The ordination of Buddhist Nuns during the time of Buddha
Many stories of the Buddha’s life and even of Prince Siddhartha Gautama (624-544 BC) are centred on women – poignant and sad, yet in most, triumphant in the end. His mother, Queen Mahamaya, died a week after his birth.
This had to be; previously ordained by her karma, it is said. Caring for him was taken over by his maternal aunt – Parajapathi Gotami who King Suddhodhana married.
Prajapati Gotami – the first Buddhist nun
The story of Prajapathi Gotami and her desire to become a nun under the dispensation of her foster son makes for a wonderfully human story. In the fifth year after the Buddha’s enlightenment (585 BC) he visited Kapilavastu, not his first visit; since he had come when his father, King Suddhodana had died.
Prajapathi Gotama with several royal women sought ordination as nuns. They were refused permission from the Buddha. Not willing to be deterred in her desire for renunciation of lay life, she followed him with the band of likeminded women, walking a very long distance to where he was in residence.
Her request was thrice refused even though she showed immense resolve and persistence.
Humanely kind Ananda Thera, a cousin who was now Buddha’s personal disciple, pointed out that the woman seeking ordination was no less than she who gave her own son to a wet nurse and gave him sustenance and brought him up.
Buddha’s sense of gratitude finally made him acquiesce and he ordained Prajapathi Gotami and her several fellow seekers.
And so the lineage was created on the full moon day of the ninth month of the year in the 6th century BC – now called Nikini Poya.
This Order of Nuns included Sanghamitta Theri, who almost three centuries later, bearing a sapling of the Bo tree in Buddha Gaya, arrived in Sri Lanka on the request of her brother, Mahinda Thera who was already in residence at Mihintale; permission being granted by her father, Emperor Ashoka (304-232 BC). Queen Anula, sister-in-law to King Devanampiya Tissa (250-210 BC), was the first of the Order of Nuns of this island.
The Buddha’s reluctance to ordain nuns
What interests me particularly is why the Buddha refused ordination to women until persuaded to change his mind by Ananda Thera.
I have heard a very sexist explanation that the Buddha is supposed to have pronounced that if nuns were ordained it would be the end of the Sangha.
Nothing could be more malicious to him and discriminatory to women; the Buddha, judging by what he preached and practised, would never have made such a comment.
He elevated women to being equal to men, even superior as the first mentioned parent in his suttas is the mother.
This was against the social background in the India of the 6th century BC when women were treated as menial according to prevalent Hindu and Jain cultures, and Manu who propounded the Manusmrti – the laying down of hierarchies with women placed completely subordinate to men.
The Buddha’s reluctance to permit women to the Order of the Ordained was said to be because of a woman’s make up of acquisitiveness and her nature being more emotional than a man’s. Accepted.
The reason I adduced to this fact of the Buddha’s preliminary refusal is within that reason. I feel he, in his great wisdom, would have thought that women would frivolously leave their families and homes and become nuns shirking their responsibilities due to minor reasons.
A husband-wife tiff is a terrible blow to a woman, just one of those things to a man; harboured by her stressfully, soon forgotten by him. So in a moment of perturbation, sorrow even, a woman could easily ‘escape’ to become a nun.
But as Olande Ananda Thera pointed out recently, no one could enter monkhood or the order of the nuns without consent from family.
Hence a run-away woman would have little chance of becoming a nun under the Buddha’s dispensation.
A more logical explanation is that the Buddha was organizing and consolidating the Order of the Monks, so He did not want a diversion or interruption.
Also he discerned that nuns were weaker physically and needed protection. Thus the Buddha’s initial reluctance to open the door to women seeking nunhood so early in his dispensation is acceptable as justified.
A second rather surprising matter concerns rules to be observed. Higher ordained monks have 227 vinaya rules to observe, nuns many more.
Prior to ordination of Prajapathi Gotami, the Buddha sent her a message asking her whether she was willing to observe eight extra precepts, which she readily consented to.
