Prajnaparamita

“In the Astasahasrikaprajnaparamitasutra, the earliest known Prajnaparamita (a word which is Sanskrit is grammatically feminine) is presented as the female personification of liberating wisdom. She is barely personalised in the sutra and is no deity, but the perfect understanding which liberates is clearly imagined as feminine (Macy 1977, 315.) Prajnaparamita is the mother of the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas, their instructors in this world, genetrix, and nurse (Macy 1977, 319.) Without perfect wisdom there would be no perfectly enlightened beings, and so, as teacher and as what is taught, Prajnaparamita is the mother who bears and nutures the enlightened ones. She is the source of light which reveals the truth; she is the eye which perceives it." (Macy 1977, 320.)”

Nancy Schuster Barnes, Women in World Religion, State U. of NY Press, 1987, p. 122.

“The "Prajnaparamita" ("Wisdom that Saves") is essential a philosophical work, the abstract concept of prajna , or insight, is frequently characterized in the opus as "the mother of all Buddhas." Inevitably, therefore, Prajnaparamita became a goddess and the Buddhist "magna mater" with whom all other goddesses, whether created intellectually or adopted locally, were promptly homoligized. Prajnaparamita is also the personification of the most important philosophical text of the Mahayana, known as the Prajnaparamitra Sutra of Eight Thousand Verses.

Prajnaparamita is the paradigmatic enlightened goddess in Buddhism. She is the transcendent wisdom of selflessness or freedom, the realisation that liberate from all suffering. She is praised as the Mother of all Buddhas. The Prajnaparamita Sutras are the verbal expressions of hr wisdom; they are basic to Universal Vehicle (mahayana) Buddhism. These wisdom texts teach the freedom reality of voidness, the conception of the spirit of the enlightenment of love and compassion, the pats of the Bodhisatvas - everything needed for the attainment of liberation.”

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