Chapter 6 · Buddhism and feminism¶

"Is Buddhism egalitarian?" Today, the question usually takes a more specific form. Are Buddhist scriptures and institutions fair to women? This deserves serious consideration. It cannot be dismissed with a doctrinal appeal to the equality of all sentient beings, nor answered from the opposite side by simply condemning the entire tradition as patriarchal oppression. This chapter attempts an honest account based on the texts, distinguishing what they actually say, what developed later, what is commonly misread, and where real tensions remain.

1. Real problems in the early texts¶

Begin with documented gender tensions that actually occur in the early texts, so that we can see clearly what the real problems are.

The eight garudhammas and nuns' subordination¶

The clearest early institutional problem is the eight garudhammas (garudhammā, eight weighty rules or rules of respect). The Pāli Vinaya's Cullavagga X records that when the Buddha agreed to Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī's entry into monastic life, he imposed eight additional conditions that bhikkhunīs must observe:

1. A bhikkhunī ordained for even a hundred years must bow to, rise to greet, join her palms for, and show respect to a bhikkhu ordained that very day.
2. A bhikkhunī must not spend the rains retreat in a place without bhikkhus.
3. Every half-month, a bhikkhunī must request two things from the bhikkhu sangha: the date of the observance day and instruction.
4. At the end of the rains retreat, a bhikkhunī must invite admonition before both sanghas concerning what has been seen, heard, or suspected.
5. A bhikkhunī who commits a grave offense must undergo half a month of mānatta discipline before both sanghas.
6. After a probationer has trained in the six rules for two years, she must seek full ordination from both sanghas.
7. A bhikkhunī must not abuse or disparage a bhikkhu in any way.
8. From this day onward, the avenue for bhikkhunīs to admonish bhikkhus is closed; the avenue for bhikkhus to admonish bhikkhunīs remains open.

Each rule is followed by the clause "This rule is to be honored, respected, revered, and venerated, and must never be transgressed for as long as life lasts."

This places bhikkhunīs in institutional subordination to bhikkhus. The most senior nun must honor the most junior monk. The bhikkhunī sangha cannot independently perform certain Vinaya rites, and the right to criticize runs in one direction. This is real institutional inequality, attributed in the traditional account to the Buddha himself.

A significant historical question arises, however. After comparing texts across traditions, several modern scholars, including Bhikkhu Anālayo, consider it possible that some or all of the eight garudhammas were added during oral transmission and were not necessarily laid down by the Buddha himself. One piece of evidence is that the rules' precise contents differ among Vinayas, including Chinese and Tibetan translations. They should be more consistent if they originated on the same occasion. Another is that, within the logic of the Vinaya, some provisions look more like later responses to specific problems than parts of a complete system issued all at once.¹

This book's position is that, whether or not the eight garudhammas came from the Buddha, they are actually present in the Pāli Vinaya and have imposed substantive institutional constraints on the bhikkhunī tradition. Their historical origin deserves investigation, but doubts about that origin cannot be used to evade their actual effects.

"The true Dharma's duration will be shortened by five hundred years"¶

On the same occasion, the Buddha is said to have told Ānanda that allowing women to enter monastic life would shorten the true Dharma's duration from a thousand years to five hundred, like a rice field attacked by rice-blast fungus. This statement has been widely cited historically as evidence of the Buddha's negative attitude toward nuns.

The textual history of this passage also requires care. All the compared versions preserve a prophecy of decline, though its frequency, numbers, and wording differ; an argument for later addition cannot rest simply on its absence from certain versions. Anālayo nevertheless advances a different hypothesis based on relationships among roles, reproaches, and contexts in the First Council and nuns’ foundation narratives. These concerns may have migrated during oral transmission from the former narrative to the latter, eventually being attributed to the Buddha. This is a narrative-transmission hypothesis about textual formation, not an established history of events. The distinction does not alter the historical fact that the prophecy has been invoked to disparage nuns.²

The Therīgāthā: another side of the same tradition¶

While raising these problems, we must not overlook one of the most important counterexamples within the same early Pāli tradition, the Therīgāthā, the Verses of the Elder Nuns, a text of the Khuddaka Nikāya.

This is a collection of verses composed by nuns who attained arahantship. Seventy-three poems survive. The collection's closing verse counts 101 elder nuns. Two poems have collective speakers named as "thirty" and "five hundred," and some poems have unnamed speakers. The women came from different backgrounds, including kings' wives, courtesans, mothers, and poor women. Their poems describe their paths of practice and final experiences of liberation, sometimes in intensely personal and joyful language. They include Ambapālī, the famous gaṇikā or courtesan of Vesālī who donated a mango grove to the Buddha, and Queen Khemā, whom the Buddha named foremost in wisdom among his women disciples.

