Introduction
Mahapajapati Gotami was the sister of Maya Devi and second wife of Suddhodana, who raised Siddhartha Gautama as her own son after her sister's death seven days after his birth.
Family
- Spouse: Suddhodana (married)
The First Bhikkhuni
After the Buddha's enlightenment and the founding of the monastic Sangha, Mahapajapati Gotami repeatedly requested ordination as a nun, initially refused before eventually being granted permission (with additional conditions, according to the traditional account) through the intervention of Ananda. She is traditionally regarded as the first woman ordained as a Buddhist nun (bhikkhuni) and the founder of the bhikkhuni order, a foundational moment in Buddhist monastic history.
This article follows the Pali Canon and its commentarial tradition as the primary early Buddhist textual source; where sources genuinely disagree on a detail (such as an exact parentage), that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into a single invented certainty.