Prajnatara

Life According to The Transmission of the Lamp Little independent information about the life of Prajñātārā exists outside of The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, a hagiographic account of the lives of early Indian and Chinese masters in the Chan tradition.

Prajñātārā was from a Brahmin family in eastern India and was orphaned at a young age.

The Transmission of the Lamp records several prophecies attributed to Prajñātārā by later Chinese patriarchs. Among them were the prediction of a great calamity during the time of Bodhidharma's heirs Huike and Sengcan that supposedly motivated them to take refuge in the mountains in order to avoid persecutions of Buddhism carried out by the emperor between 574–77. The ordination name Prajñātārā combines the names of two female Buddhist deities or Bodhisattva, Prajnaparamita and Tara.

In 2008, Rev. Koten Benson suggested that Prajñātārā might have been a woman and was the head of the Sarvastivadin order. He claims that oral traditions in Kerala and the Korean Seon (Korean Zen Buddhism) tradition identify Prajñātārā as female, and that archaeological evidence from southern India confirms the existence of famous female teachers.

Reactions to this theory by mainstream Buddhist scholars have ranged from outright dismissal to an acknowledgement that it could be possible. Classical Chinese texts do not always denote gender, and in the absence of explicit gender designations an entry in the list of Dharma successors might be presumed to be male. While less information regarding female teachers has generally been retained by the tradition, the equality of women in spiritual matters was affirmed by the Buddha, and the Chan tradition has a history of female teachers.

The Shōbōgenzo, a 12th century Japanese text written by Zen Master Dōgen, which structurally preserves record of the zen lineage, references Hannyatara as female in chapter 50.

Archeological discoveries have confirmed the existence of a female teacher in southern India. The historical and oral traditions of the people of the state of Kerala provide details about the lives of both Prajñatara and Bodhidharma. The information transmitted through the Zen lineages of Korea confirm this written and oral history, while the knowledge that Bodhidharma had a woman master seems to have been lost in China after a few generations. Some scholars assert that this is because in written Chinese, gender is inferred from context rather than stated explicitly.