side, and her death on the seventh day after the birth, against the layered compilation history of the Buddhist biographical tradition, and find these belong to a hagiographical layer that develops over the several centuries following the Buddha's own lifetime, which is why historians treat them as legendary elaboration rather than as reported fact.
Historicity Detail
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014) records that Maya, also called Mahamaya, queen of the Shakyas and mother of the Buddha, including the dream of a white elephant announcing his conception, the birth at Lumbini and her death seven days afterward followed by rebirth in the Trayastrimsa heaven, is known entirely through Buddhist biographical literature composed later than the events it narrates, with no contemporary source independently attesting to her. 1
Identity
Also Known As
Mahamaya; Mayadevi; Queen Maya of the Shakyas 1Tradition: Buddhism
Canonical Reference
Tradition holds the Buddha ascended to the Trayastrimsa heaven to teach her the higher doctrine for three months, descending again at Sankassa, an episode still kept as a festival across Theravada Asia. 1
Gender
Female 1
Life
Office Held
Queen of the Shakyas, wife of Suddhodana of Kapilavastu 1Tradition: Buddhism
Origins
Origin of the Name
Her name, meaning illusion or magical power in Sanskrit and Pali, is read by some Buddhist commentators as an apt one for a queen whose death seven days after the birth embodies the teaching that even the mother of a Buddha remains bound to impermanence. 1
Attributions
Tradition
Conceived after dreaming of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side 1Tradition: Buddhism
Tradition
Reborn in the Trayastrimsa heaven, where the Buddha is held to have taught her the Abhidharma for three months 1Tradition: Theravada Buddhism
Position Profile
Key Text
The Lalitavistara Sutra and the wider Buddhist birth narratives record her dream of the white elephant and the birth at Lumbini. 1
Attestation
Traditions Revering This Figure
Buddhism 1
Practice
Lineage
Her younger sister Mahaprajapati Gautami raised the infant Buddha after Maya's death and, in the tradition's account, later became the first Buddhist nun, ordained directly by the Buddha after repeatedly petitioning him to admit women to the monastic community. 1
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The Dream, the Grove and the Sala Branch

The conception is announced by a dream, and the dream is one of the most frequently carved scenes in Buddhist art. Maya sees a white elephant with six tusks, carrying a lotus, circle her three times and enter her right side. Brahmin interpreters at the court tell Suddhodana that his queen will bear a son who will become either a universal monarch or a fully awakened one. The elephant is the standard sign of royal power in Indian iconography, and six is the number of directions with the zenith and nadir added, so the image says both that a king is coming and that his reach will not be territorial.

The birth is told with equal deliberation. Ten months later Maya sets out for her parents' house to give birth there, as custom required, and stops at a pleasure grove at Lumbini. She takes hold of the branch of a sala tree, gives birth standing, and the child emerges from her right side without pain and takes seven steps. The elements of the scene, the tree, the standing posture, the grasped branch, belong to older Indian imagery of the fertile woman and the tree spirit, and Buddhist sculptors used that vocabulary consciously.

She dies seven days after the birth. The Pali commentaries explain that this is not misfortune but the rule: the womb that carries a Buddha is not used again, and the mother of a Buddha always dies on the seventh day. The child was raised by her sister Mahapajapati Gotami, who was also Suddhodana's wife and who, decades later, asked her stepson to admit women to the monastic order and became the first bhikkhuni. Lumbini itself is a fixed point in the history rather than the legend: Ashoka set up a pillar there in the third century BCE recording that the Buddha was born on that spot, and the pillar still stands.

The Teaching in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three

Buddhist tradition holds that a person's debt to their parents cannot be repaid with material things, only by establishing them in the teaching, and the story of Maya after her death is the founder's own discharge of that debt. Reborn in the Trayastrimsa heaven, the heaven of the thirty-three gods on the summit of Mount Meru, she is out of reach of ordinary speech. In the seventh year after his awakening the Buddha ascends there and spends the three months of the rains retreat teaching her and the assembled gods the Abhidharma, the systematic analysis of mind and phenomena, sending a created double down to the human world to keep his daily alms round.

The descent is the part that became a festival. He returns to earth at Sankassa on a triple stairway of gold, silver and crystal, attended by Brahma and Shakra, at the full moon that ends the rains. Sankassa is one of the eight great pilgrimage places of Indian Buddhism, and the descent from the heaven is kept across Theravada countries at the end of the rains retreat, in Thailand and Laos and Myanmar, with processions and offerings.

The episode does a specific piece of doctrinal work as well as an emotional one. Placing the first teaching of the Abhidharma in a heaven, to an audience of gods, was one traditional answer to the observation that the Abhidharma texts are unlike the discourses in style and appear later in the record. Modern scholars read the Abhidharma as the product of several centuries of monastic analysis rather than a single delivered teaching, and note that the different schools produced different Abhidharma collections that do not agree. The story remains one of the most widely depicted scenes in Buddhist art, and its subject is a son teaching his mother.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Maya directly: "capital of the pre-conquest Kiche Maya kingdom, and it grew as a Dominican parish town in the colonial highlands."

Source Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the MayaAllen J. Christenson

This source names Maya directly: "released in 1990, not a traditional Maya calendrical system, despite popular conflation of the two."

This source names Maya directly: "of only four surviving pre-Columbian Maya manuscripts."

Source History of the SLUBSaxon State and University Library Dresdenthe holders' own account

This source names Maya directly: "and its custody of major Mexica and Maya archaeological material."

This source names Maya directly: "Age teaching, his authorship of The Mayan Factor, and his role originating the 1987 Harmonic Convergence event."

This source names Maya directly: "around an interview with a working Maya archaeologist."

