Since the 1980s, Barbara McHugh has been studying and practicing Buddhism. Unlike most Buddhists, however, she also attends a Christian church.

“I think [both] these religions are really getting at the same thing, as much as they don’t like to think so,” McHugh observes via phone from her Berkeley, California, home. “This idea of how we get out of the prison of the self: Buddhism has one way, Christianity has another, and they overlap a lot.”

Spirituality is central to McHugh’s life. The poet and novelist, who also spent 20 years as a writing coach and “book doctor,” with individual clients, workshops, and intensives, earned Ph.D.s in religion and literature from the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. She’s on the board of directors of Marin Sangha, a local Buddhist community, and teaches meditation. And in her new novel, Bride of the Buddha,McHugh gives a feminist spin to the myth of Yasodhara, the wife Siddhartha abandoned, along with the couple’s infant son, to become the Buddha. 

“It’s a story of forgiveness,” McHugh says. “It’s a story of the conflict between transcending the world and embracing the world, and [of] what causes her to choose both of these [actions] throughout her life. I see that as important because it’s a conflict that comes up in all religions.” 

According to McHugh, the common narrative is that Yasodhara eventually joined the Buddha’s community and became a nun. However, in Bride of the Buddha, Yasodhara disguises herself as a man named Ananda and becomes a monk, taking an active role in persuading the Buddha to ordinate women after her son decides to follow in his father’s spiritual footsteps. She also becomes aware of hidden dangers that threaten the Buddha’s life and lessons.

McHugh delves into Yasodhara’s origin story, including the deaths of two of her sisters and her lifelong quest for enlightenment for herself and for other women:

But I couldn’t have gained this freedom without faith in the possibility of awakening, where my body was other than some essential self that would be irreparably damaged by forced sex. This was the faith the Tathagata had bestowed on me by allowing me to become a monk. Not that all women needed to turn themselves into monastics, but I truly believed that nothing other than the existence of fellow women seeking full enlightenment could give them the confidence that they, too, were other than their bodies; they were part of the mystery that all beings shared.

Why did McHugh choose to rewrite the story of a woman who she says is barely present in the Buddhist canon? “I didn’t just want to go with the hagiography and make her passive,” McHugh says. “I wanted to make it [Yasodhara’s] own story.” The author also has tradition on her side. “There’s evidence in the scriptures that Ananda and Yasodhara could be the same person, partly because [there are] certain anomalies in Ananda’s life,” McHugh says. “Here is an unenlightened junior monk who persuades the Buddha to admit women! So what is going on here, that Ananda talks him into it?” The two also have major similarities, McHugh claims: “extreme” physical attractiveness and a first-cousin relationship to the Buddha.

There’s a lot of potential in rewriting a myth as well, McHugh thinks. “A myth is like a big house,” she says. “Millions of people live in it, and they’re able to use that myth as a jumping-off point. When people live in that myth, they can see the universe from a safe place.” 

She doesn’t see the need to entirely do away with the story of the Buddha’s wife. “If you tear down a myth, it’s sort of like being left with a big hole, to a toxic degree.” Reimagining a myth, however, is analogous to renovating the house and thus challenging that safe space. “[It’s] like remodeling a house [and] letting more light in,” McHugh says. “You’re trying to find the truths that have gotten lost in the historical view of the facts. The legend, the myth, can begin to block out light, but a myth has so much potential.” Making this myth a “page-turner of a novel” that people would want to read was equally important, McHugh says. “The older I get, [the more] I feel like fiction is so important in terms of portraying values and getting at our core being.

“I like to think novels change people,” she reflects. “In this book, it shows them how to be holy, for a woman to go beyond her feminine identity and become more of a central person on the primary spiritual track.” 

Kirkus Reviews praised Bride of the Buddha,calling the book “a moving drama with a message about female empowerment at its core” and “an edifying look at the patriarchal limitations of Buddhism’s genius.” 

For her part, McHugh hopes her novel shows readers “the possibilities of being” and what she calls life’s “infinite” learning curve.

“I always quote this woman from the church I attend, who said, ‘I’m so glad I’m eighty-five. Back when I was eighty-two, I just did not have it together,’ ” McHugh relates with a laugh. “In my book, I try to show that…there’s always some new way of learning and new challenges you’re going to get as the years go by.” 

Lauren Emily Whalen lives in Chicago and is the author of four books for young adults.