Wendy Garling

Wendy Garling is a writer, independent scholar, and authorized dharma teacher with a BA from Wellesley College and MA specializing in Sanskrit language and literature from UC Berkeley. She is the author of Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha’s Life (2016, Shambhala Publications) and the award-winning The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: the Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati (2021, Shambhala Publications).

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. Pilgrimage has played an important role in Wendy’s life: in 2007 she journeyed to the sites of women saints in Tibet, and in 2011 and 2018 to sacred sites of the Buddha in India. Most notably, in 2023 she led a historic pilgrimage of lay and monastic women with Venerable Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo from Lumbini, Nepal to Vaishali, India, “In the Footsteps of Gautami and the First Buddhist Women,” retracing the sacred journey of those 500 women for the first time, after 2,500 years.