The Therīgāthā itself is the strongest textual evidence that early Buddhism recognized that women could and did attain arahantship, the highest liberation. Its existence prevents a single, simple answer to the question of early Buddhism's attitude toward women. Within the same tradition are institutional provisions subordinating nuns and an anthology that records and cherishes the awakening experiences of dozens of women.³

The nun Somā: "What difference could womanhood make?"¶

The Pāli canon's most direct rebuttal of gender essentialism appears in the Somā Sutta, SN 5.2, in the Bhikkhunī Saṃyutta. As Somā sits meditating in the forest, Māra appears to taunt her, saying that the state attained by sages is so difficult to reach that a woman with "two-finger wisdom" cannot attain it. The commentaries explain dvaṅgulapaññā as the little wisdom with which a woman pinches rice between two fingers to test whether it is cooked. This amounts to kitchen knowledge. Somā's reply has two levels:

When the mind is well concentrated, wisdom is present, and phenomena are rightly seen, what difference could womanhood make?

If someone still thinks "I am a woman," "I am a man," or "I am something," that is the person for Māra to address.

The first level concerns experience. Concentration and wisdom are the conditions of awakening, regardless of gender. The second is more radical, reversing the question. Gender identification itself belongs to Māra's domain. Only those still defining themselves as "I am a woman" or "I am a man" can be struck by such taunts. This amounts to saying that the very question of whether women can awaken presupposes what the teaching of no-self is meant to dismantle. Māra immediately disappears. The dialogue has a parallel in the bhikkhunī section of the Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama, and its textual standing is uncontested.⁴

Notice that the statement "women are foolish" (SN 16.10), quoted later in this chapter, is attributed to Ānanda and is of doubtful authenticity. This pointed rebuttal, however, is preserved in the Saṃyutta Nikāya's dedicated Bhikkhunī Saṃyutta, spoken by a woman practitioner. The same scriptural collection preserves both voices. This is the actual state of the early textual layer.

2. Examining the sources and a widespread misreading¶

Ānanda's role in establishing the nuns' order¶

Ānanda's portrayal deserves careful examination in any discussion of early Buddhism's attitude toward women. The positions attributed to him in different textual contexts contrast markedly.

In the account of how the nuns' order was established, Ānanda advocates for women. In the Vinaya narrative, he asks the Buddha three times to allow Mahāpajāpatī, the Buddha's aunt and foster mother, to enter monastic life. He then poses the crucial question that changes the Buddha's mind. "If women enter monastic life, can they attain the fruits of stream-entry, once-returning, non-returning, and arahantship?" The Buddha answers yes. In this narrative, it is the Buddha who says that women's admission will shorten the true Dharma's duration by five hundred years. Ānanda's position is in support of women's entry into monastic life.

On the other side, one passage in the Pāli Saṃyutta Nikāya does put a sharply worded statement in Ānanda's mouth. In the Bhikkhunupassaya Sutta, SN 16.10, in the Kassapa Saṃyutta, Mahākassapa has taught at the nuns' residence and been mocked by the nun Thullatissā. A statement is attributed to Ānanda:

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

Its literal meaning is "Venerable Kassapa, please be patient; women are foolish." In his English translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, Bhikkhu Bodhi chose to render it faithfully and left this translator's note:

I have translated this sentence with complete fidelity to the text, knowing that some readers may find the rendering harsh. … I leave it to readers to judge whether Ānanda actually said such a thing, or whether the compilers of the scriptures put the words in his mouth.¹⁹

Bodhi explicitly raises the question of authenticity, placing the two possibilities side by side and leaving readers to judge whether these are Ānanda's own words or words inserted by the compilers. This book favors the latter, because the statement conflicts with Ānanda's consistent support in the ordination narrative. This revealing detail of early textual history shows how, during the formation of the canon, voices with different positions could be layered under the name of the same person.

