Chapter 6: Buddhism and Feminism¶

"Is Buddhism egalitarian?" In the contemporary world, the concrete version of this question is normally: are Buddhist scriptures and institutions fair to women? The question must be taken seriously. It cannot be dismissed at the doctrinal level with the four words "all sentient beings are equal," nor can the whole tradition simply be condemned from the opposite direction as patriarchal oppression. This chapter attempts an honest, text-based account: what the texts actually say, what developed later, what constitutes common misreading, and where genuine tensions exist.

I. The Genuinely Problematic Elements in Early Scriptures¶

We should begin with the documented gender tensions genuinely present in early scriptures, so that the real problems can be clearly identified.

The Eight Garudhammas and the Subordinate Position of Bhikṣuṇīs¶

The clearest early institutional problem is the eight garudhammas, or eight weighty rules. According to the Pali Vinaya's Cullavagga X, the Buddha imposed eight additional conditions when he consented to Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī's ordination, which bhikṣuṇīs were required to observe:

1. A bhikṣuṇī ordained for a hundred years must bow to a bhikṣu ordained that very day;
2. A bhikṣuṇī may not spend the rains retreat in a place where no bhikṣu is present;
3. Every half month, the bhikṣuṇī community must ask the bhikṣu Saṅgha for the date of the uposatha and for instruction;
4. A bhikṣuṇī must receive full ordination before both the bhikṣu and bhikṣuṇī Saṅghas;
5. A bhikṣuṇī who commits a saṅghādisesa offense must undergo rehabilitation before both Saṅghas;
6. A bhikṣuṇī may not make any accusation against a bhikṣu;
7. A bhikṣuṇī may not insult a bhikṣu in any way;
8. A bhikṣuṇī may not criticize or admonish a bhikṣu, but a bhikṣu may criticize or admonish a bhikṣuṇī.

These rules place bhikṣuṇīs in an institutionally subordinate position to bhikṣus. The most senior bhikṣuṇī must honor the youngest bhikṣu; the bhikṣuṇī Saṅgha cannot perform certain Vinaya procedures independently; and the right of criticism operates in only one direction. This is a real institutional inequality that traditional narratives attribute to the Buddha himself.

There is, however, an important historical question. After comparing texts across several traditions, several modern scholars, including Bhikkhu Anālayo, believe that some or all of the eight garudhammas may have been added during oral transmission and need not have been prescribed personally by the Buddha. One piece of evidence is that different Vinayas, including Chinese and Tibetan versions, differ in the specific content of the eight rules; had they issued from the same original occasion, greater consistency would be expected. A second is that, according to the logic of the Vinaya, some provisions look more like emergency amendments addressing later, concrete problems than a complete institution promulgated at one time.¹

This book's position is that, whether or not the eight garudhammas came from the Buddha, they genuinely exist in the Pali Vinaya and imposed substantive institutional restrictions on the bhikṣuṇī tradition. Their historical origin deserves investigation, but doubts about their source cannot be used to evade their actual effects.

"The True Dharma Will Last Five Hundred Years Less"¶

On the same occasion, the Buddha is said to have told Ānanda that if women were permitted to ordain, the duration of the true Dharma would be shortened from one thousand to five hundred years, as though a rice field had been attacked by blight. Historically, this statement has often been invoked as evidence of the Buddha's negative attitude toward bhikṣuṇīs.

The passage likewise presents a question of textual authenticity. Sanskrit parallel texts express it differently, and some scholars believe that predictive statements of this kind were later insertions. This does not alter the fact of its presence in the Pali Vinaya or the way it was used in history.

The Therīgāthā: Another Face of the Same Tradition¶

While raising these problems, one cannot ignore one of the most important pieces of counterevidence within the same early Pali tradition: the Therīgāthā, one of the works of the Pali Khuddaka Nikāya.

This is a collection of verses composed by female bhikṣuṇīs who had attained arhatship, preserving poems by seventy-three women. They came from different backgrounds, including royal wives, courtesans, mothers, and impoverished women. Their poetry describes their own paths of practice and final experiences of liberation, sometimes in language of intense individuality and joy. They include the famous courtesan Ambapālī, a gaṇikā of Vaiśālī who offered the Buddha her mango grove, and Queen Khemā, whom the Buddha named foremost in wisdom among his female disciples.

