Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Buddhism in Translations - § 99. The Admission of Women to the Order.

Henry Clarke WarrenPali Canon TranslationsTheravada Buddhism

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This is a canonical Pali scripture — a passage from the Culla-Vagga of the Vinaya Pitaka, the Theravada Buddhist monastic rule — narrating the founding of the bhikkhunī (nuns') order. It recounts how Mahā-Pajāpatī, the Buddha's aunt and foster mother, repeatedly petitions him to admit women to the monastic life and is refused each time, before following him on foot to Vesālī in monks' robes as an act of determined appeal. The monk Ānanda intervenes, and when the Buddha concedes that women are fully capable of attaining all four stages of spiritual liberation, Ānanda uses that admission to argue successfully for their admission. The Buddha grants ordination conditionally, imposing eight permanent "weighty regulations" (garudhammā) that subordinate all nuns to all monks regardless of seniority — a nun of a hundred years must defer to a monk ordained that day. Most distinctively, the text closes with the Buddha predicting that admitting women has halved the lifespan of the Dharma from a thousand years to five hundred, comparing the nuns' order to mildew on rice, rust on sugarcane, and burglars preying on female-majority households. The passage is thus a primary source for both the history of Buddhist women's ordination and ongoing scholarly debate about early Buddhist attitudes toward gender and institutional hierarchy.

Buddhism in Translations - § 99. The Admission of Women to the Order.

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