Lumbini, Sacred Sites

She gave birth in the grove there, holding a sala branch, on the journey to her parents' house; the shrine at the site is named the Mayadevi temple after her.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

This source names Maya directly: "The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, opened by Yuri Knorozov's 1952 argument that the script was partly phonetic."

This source names Maya directly: "Thompson's study is the standard reference for the structure of the Maya calendars, the Haab and Tzolkin counts, and the reading of month and day glyphs, working directly from the calendrical..."

Source Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An IntroductionJ. Eric S. Thompson

This source names Maya directly: "October 12, 2009, reporting Guatemalan Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun's own frustration with international questions about a supposed Mayan doomsday tied to December 21, 2012."

This source names Maya directly: "The comparative reconstruction of the Mayan language family from its living daughter languages, applied systematically to the family from the 1960s."

This source names Maya directly: "built by the ancestors of the living Maya rather than a vanished outside people."

This source names Maya directly: "Weighs missionary accounts of Aztec and Maya ritual against native testimony."

This source names Maya directly: "of the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya sacred narrative, one of the manuscript's most important surviving copies."

Source Popol Vuh (Ayer MS 1515): Newberry Library Research GuideThe Newberry Librarythe holders' own account

This source names Maya directly: "is the sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya, and this University of Oklahoma Press edition is Allen J."

Source Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the MayaAllen J. Christenson

This source names Maya directly: "source for the Haab month names and Maya ritual practice precisely because he also burned the Maya books he found in Yucatan, destroying much of the primary evidence his own account now substitutes..."

Source Relacion de las cosas de YucatanDiego de Landa

This source names Maya directly: "Right Angle Cross of Maya is a Right Angle Incarnation Cross built on Gate 32 and Gate 42."

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

This source names Maya directly: "Right Angle Cross of Maya is a Right Angle Incarnation Cross built on Gate 42 and Gate 32."

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

This source names Maya directly: "Right Angle Cross of Maya is a Right Angle Incarnation Cross built on Gate 61 and Gate 62."

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

This source names Maya directly: "Right Angle Cross of Maya is a Right Angle Incarnation Cross built on Gate 62 and Gate 61."

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

This source names Maya directly: "with Hindu and Buddhist teachings on maya and with older accounts of a creator standing behind the world in other traditions."

This source names Maya directly: "Susan Milbrath's study of Maya astronomical religion, tracing how Venus, the sun, the moon and the planets structure Maya art, ritual calendars and the Dresden Codex's Venus table, including the..."

This source names Maya directly: "rather than a general history of Maya calendrics."

This source names Maya directly: "Coe, Stephen Houston, Mary Miller and Karl Taube are specialists in Maya epigraphy and archaeology, and this Precolumbia Mesoweb Press study is their peer reviewed scholarly assessment of the..."

Source The Fourth Maya CodexMichael D. Coe, Stephen Houston, Mary Miller and Karl Taube

This source names Maya directly: "Jones's The Itza Maya, Rulership and Rebellion at Lake Peten, published by Stanford University Press in 1998, is the standard scholarly history of the last independent Maya kingdom, conquered by..."

This source names Maya directly: "study identifying the deities of the Maya codices with the Schellhas god-letter system, matching those letter designations to specific named deities and to figures known from the Classic period."

Source The Major Gods of Ancient YucatanKarl A. Taube
The Maya, Sources

This source names Maya directly: "are archaeologists specializing in Maya civilization, and this is a long running academic reference work, first published in the 1960s and substantially revised across many later editions as Maya..."

Source The MayaMichael D. Coe and Stephen Houston

This source names Maya directly: "Coe and Stephen Houston's standard scholarly textbook on ancient Maya civilization, published by Thames and Hudson and regularly revised as new archaeological and epigraphic findings emerge..."

Source The Maya (9th edition)Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston

This source names Maya directly: "esoteric numerology, not a work of Maya scholarship, and this record states that plainly: Arguelles reinterpreted the ancient Maya calendar as a countdown toward planetary transformation, an..."

Source The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond TechnologyJose Arguelles

This source names Maya directly: "Robert Carmack's The Quiche Mayas of Utatlan is a major scholarly ethnohistory of the Postclassic Kiche Maya kingdom centered at Utatlan in highland Guatemala, combining archaeological excavation..."

This source names Maya directly: "her own apprenticeship with K'iche' Maya day-keepers, ajq'ij, in Momostenango, Guatemala, a documented firsthand method that makes it the standard authority for the two hundred sixty day count as a..."

Source Time and the Highland MayaBarbara Tedlock

This source names Maya directly: "substance in ancient Egyptian and Maya practice rather than serving only as an ornamental flower or perfume ingredient, as it is often assumed to be."

The birth she gave at Lumbini is one of the three events the festival marks, alongside the awakening and the final passing.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Belongs to Tradition

Buddhism, Religions

The mother of the founder, and the subject of two of the most frequently depicted scenes in Buddhist art, the dream and the birth at Lumbini.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Children

She died seven days after the birth, and he was raised by her sister Mahapajapati Gotami, who later became the first ordained Buddhist nun.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Depicted In

The relief's directly named subject per the museum's own title, following the standard Gandharan composition for Maya's birth-giving at Lumbini, matching the corroborating Wikipedia record's account of that same scene.

Sources
1. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014View the Source
Maya, Mother of the Buddha (Wikipedia)
WikipediaDepicted In: Birth of the Buddha Shakyamuni (Gandhara, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.417.1)
Quote, Depicted In: Birth of the Buddha Shakyamuni (Gandhara, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.417.1)
Maya Devi was delighted by the park and gave birth standing while holding onto a sal branch. Legend has it that Prince Siddhartha emerged from her right side.
View the Source
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