The Therīgāthā is itself the strongest textual evidence that early Buddhism recognized both that women could attain arhatship—the highest state of liberation—and that women had in fact done so. Its existence prevents the question of "early Buddhism's attitude toward women" from being reduced to one answer. The same tradition contains institutional provisions subordinating bhikṣuṇīs and a treasured poetic collection recording the awakening experiences of dozens of women.²

Bhikṣuṇī Somā: "What Difference Does Being a Woman Make?"¶

The most direct canonical Pali refutation of gender essentialism occurs in the Somā Sutta of the Bhikkhunī Saṃyutta (SN 5.2). Bhikṣuṇī Somā is meditating in a forest when Māra appears to taunt her. He says that the state attained by the sages is exceedingly difficult to reach and impossible for a woman with her "two-finger wisdom" (dvaṅgulapaññā). The commentary explains this as the meager kitchen wisdom of a woman testing with two fingers whether rice has cooked. Somā's answer has two levels:

When the mind is well concentrated, wisdom is present, and phenomena are seen with right understanding, what difference does being a woman make?

Māra may speak to one who still thinks, "I am a woman," "I am a man," or "I am anything at all."

The first level is empirical: the conditions of awakening are concentration and wisdom, not gender. The second is more thoroughgoing. It reverses the problem by placing gender identity itself within Māra's domain. Only someone who still defines herself or himself as "I am a woman" or "I am a man" can be struck by the provocation. This amounts to saying that the formulation of the question "can a woman awaken?" already presupposes the very thing the teaching of no-self dismantles. Māra disappears. A parallel scripture occurs in the Bhikṣuṇī Saṃyukta of the Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama, and the passage's textual status is uncontested.³

It is worth noting that the statement "women are foolish" cited below from SN 16.10 is attributed to Ānanda and is of doubtful authenticity, whereas this point-by-point refutation appears in the Saṃyutta Nikāya's dedicated Bhikkhunī Saṃyutta in the voice of a woman practitioner. The same collection preserved both voices. This is the actual condition of the early textual layer.

II. Analysis of the Sources and a Widespread Misreading¶

Ānanda's Role in the Establishment of the Bhikṣuṇī Institution¶

When discussing early Buddhism's attitude toward women, Ānanda's image deserves careful sorting from the sources, because his position differs markedly across textual contexts.

In the story of the bhikṣuṇī order's establishment, Ānanda is the advocate for women. In the Vinaya account, Ānanda asks the Buddha three times to allow Mahāpajāpatī—the Buddha's maternal aunt and foster mother—to ordain. He poses the decisive question that changes the Buddha's mind: "If women go forth, can they attain stream-entry, once-returning, non-returning, and arhatship?" The Buddha answers that they can. In this narrative, it is the Buddha who says that the admission of women will shorten the true Dharma's duration by five hundred years, while Ānanda's position supports women's ordination.

On the other hand, one passage in the Pali Saṃyutta Nikāya genuinely places an aggressively worded statement in Ānanda's mouth. In the Bhikkhunupassaya Sutta of the Kassapa Saṃyutta (SN 16.10), after Mahākassapa teaches at the bhikṣuṇīs' residence and is mocked by Bhikṣuṇī Thullanandā, a statement is attributed to Ānanda:

"Be patient, Venerable Kassapa, women are foolish." (Khamatha bhante Kassapa bālo mātugāmo)

The literal meaning is: "Venerable Kassapa, please be patient; women are foolish." In his English translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, Bhikkhu Bodhi translates it as it stands and supplies the following note:

I translate this sentence with complete fidelity to the text, knowing that some readers may find the rendering harsh. … I leave it to the reader to judge whether Ānanda really spoke this sentence, or whether the canonical redactors placed it in his mouth.⁶

Bhikkhu Bodhi explicitly raises the question of authenticity. The line may well be an insertion by canonical compilers rather than Ānanda's own words. In light of his consistent support in the narrative of bhikṣuṇī ordination, the doubt carries greater weight. It is an interesting detail of early textual history, showing how the voices of different positions could be layered under the name of the same person as the canon formed.