One of them was that however long a nun’s period of being in ordination, she has to bow to a monk of even one day’s ordination.
Another decrees that nuns live in their aranyas fairly close to where the monks reside and need to have periodic meetings with monks presiding, where their observation of vinaya rules is investigated.
Monks are encouraged to be forest meditators, not nuns. Reason for all these is obvious: society was not disciplined nor all civilized then.
Decline of the Order
After the tenth century, Bhikkhuni orders became weak due to political reasons or war in countries where Bhikkhunis resided.
The Bhikkhuni order is believed to have died out during the 11th century AD but before the Bhikkhuni community disappeared, some Bhikkunis went to China and founded a community of Buddhist Nuns there in 436 AD.
Some scholars believe that the Theravada Bhikkhuni order was maintained in Myanmar until the 13 century. In Sri Lanka it is believed that during the occupation of the maritime regions of the island by the Portuguese (1518-1658) the first Europeans to colonize us, they were ruthless and attempted suppression and complete decimation of Buddhism, so as to introduce Roman Catholicism.
Thus the Order of higher ordained nuns disappeared in this country. Once Buddhism was re-established with the defeat of the Portuguese by the Dutch and latter under the British, women who wanted to follow the Path, who were willing to renounce lay life, became ten preceptors or dasasil mathas.
In Myanmar these ten preceptors are known as Thila–sin and are present in the country since the 13th Century but not recognized as part of the Sangha. Other countries which follow the Theravada tradition like Thailand and Nepal have their ten preceptors known as Mea Chie and Aragarika respectively.
Moving from ten preceptors to nuns in the Mahayana tradition
It was decreed by some Sri Lankan monks that no nun could be ordained without an ordained Theravada nun carrying out the ordination. Not even in remotest China was found an existing nun of the Theravada lineage.
So those who sought higher ordination were being ordained in the Mahayana tradition. The German ten preceptor, Ayya Khema who was in Sri Lanka up until the early 1990s went to California to be ordained a nun.
Ayya Khema built a wonderful place of retreat on an island in the Ratgama Lake, Dodanduwa, close to the Island Hermitage also started by a German monk – Ven Nyanatiloka in 1911. She went into occupation at Nuns’ Island, Parappuduwa on September 9,1984 after being ordained a ten preceptor a couple of years earlier.
Kusuma Devendra, a dasasil matha, with others, proceeded to Buddha Gaya in 1996 and obtained higher ordination from a monk of the Mahayana tradition wearing rich robes and a mitre-like headdress. They returned to the island and were treated with great respect.
The ordination of Theravada nuns
In a sutta The Buddha decreed that after a woman is ordained by a nun of higher ordination, she should go through a second ordination by a monk.
Leading from this, the Buddha said that if there was no nun present or available, a monk could ordain women. It is because of this pronouncement of the Buddha that a Sri Lankan Theravada monk conducted a second ordination of Sister Kusuma and others who were ordained originally in Buddha Gaya. Ven. Brahmavamso ordains nuns in the Theravada tradition in Australia.
I keep in touch with two of them ordained by him in Perth in 2009: Ajahn Vayama and Ajahn Seri. Ajahn Vayama took her ten precepts in Parappuduwa under Ayya Khema in 1985.
The theri gathas written by nuns of the Buddha’s time are scintillating gems of poetry. Women of that time, as also later, entered the Order either on their own volition by being convinced it was the Path for them or they were forced by circumstances like a miserably tortured family life.
The nuns during the Buddha’s time were already followers of the Buddha and sought ordination; or were converts to the new religion. Their psalms reflect the manner of their entering the order and then achieving Arahantship.
The Buddha Dhamma gives equal rights to men and women. In the Parinibbana Sutta, the Buddha preached there had to be four groups in his religious community to ensure effectiveness and continuity.
They are: Bhikkhus (monks), Bhikkhunis (nuns), upasaka (layman/ disciple) and upasika (laywomen/ disciple). Thus it is essential that higher ordained nuns are within the Sangha.