Still, one cannot accuse the authorities of not trying their best. A carefully selected group of monks and nuns have been assigned the daunting task, philologically and otherwise, of examining canonical Buddhist texts, especially the Tibetan Vinaya, for a usable precedent of female ordination within the Mulasarvastivada tradition (an early Indian school of Buddhism). Once such precedent has been found, the full ordination of nuns can be revived. However, in an article from 2013, German Buddhist nun Jampa Tsedroen expressed concern that conservative circles of monks might state their dissatisfaction if any such precedent was actually unearthed. By way of consolation, bhikkhuni Tenzin Palmo’s paper (read at the first International Congress on Buddhist Women’s Role in the Sangha at the University of Hamburg in 2007) claims that, according to the Eight Heavies and Vinaya, monks get to keep their higher position even if full ordination of nuns were to be allowed.
So what would happen if a thoughtful monk (in another tradition) chose to skip similar delay tactics and simply started ordaining women? In 2009, at Dhammasara Monastery in Perth, Australia, British bhikkhu Ajahn Brahm headed the ordination of four bhikkhunis after having established a pre-existing Theravadan lineage. One part of the Buddhist community hailed it as a praiseworthy gesture that proved Buddhism could be relevant and responsive to contemporary contexts, but the monastery’s Thai authorities fiercely revoked the ordination and excommunicated bhikkhu Ajahn Brahm. Some harsh criticism came also from the American monk Ajahn Thanissaro, a strong presence in the Thai Theravada Buddhism, who denounced the ordinations as going against the Thai Vinaya.
But isn’t this eavesdropping on that bygone Buddha’s whisper into Ananda’s inattentive ear and poring over various Vinayas for guidelines like waiting for linguists to fully decipher the Indus script before we can carry on with the 21st century? The historical Buddha – adamantly anti-ritual and heretical as he was – has little to do with the spectacular, ritualised and hierarchical religious blend that is Tibetan Buddhism, though he might have contributed to the brilliant psychological tools it has to offer. In Therigatha, for example, bhikkhuni Punnika uses humour and irony to convince a Brahmin of the pointlessness of his water ablutions, and the efficacy, instead, of pure insight.
Besides being time-consuming and unnecessary, using any of the Vinayas to validate what would be a perfectly valid decision anyway (the full ordination of women) is problematic from at least two standpoints. First, turning to Vinaya for historical evidence of women’s equality within the sangha, or the lack of it, masks the fact that the ongoing discrimination is a human-rights issue that should be tackled in the present. Second, one cannot hope to find in a Vinaya that which has been, most likely, deliberately omitted. This latter point introduces the pivotal question of the original Vinaya’s authorship, the document’s legitimacy and applicability in the contemporary context. So how did it come to be in the first place?
The Rashomon effect
Evam me suttam (thus have I heard) is a refrain-like opening phrase for individual texts or teachings in the Buddhist Pali canon. It tells us, more than anything else, how the Buddha’s words were recorded and transmitted.
The legendary First Buddhist Council took place in a cave close to Rajgir, during the rainy season. Soon after the Buddha’s parinirvana, a group of bhikkhus – presided by the imperious monk Mahakashyapa – gathered to recollect the Buddha’s teachings and instructions, and eventually arrive at his definitive oeuvre, the Buddha’s collected works. They were mostly relying on Ananda’s and bhikkhu Upali’s memory. But it should be taken into account that Ananda had been severely criticised and sanctioned for advocating women’s ordination and being trouble in general, and forced to mend his ways before he was rehabilitated. In legal lingo, the witness might have been extorted into telling the truth as Mahakashyapa and his adherent monks would have it. No burning bushes or divine words chiseling themselves into stone in strokes of lightning. Just a group of men in a cave on a rainy day weaving together the various strands of the Buddha’s fugitive sentences and, in the best of scenarios, slightly adjusting them as they went.
By the end of that meeting, the monks had the Buddhist canon engraved on their minds, and only centuries later scratched onto palm leaves and stored in woven baskets, pitakas (to await countless future transcripts and interpolations). One set of those fragile manuscripts formed the notorious prototypal Vinaya Pitaka – The Basket of Discipline.
But what had happened to the bhikkunis? Where were they at this deciding moment? No one really knows – the records keep mum about the nuns. The aged Mahaprajapati and her retinue had all allegedly chosen to die sometime before the Buddha. The event was celebrated as their collective parinirvana (or, as Reiko Ohnuma suggests, good riddance). The surviving nuns either didn’t receive the invitation to this cave rendezvous, or their presence was not recorded, their contribution uncalled for. You may consider the whole process undemocratic, but that, it seems, was the approach du jour.
Is it then wise or justifiable to take into account such a set of regulations as promulgated by the original Vinaya and its derivatives, and use them to steer the sangha in this day and age? Hardly.
What is more, some scholars, like In Young Chung, see the Eight Heavies as an appendix of a later date: facts don’t add up, and there are certain discrepancies with other sources. Could it be that the Buddha was a feminist after all? If we were to believe the Buddha discriminated against women even after achieving enlightenment, either we have to change the meaning and definition of enlightenment – as Richard H Jones puts it, “a sage need not be a saint” – or conclude that he might have reached full self-realisation and Bodhisattvic compassion only in his parinirvana, in that final act of mumbling, the unrecorded change of heart. The former is one of the most critical questions Gross poses.
Defining arahant
A glance at some of the Buddhist canonical texts, especially the Therigatha (The Poems of Early Buddhist Nuns, shaped at the time when Patna was “the fairest city on earth”) might offer an insight into the nuns’ lives pre-Eight Heavies (if there ever was such a time), and could partially explain the present deadlock.
Therigatha’s commentary praises some of the nuns as excellent preachers to mixed audiences, while the verses give detailed accounts of the stages of enlightenment they went through to get there. These are ascribed to an anonymous sister (from Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids’s translation, Psalms of the Sisters, originally published in 1909):
And now I know the days of the long past,
And clearly shines the Eye Celestial,
I know the thoughts of other minds, and hear
With sublimated sense the sound of things
Ineffable. The mystic potencies
I exercise; and all the deadly Drugs
That poisoned every thought are purged away.
A living truth for me this Sixfold Lore…
These phases are, however, technically predictable and same for both men and women throughout the Buddhist canonical literature, notes Ellison Banks Findly. Just like their male counterparts, the early nuns presented in this anthology did attain full self-realisation or arahantship, if judged by these vivid descriptions. But, Findly points out, the term itself, arahant – when it stands for an individual who has attained enlightenment, full realization – is in the early Pali canon applied only to men, although the canon does acknowledge women’s capabilities of theoretically becoming one. In the parallel monks’ collection Theragatha, for example, the title is explicitly attributed to some monks. In connection to the sisters of Therigatha, on the other hand, it is used only in the later-date commentaries. So what’s the matter here?