A Widespread Misreading: The Buddha Forbade Monks to Speak with Women¶

This impression derives from a conversation in the Pali Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16). Ānanda asks the Buddha, "How should we conduct ourselves toward women?" In the traditional translation, the Buddha's response proceeds in three stages:

"Do not see them, Ānanda." "But if we see them, what should we do?" "Do not speak with them." "But if they speak to us, what should we do?" "Establish mindfulness, Ānanda." (sati upaṭṭhāpetabbaṃ)

The final Pali sentence means "mindfulness should be established." It concerns governing one's own mind, not a literal inability to open one's mouth. The context is the Buddha's imminent parinirvāṇa and Ānanda's questions about how the Saṅgha should operate in the future. This is guidance for ordained monks in self-management, centered on the final instruction, mindfulness. If contact with women is necessary, they are to remain aware and govern their own minds. It does not say that every interaction with women is forbidden.

There is also an important issue of textual history. This exchange on "how to treat women" does not occur in the Sanskrit parallel text and appears only in the Pali version. This has led scholars to suspect a later insertion that need not reflect the early tradition.⁷

Whether or not the passage was later inserted, even taken as authoritative it says that "monastics should maintain mindfulness when facing the opposite sex," not that "speaking with women is forbidden." The latter is an unwarranted extension of the former.

III. "The Female Body Is Born of Bad Karma": A Claim Requiring Careful Stratification¶

The proposition that "birth in a female body is the result of bad karma" is widespread in some Chinese and Southern Buddhist cultural settings. Its scriptural basis, however, is much weaker than commonly assumed and has different sources in different traditions.

The early Pali canon offers no explicit support. Women in the Therīgāthā attain arhatship, and the text never suggests that their female bodies are disadvantages. The Buddha explicitly tells Ānanda that women can attain every fruition, a claim difficult to reconcile logically with the proposition that the female body is caused by bad karma.

The five obstructions are a different claim. A related early proposition more often concerns the five obstructions: a woman cannot become Brahmā, Śakra, Māra, a wheel-turning monarch, or a buddha. These five, especially the last, do not amount to the same proposition as "the female body is caused by bad karma." The former concerns certain specific offices; the latter concerns the female body itself.

The five obstructions also withstand the same textual-historical inquiry applied throughout this chapter. Their earliest occurrence in the Pali canon is the list of possibilities and impossibilities in the Bahudhātuka Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya (MN 115): a woman cannot become a perfectly awakened buddha, wheel-turning monarch, Śakra, Māra, or Brahmā. Yet Anālayo's comparative study of the different versions of the Bahudhātuka Sutta—Pali, the corresponding Chinese Madhyama Āgama scripture, Tibetan, and other Chinese parallels—shows that the passage on women's incapabilities does not appear in every transmission and that its language and position are inconsistent. It very likely belongs to a layer added during transmission rather than to the scripture's original stratum.⁴ In other words, the five obstructions occupy a position similar to the eight garudhammas and the "five-hundred-year" prediction: they genuinely exist within canonical texts while bearing the fingerprints of later editorial activity. The dragon-girl story in the Lotus Sūtra, discussed below, responds precisely to this proposition once it had found a settled place within the canon.

Later texts genuinely contain statements of this kind. Some sectarian Abhidharma works, especially in non-Pali systems, and certain Chinese Buddhist scriptures—including the Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Causes and Effects of Good and Evil, considered apocryphal or late, as well as some commentarial works on the Āgamas—do state that "the female body is the karmic result of past wrongdoing." These texts may reflect the penetration of wider Indian cultural attitudes about women's status into Buddhist expression; they may also show particular monastic commentators' positions gradually treated as scriptural sources.

The Blood Bowl Sūtra: material evidence of cultural penetration. "Patriarchal culture entering Buddhist expression" is not an abstract assertion. It has concrete textual examples, of which the Blood Bowl Sūtra is the clearest. This Chinese apocryphon was probably produced around the Song dynasty and has no parallel in Indic literature. It claims that menstrual and childbirth blood pollute and offend the gods of earth and water, causing women after death to fall into Blood Bowl Hell. They can be rescued only if their children invite monks to recite scriptures and perform rites that break open the blood bowl. Only several hundred characters long, the apocryphon circulated widely in Ming and Qing China and spread east to Japan as the Ketsubonkyō. There it merged with medieval Japanese discourse on the "five obstructions and three submissions" and generated a complete ritual economy directed at women. It hardened "the female body as karmic obstruction" from scattered commentarial claims into a closed circuit of hell doctrine, filial ethics, and ritual economy. As doctrine it has no early foundation. As a historical force shaping women's religious situation, its actual power may have exceeded that of most canonical works discussed in this chapter.⁵

