Maya gave birth to the Enlightened One, Buddha. The same Goddess, called Maia by the Greeks, was the virgin mother to Hermes the Enlightened One, who had as many reincarnations as the Buddha. Sometimes Maia's partner was Volcanus (Greek Hephaestus, the divine smith and fire-god). This was another mythic mating of male fire and female water. Hindus said Agni the fire-god was the consort of Kali-Maya, though he was periodically swallowed up and "quenched" by her. According to the Tantric phrase, the Goddess quenched a blazing lingam in her yoni.

As the virgin mother of Buddha, Maya embarrassed ascetic Buddhists and was soon written out of the script. Like ascetic Christians speaking of Christ's birth, some Buddhists claimed the Enlightened One could not touch his mother's "parts of shame" and so was born through an opening in her side. This mythic Caesarian section seems to have been bungled, for a few days later Maya died -- "of joy," as Buddhist scriptures rather fatuously put it.

Nevertheless, Maya remained very much alive as one of Kali's most revered manifestations, because the very fact of "Existence"-- the material cosmos-demanded her presence. As Zimmer analyzed her:

Maya-Shakti is personified as the world-protecting, feminine, maternal side of Ultimate Being, and as such, stands for spontaneous, loving acceptance of life's tangible reality...[S]he affirms, she is, she represents and enjoys, the delirium of the manifested forms.... Maya-Shakti is Eve, "the Eternal Feminine," das Ewig-Weibliche: she who ate, she and tempted her consort to eat, and was herself the apple. From the point of view of the masculine principle of the Spirit (which is in quest of the enduring, eternally valid, and absolutely divine) she is the pre-eminent enigma.

In herself Maya embodied all three aspects of the maternal trinity. Her colors were white, red, and black, the colors of the Gunas, or the Virgin-Mother-Crone. Like every other form of Kali, she was Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. She was also a spirit dwelling perpetually in women, A Mahayana text says, "Of all the forms of Maya, woman is the most important."

Maya's son Buddha was surrounded by her symbols. He entered his trance of meditation under her sacred fig tree, which protected him from the weather. On his return from the soul-journey, his first symbolic act was to accept a dish of curds from a maiden on Full Moon Day in the month of May, the greatest of Buddhist festivals.