Wendy Garling is a writer, mother, gardener, independent scholar, and authorized dharma teacher with a BA from Wellesley College and an MA specializing in Sanskrit language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha’s Life (2016, Shambhala Publications), a groundbreaking biography of the Buddha that relates his journey to awakening through the stories of Buddhism’s first women, and the award-winning The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati (2021, Shambhala Publications), which includes a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Wendy has studied with teachers of different schools and lineages, foremost her refuge lama, His Holiness the 16th Karmapa (who gave her the name Karma Dhonden Lhamo); her kind root lama, the late Sera Je Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden; and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whom she first met in 1979. From 1991–92, she coordinated the Georgia chapter of the International Year of Tibet, helping to bring many Tibetan cultural and religious events to Atlanta and Emory University. As a freelance writer and editor, she was on the editorial team at the Boston Women’s Health Collective for the 2005 edition of Our Bodies Ourselves and several subsequent BWHC publications. She also wrote business articles for The Palladium Group, published through Harvard Business Publishing.

Pilgrimage has played an important role in Wendy’s life. In 2007, she journeyed with Lama Tsultrim Allione to the sites of women saints in Tibet, and in 2011 and 2018 to Buddhist sites in India. In 2023, she led her own pilgrimage, “Following in the Footsteps of Gautami and the First Buddhist Women,” through sacred sites in Buddhism’s motherland of Nepal to Vaishali, India, accompanied by special guest the Venerable Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Her dream is to bring back the stories of Buddhism’s first women, reawaken their voices, and ensure that they are not just remembered but valorized as integral to the roots of Buddhism. Wendy lives in Concord, Massachusetts, and can be reached at [email protected].

His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is considered the foremost Buddhist leader of our time. The exiled spiritual head of the Tibetan people, he is a Nobel Peace Laureate, a Congressional Gold Medal recipient, and a remarkable teacher and scholar who has authored over one hundred books.