This book's judgment: treating "the female body is born of bad karma" as a central doctrine of early Buddhism is inaccurate; claiming that the proposition possesses no scriptural basis whatsoever is likewise wrong. It genuinely occurs in some later and Chinese texts. The proposition must be historicized. It is more likely a product of Indian and Chinese patriarchal culture entering Buddhist expression than a central element of the early teaching. The case of the Blood Bowl Sūtra further suggests that the deepest effects on women often came not from disputed canonical passages but from rituals and institutions grown around apocryphal texts.

IV. The Mahāyāna Period: The Dragon Girl, the Goddess, and the Five Obstructions¶

A famous scene in Mahāyāna literature directly addresses whether women can attain buddhahood: the story of the dragon girl's attainment of buddhahood in the "Devadatta" chapter of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra).

The story runs as follows. Mañjuśrī declares that an eight-year-old daughter of the dragon king living beneath the sea possesses unequaled intelligence and is already capable of attaining unsurpassed awakening. Śāriputra expresses doubt, arguing that women face five obstructions and cannot become Brahmā, Śakra, Māra, a wheel-turning monarch, or a buddha. As soon as he finishes speaking, the dragon girl appears and offers a precious jewel to the Buddha, who accepts it in an instant. She says, "I will attain buddhahood even more quickly."

At this point a crucial textual difference appears.

The received Chinese translation by Kumārajīva says that the dragon girl "suddenly transformed into a man, completed the bodhisattva practices, proceeded at once to the stainless world in the south, sat upon a jeweled lotus, and attained complete, perfect awakening." This indicates that she first changed into a male body and then attained buddhahood.

The Sanskrit text, together with the Tibetan translation, is closer to saying that she demonstrated her buddhahood on the spot, and that her manifestation of a male form before traveling to the pure land was something displayed for the doubters, not necessarily a logical requirement that "one must first transform into a male body before attaining buddhahood."

The textual difference has produced two categorically different readings. One holds that "the dragon-girl story proves a woman cannot attain buddhahood without first transforming her body," a strong reading of the Chinese. The other holds that "the dragon-girl story ridicules Śāriputra's claim about the five obstructions and proves that a woman can attain buddhahood immediately," a reading inclined toward the Sanskrit.

Historically, Chinese monastic tradition generally adopted the first interpretation and made the need to transform into a male body a doctrine. Modern feminist Buddhist scholars such as Paula Arai and Rita Gross, together with some modern Asian Buddhist reformers, tend toward the second, treating the story as a declaration of the equal possibility that men and women can attain buddhahood.

This book's judgment: the Chinese version genuinely contains the words "transformed into a man." The Sanskrit original is more flexible on whether a male transformation is required for buddhahood. It should also be noted that the difference should not simply be called a "mistranslation." Kumārajīva's translation bureau was sufficiently accomplished to handle the passage. Turning a "manifestation of male form" into the concrete step "transformed into a man" was more likely a deliberate interpretive decision, reflecting doubts in the translation setting about whether the female body could directly attain buddhahood. Here translation was simultaneously a theological decision. This is precisely the example's value: it shows how doctrine can be reshaped in transmission through the ostensibly technical stage of translation. Treating Kumārajīva's wording as decisive substitutes a particular Chinese translation tradition for a more complex textual history. Under either reading, the Lotus Sūtra raised a sharply pointed question within its Mahāyāna context: is there a gender threshold for buddhahood?⁸

The Goddess of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra: Another Answer¶

Mahāyāna texts actually offer more than one answer to gender. The goddess in the "Contemplating Sentient Beings" chapter of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa represents another type alongside the dragon girl. The goddess scatters flowers in Vimalakīrti's room. Petals cling to the śrāvaka disciples, who cannot brush them away. Śāriputra asks her, "Why do you not transform your female body?" The goddess answers, "For twelve years I have sought the characteristics of a woman and have not found them. What is there to transform?" She then supernaturally exchanges bodies with Śāriputra, making the foremost disciple personally experience "appearing in a female body," and explains that just as Śāriputra is not a woman but appears in a female body, every woman likewise appears in a female body without being a woman. "Therefore the Buddha says that all phenomena are neither male nor female."

