|
Theravādin buddhists observe the full-moon of the lunar month of Bhaddapada
(corresponding to August-September) to commemorate the establishment of a bhikkhunī
(nun) order among the followers of Gotama (c.484-404 BCE).
Monkish myth has it that this happened 5 years after his awakening (so, around
444 BCE). When Gotama was staying at Kapilavatthu, the capital of his tribe, the
Sākyas, his maternal aunt and foster-mother, Gotamī,
who would have been at least 55, asked him to admit herself and other women into
his monastic order. (As with Gotama, we do not know her first name, only her
clan name; later buddhists assigned an epithet, mahāpajāpatī, 'the great
chief queen', to her.)
Gotamī asked 3 times, and 3 times Gotama refused. After the wet season
Gotama wandered south to the city of Vesālī. Gotamī and some other
Sākyan women cut off their hair and put on the yellow robes of a monk, and
walked down to Vesālī. There were already other women who were wandering
ascetics in north India at the time, and an order of nuns was established among
a major rival sect to Gotama's, the Jains. So what was scandalous about Gotamī's
actions was not her leaving domestic life, but her defiance of Gotama. At Vesālī,
Gotamī met Ānanda, her nephew-in-law, who was Gotama's
personal attendant. To emphasize the scandal in her behavior, the monks who later
composed the monastic texts described her as being in tears, such lack of self-control
highlighting lack of spiritual development. Ānanda took up the women's cause,
for which he was to be denigrated by other monks after Gotama's death.
Ānanda asked Gotama 3 times to admit women into the order, 3 times being
refused. Ānanda then asked Gotama: 'Master, are women capable, after going
forth from the homelife into homelessness in the teaching and training declared
by the perfect one, of realizing the fruit of stream-entry or once-return or non-return
or arahantship?' (That is, if women became wandering mendicants in Gotama's order,
would they be able to progress along any of the 4 stages to buddhahood; in short,
are women capable of becoming awakened?) Gotama replied: 'They are, Ānanda.'
Ānanda then suggested to Gotama a fourth time that it would be good for
women to be admitted into the monastic order. Gotama then agreed. Having agreed
that women could realize arahantship, he could not deny them the opportunity to
do so, and to work on their spiritual development on a full-time basis as monastics.
He accepted Gotamī into the monastic order.
Hundreds of years after Gotama's death, the monks who composed the Pāli
and Sanskrit texts on the rules of the monastic order (Vinaya) did so
in a way that inferiorized nuns to monks, denigrated Ānanda, and predicted
the establishment of the bhikkhunī order would shorten the life
of teaching (according to brahminical concepts of time cycles).
Many buddhist women followed the example of Gotamī and her comrades. She
had a cult following in her own right, which included hagiographic stories such
as the Gotamī-apadāna (Jonathan Walters, 'The buddha's mother's
story', 1994). The bhikkhunī order flourished in India for a thousand
years, until the middle of the first millennium. From that time their numbers
decreased, especially with the development of tantra (vajrayāna) from the
7th century. The order survived to the end of that millennium. Schopen (Bones,
stones, and buddhist monks, 1997) notes:
… it appears that the emergence of the Mahāyāna in the fourth
to fifth centuries coincided with a marked decline in the role of women in all
kinds of practice of Indian Buddhism. What is important for us to note here, however,
is that until that time—contrary to Oldenberg—nuns, indeed women as
a whole, appear to have been very numerous, very active, and, as a consequence,
very influential in the active Buddhist communities of early India. The female
monastics who, like their male counterparts, were so active in religious giving
and the cults of relics and images were, again like their male counterparts, oftentimes
of high ecclesiastical standing: they were "masters of the Three Piṭakas,"
"versed in the Sūtras," and many of them had groups of disciples.
Sinhalese legend says that the bhikkhunī order was introduced
into Lanka in the late 3rd century BCE. It survived there for 1,300 years.
In 426 CE, eight Sinhalese nuns went to China. They were followed by three
more in 429, providing a quorum to enable full ordination of Chinese nuns for
the first time. Nun orders of east Asia trace their ordination right back to them,
in a 1,600 year history whose origins go back 800 years further to Gotamī.
While the Pyū in (what is now) Burma got their theravāda buddhism
from mainland south India by the 4th century, we do not know when a bhikkhunī
order developed in Burma, but it died out at the end of the 13th century. The
Mon of (what is now) Siam also got theravāda from mainland India by the middle
of the first millennium, but we do not know if there was a bhikkhunī
order among them.
The bhikkhunī order died out in Lanka in the 11th century before
the mahāvihārin version of theravāda buddhism was 'exported' from
there to southeast Asia in the late medieval period. The Sinhalese did not choose
to import a bhikkhunī order from Burma to reestablish it (though
they imported monks from other countries to reestablish the monkhood on 5 occasions).
The theravāda bhikkhunī order was reestablished in the
late 20th century, when 21 Sinhalese nuns got higher ordination at a ceremony
in Bodhgayā, India, in February 1998. The first higher ordination
of Sinhalese nuns in Lanka itself was in 1998, and there are now some 1,000 Sinhalese bhikkhunīs. In Siam, where
there is a small number of bhikkhunīs, the male monastic establishment
is hysterically opposed to higher ordination of women. There are also bhikkhunīs
in Nepal (a country to which theravāda was introduced in the 20th century). The TheravÄdin bhikkhunī order was restored in India on 15 January 2009, at Nagpur, with the higher ordination of 14 nuns.
In Australia, the first higher ordination of theravādin nuns was on 22 October 2009. The bhikkhunīs are ajahn Vāyāmā and ayyas Nirodhā, Serī and Hasapañña.
In 2010, the Bhaddapada uposatha is September 23.
|
