Wendy Garling is the author of the award-winning biography of the Buddha’s adoptive mother, The Woman Who Raised the Buddha, the Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati, with foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (2021, Shambhala Publications), and Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha’s Life (2016, Shambhala Publications), a groundbreaking new biography of the Buddha that relates his journey to awakening through the stories of Buddhism’s first women. She has a BA from Wellesley College and MA specializing in Sanskrit language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Wendy has studied with teachers of different schools and lineages, foremost her refuge lama His Holiness the 16th Karmapa, her kind root lama, the late Sera Je Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama whom she first met in 1979. In 1991-92, she coordinated the Georgia chapter of the International Year of Tibet bringing Tibetan cultural and religious events for the first time to Atlanta and Emory University.
In 2023, in the company of guest teacher Venerable Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, Wendy led a first-of its-kind 9-day pilgrimage from sacred sites in Buddhism’s Motherland of Nepal to Vaishali, India, tracing the footsteps of Mahaprajapati and the first Buddhist women. In addition to traveling to the traditional Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India, she has journeyed with Lama Tsultrim Allione to the sacred sites of Machig Labdron in Tibet.
Wendy lives in Concord, Massachusetts and can be reached at wendy.garling@yahoo.com.
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