Placed side by side, the two stories reveal two structurally different Mahāyāna strategies for answering the five obstructions. The dragon-girl story, at least in the Chinese reading, follows a transformation strategy. It accepts the premise that a buddha's body is male and allows a woman to meet it through transformation. The gender threshold is bypassed but not denied. The goddess story follows a genderless strategy. It directly uses emptiness to dismantle the threshold itself. The "characteristics of a woman" cannot be found, so the demand to "transform the body" loses its object. The genderless strategy is philosophically more thoroughgoing. It places gender within analysis by no-self and emptiness, depriving any gender-based restriction of doctrinal footing.

Yet the historical direction deserves attention. In the actual institutions and popular beliefs of East Asian Buddhism, the transformation strategy prevailed—the male transformation upon Pure Land rebirth, penitential discourse on being born female, and even the Blood Bowl Sūtra discussed above—not the genderless strategy. At the theoretical level, the language of emptiness dismantled the essentiality of gender but scarcely touched gender hierarchy within Saṅgha institutions. The gap between doctrinal resources and institutional reality is the clearest instance of a pattern repeatedly encountered in this chapter: at the highest doctrinal level, a tradition may possess every tool required to dismantle discrimination while allowing discrimination to operate unchanged institutionally. Why this occurred is a question for readers and for Volume II.⁹

V. Actual Institutions in Chinese and Tibetan Monasteries¶

Discussion at the scriptural level must be set alongside the historical reality of institutions.

Chinese Buddhism: the Chinese bhikṣuṇī lineage traveled east with the Indian Vinaya and historically preserved a relatively complete transmission, especially when compared with Southern Buddhism. Full ordination in Chinese Buddhism retained the dual-Saṅgha procedure, conferred jointly by bhikṣu and bhikṣuṇī Saṅghas. Bhikṣuṇīs genuinely remained present throughout Chinese history and sometimes maintained substantial scholastic traditions. In actual monastic rites and everyday organization, however, large quantities of the Confucian gender norms of the "three submissions and four virtues" were historically absorbed. The positions and etiquette of women in many Chinese temple rites were presumed subordinate to those of men. This resulted from the collision of Indian Buddhism with Chinese culture and did not derive entirely from early scriptures, but it sedimented into tradition.

Guanyin's gender transformation: Chinese Buddhism also displays a phenomenon that forms a subtle contrast with its institutional history. Avalokiteśvara was male in India. Although the thirty-three responsive manifestations listed in the "Universal Gateway" chapter of the Lotus Sūtra include female forms, the principal deity remained male. After entering China, beginning around the Song dynasty, female images such as White-Robed Guanyin, legends of Princess Miaoshan, and Guanyin as the giver of children gradually became dominant. By the Ming, popular belief understood Guanyin almost entirely as female. This is the largest transformation of a deity's gender in Buddhist history, a process systematically reconstructed in Chün-fang Yü's research.¹⁰ Its juxtaposition with the institutional level is revealing. Chinese Buddhism made its most beloved bodhisattva female in devotional imagination while preserving women's subordinate position in Saṅgha institutions. The highest symbol of compassion could be female; the senior seat in the Saṅgha could not. This again confirms the chapter's observation that recognition of women's spiritual power and restriction of women's institutional status can coexist without disturbing one another within the same tradition.

Taiwan: the fruit of the lineage: a discussion of Chinese Buddhist institutions without Taiwan is incomplete, because contemporary Taiwan has the world's most flourishing bhikṣuṇī institution. Several facts deserve emphasis. Bhikṣuṇīs greatly outnumber bhikṣus among Taiwan's ordained population—more than three to one under various methods of counting. The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, founded by Dharma Master Cheng Yen, is one of the world's largest Buddhist charitable organizations, and its founder and central leadership are nuns. Bhikṣuṇī scholars occupy prominent positions in doctrinal study and Buddhist social discourse. In 2001, Dharma Master Chao-hwei read a "Declaration Abolishing the Eight Garudhammas" at a public meeting and tore up a sheet bearing the rules on the spot, the most direct contemporary response in Chinese Buddhism to the institutional problem described in Section I. She received the Niwano Peace Prize in 2021.¹¹ Taiwan has another structural significance for the chapter's argument. It is the fruit of the historical continuity of Chinese Buddhism's dual-Saṅgha ordination lineage. The 1998 ordination of Southern Buddhist women at Bodh Gayā, discussed in Chapter 9.5, was completed with the assistance of this Chinese Dharmaguptaka transmission. In other words, the Sri Lankan transmission that crossed the sea fifteen hundred years ago to assist Chinese nuns flowed back into the Southern Buddhist world through Taiwan at the end of the twentieth century. Whether a lineage of institutional transmission survives determines, on a scale of centuries, the space of possibility available to women throughout a tradition.

