La maternité dans le canon bouddhiste pāli : choix et chemins

Abstract

This article examines the themes of choice and agency in the context of motherhood as it appears in the Pāli Buddhist texts. I focus on two characters, Māya, the Buddha’s birth mother and Visākhā, one of his best known female lay disciples. Both of these women are known primarily because of their connection to the Buddha, and their spiritual path is neglected, or even disdained, because they are considered as secondary and auxiliary characters whose only purpose is to support the men they surround (Gross, 1995). In this article, I propose a “matricentric” feminist approach (O’Reilly, 2014) to challenge this attitude, and the patriarchal hierarchy that underlies it. Based on this radical interpretation of Buddhist principles, I show how the Buddhist path appears, in the Pāli texts, as a “mothering path” that a number of women, like Māya and Visākhā, choose and undertake as a spiritual path, thereby recognizing women’s agency as mothers and the validity and value of mothering in a soteriological context.