Tibetan Buddhism: as Part XI explained, Tibetan Buddhism historically never formed a complete bhikṣuṇī ordination lineage. Women practitioners long remained śrāmaṇerikās, novices, and held a conspicuously subordinate position in institutional power. The situation changed substantively in 2022, when Bhutan's Je Khenpo conferred full ordination upon 144 women and institutionalized ordination in the following years, as Section III of the preceding chapter explained. Whether other Tibetan schools would recognize and follow the development remained to be seen when this book was completed. Tibetan tantra, meanwhile, contains numerous practices centered on female deities such as ḍākinīs and has women founders, including Machig Labdrön, founder of the Chöd transmission. This shows Tibetan Buddhism's distinctive recognition of women's spiritual power. Yet for nearly a millennium it did not translate into institutional openness to bhikṣuṇī ordination. Spiritual respect and institutional exclusion coexisted historically for a very long time.¹²

VI. Principal Voices in Modern Feminist Buddhist Scholarship¶

Since the 1990s, feminist Buddhist scholarship has developed into a mature field. Several principal voices deserve identification.

Rita Gross (1943–2015), in Buddhism after Patriarchy (1993), systematically introduced a critical feminist perspective into Buddhist studies. She criticized gender discrimination in Buddhist history while arguing that Buddhism's central concepts—no-self, dependent origination, and the equality of sentient beings—were compatible with feminist values and could even supply resources for building a post-patriarchal Buddhism.¹³

Paula Arai concentrated on women in Japanese Sōtō Zen. She showed that within historically male-dominated monastic institutions, women actually maintained substantially complete lineages through private ritual transmission, Dharma succession, and everyday practice, while almost disappearing from official records.

Bhikkhu Ṭhānissaro and Bhikkhu Anālayo, working from within tradition, challenged the authenticity of some texts, including the eight garudhammas and the five-hundred-year prediction. They supplied academic grounds for reform without requiring the complete rejection of early tradition.

An enduring internal disagreement divides the field. Should problems be acknowledged while reform and interpretation are sought within traditional frameworks—preserving most of the tradition while correcting its gender blindness? Or should the authority of these traditions be questioned more fundamentally, leading toward a more radical reconstruction? Scholars and practitioners adopt different positions.

VII. An Overall Statement Based on the Evidence¶

The evidence can now be organized into a textually and historically grounded statement.

Early Buddhism recognized that women could attain the highest state of liberation, arhatship. The poems of dozens of awakened women in the Therīgāthā provide the strongest evidence. Bhikṣuṇī Somā's answer to Māra in SN 5.2 shows that the early tradition already contained a direct refutation of gender essentialism, grounded precisely in the teaching of no-self. This is not insignificant. It means that the early teaching's central position is "women can be liberated," not "women's liberation is inferior."

The early Pali Vinaya contains real institutional gender inequality in the eight garudhammas, while some passages, such as the one stating that bhikṣuṇīs shorten the duration of the true Dharma, express negative attitudes. These cannot simply be erased, but their textual authenticity requires careful investigation; some may be later insertions.

"The female body is born of bad karma" as a systematic doctrine belongs more to later Buddhist expression partly infiltrated by surrounding cultures than to a central proposition of early scriptures. It is wrong to say that it occurs in no scripture at all, but it is likewise inaccurate to attribute it to "the Buddha's original teaching."

The five obstructions and dragon-girl story in Mahāyāna scriptures represent a more complex picture. The five obstructions are a proposition questioned by the texts themselves—the dragon-girl story exists to answer it, while inconsistencies among versions of the Bahudhātuka Sutta indicate that the five obstructions may themselves be an added layer. Yet the Chinese version of the dragon-girl story retains the wording "transformed into a man," an ambiguity the Chinese Buddhist tradition has never clearly resolved as a whole. The goddess of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra shows that Mahāyāna possessed a more thoroughgoing solution—that all phenomena are neither male nor female—but this solution did not prevail in institutional history.

Actual monastic institutions, both Chinese and Tibetan, have historically contained arrangements disadvantageous to women. Some derive from Buddhist texts, such as the eight garudhammas, while others entered from surrounding Confucian or Brahmanical culture. The latter could even be hardened into ritual and economic structures through apocrypha such as the Blood Bowl Sūtra. Distinguishing these sources matters for discussions of reform. At the same time, the flourishing bhikṣuṇī institution in Taiwan and Bhutan's ordinations since 2022, discussed in Section III of the preceding chapter, show that institutions can change. Historically, the lever of change has been the survival and reconstruction of the ordination lineage itself.

The overall picture is this: early Buddhism was relatively inclusive in soteriology—women could attain liberation—and institutionally unequal in gender—bhikṣuṇīs were subordinate. As it spread into different regions, its cultural expression absorbed local gender prejudices. This mixed picture is closer to historical reality than either of the simplified narratives "Buddhism oppresses women" or "Buddhism was originally egalitarian."

Concluding Note: Professor Duan Qing¶

In discussing modern access to Southern Buddhism, Chapter 9.5 identified three people of exceptional importance: Bhikkhu Bodhi, the lay scholar Zhuang Chunjiang, and Venerable Mahinda. Here, in the final chapter of the book, the author wishes to mention a fourth separately: Professor Duan Qing.

Duan Qing (1953–2022) was a professor in Peking University's School of Foreign Languages and an expert in Sanskrit, Pali, and Indology. Her academic career crossed philology, religious history, and textual criticism, and she was one of the very few academic Chinese scholars whose research on early Southern Buddhist literature reached an international standard. She organized and directed the Chinese translation projects for the Pali Dīgha Nikāya and Majjhima Nikāya and wrote a detailed introduction for each translation. Their significance to Chinese scholarship can be compared with Bhikkhu Bodhi's significance to the English-speaking world.

In both introductions, she consistently identified herself as an "outsider to Buddhist circles." This was not modesty but a statement of position. She read the texts as a philologist and historian of ideas, not from faith. That distance gave her descriptions unusual weight.

Her central judgment was that the Buddha in the Majjhima Nikāya is "a great human being." His greatness lay neither in innate genius nor divine bestowal, but in his broad mastery of his predecessors' theories and contemplative experience, his deep reflection upon and personal testing of the defects in different theories, and the creativity he then began. He was a practitioner through and through. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha drags his sick body northward from Vaiśālī to Kuśinagara. He is "a kindly old man who has reached the advanced age of eighty and suffers from serious illness, yet whose thinking remains clear." Depending on alms and river water to sustain his body, he completes the final journey. In her view, the account "shows that the Buddha was not only a teacher but a practitioner of cultivation. He led by example, demonstrating genuine practice to his disciples until the end of his life."

Ānanda leans against the door and weeps. The Buddha consoles him with compassion: "All who are joined in affection must ultimately be separated." Reading the passage, Professor Duan Qing said that the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta "remains filled with the love for the Buddha felt by disciples who had personally known him." After twenty-five hundred years, the emotion in the words is still alive.

She also wrote of the Buddha's concentration and restraint: "Even a person as great as the Buddha did not attend to everything, but spoke only on topics related to rescue from the sea of suffering. He consciously attended to some things and did not attend to others." She believed this still offered a lesson to contemporary people amid an explosion of information. The introduction to the Majjhima Nikāya ends with a quiet sentence: "In a turbulent and clamorous world, reading the Majjhima Nikāya may perhaps give us at least a moment of tranquility." It is dated September 6, 2020, Peking University Foreign Languages Building. A year and a half later, she left the world with the translation project unfinished.

With her command of languages, her grasp of early literature, and her genuine understanding of the original intent of the Buddha's teaching beyond sectarian boundaries, she should have become one of the most important figures helping the Chinese-speaking world understand Southern and early Buddhism. Her actual influence ultimately fell short of that of the other three figures listed in Chapter 9.5. The reason was not the standard of her work, but only the impermanence of life.¹⁴

References¶