A widespread misreading: the Buddha forbade monks to speak with women¶

This impression comes from a dialogue in the Pāli Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, DN 16. Ānanda asks the Buddha, "How should we behave toward women?" In traditional translations, the Buddha's answer proceeds through three levels:

"Do not see them, Ānanda." "What if we see them?" "Do not speak with them." "What if they speak to us first?" "Maintain mindfulness, Ānanda." (sati upaṭṭhāpetabbaṃ)

The last Pāli phrase means to establish mindfulness. It concerns governing one's own mind, rather than a literal ban on speaking. The context is the Buddha's approaching final nirvāṇa, with Ānanda asking how the sangha should operate in the future. This is guidance for monastics' self-regulation, centered on the final instruction about mindfulness. If contact with women is necessary, one should remain aware and govern one's mind. It does not prohibit all contact with women.

A point about textual distribution also deserves recording. This exchange on how to treat women does not occur in every school's version of the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta. It appears both in the Pāli Dīgha Nikāya and in the Youxing Jing of the Chinese Dīrgha Āgama transmitted by the Dharmaguptaka, with the three levels of the answer corresponding point for point. It is absent, however, from the Mūlasarvāstivāda line. In Waldschmidt's Sanskrit edition based on the Turfan manuscripts, Ānanda approaches and proceeds directly to ask about honoring the body, without this intervening passage. The accompanying Tibetan translation and Chinese Vinaya translation likewise omit it. Two independent versions contain it and one does not. This distribution establishes disagreement among the schools, but the available material cannot decide whether one line omitted it or another inserted it.⁵

Whether or not the passage was inserted later, even if accepted, it says that monastics must maintain mindfulness when dealing with the opposite sex. It does not forbid conversation with women. The latter is an overextension of the former.

3. "A female body is born from bad karma": a claim requiring careful distinctions¶

The proposition that birth in a female body results from bad karma is widespread in some Chinese and Theravāda Buddhist cultural settings. Its scriptural basis, however, is much weaker than generally assumed, and its sources differ across traditions.

The materials examined here provide no direct evidence that being female itself is a result of bad karma. This book searched specified stems in the root texts of the Vinaya and the four Nikāyas, using the VRI Roman-script edition. This covers five Vinaya divisions, three divisions of the Dīgha Nikāya, three of the Majjhima Nikāya, five of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, and eleven collections of the Aṅguttara Nikāya, twenty-seven units in all, excluding commentaries and subcommentaries. The term for womanhood, itthibhāva, occurs only once in this examination, in Somā's reply to Māra quoted above. Itthiliṅga occurs twice: once in the Aggañña Sutta, where male and female characteristics arise together in the same sentence, and once in the Vinaya's Pārājika, where a bhikkhu develops female characteristics. The Buddha's ruling leaves the preceptor, ordination, and seniority unchanged, transferring the individual to the nuns' community to observe the shared rules. He neither declares an offense nor calls it karmic retribution. Itthindriya and purisindriya appear either as two of three faculties or in parallel descriptions of women and men in the Saṃyoga Sutta, with entirely symmetrical wording. After excluding headings and compounds with non-gender meanings, a search within 260 characters on either side of the six stems specified in the footnote found no co-occurrence with the listed stems for inferiority, bad karma, or bad destinations. More directly, the Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta is devoted specifically to explaining the causes of better and worse human circumstances. It lists seven pairs of differences: short and long life, sickness and health, ugliness and beauty, absence and presence of influence, poverty and wealth, low and high birth, and foolishness and wisdom. Gender is absent from the list, and the agent of each kind of karma is consistently "a woman or a man," itthī vā puriso vā. These examples and the co-occurrence search for specified stems do not establish this proposition. The result is limited to the listed corpus and method; zero co-occurrence alone cannot establish that the proposition is absent in meaning from all early teachings.⁶

Other canonical statements must be distinguished from it. First are the "five hindrances." A woman cannot become Brahmā, Sakka, Māra, a wheel-turning monarch, or a buddha. These five, especially the last, are a different proposition from the claim that a female body results from bad karma. The former concerns certain particular statuses. The latter concerns womanhood itself. Second is the Kamboja Sutta. Ānanda asks why women do not sit in councils, conduct business, or travel to Kamboja, and the Buddha replies that women are wrathful, envious, miserly, and deficient in wisdom. This is the early canon's most direct disparagement of women, but it disparages temperament and the social position resulting from it. It still does not say that a female body arises from bad karma. Third, the sutta on distinctive suffering in the Saṃyutta Nikāya's Mātugāma Saṃyutta lists five kinds of suffering women have that men do not: leaving their family when young for a husband's home, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and serving men. These are sufferings of circumstance, rather than punishments through karmic retribution. The first two suttas of the same collection also present five qualities through which women and men please or displease each other, in an entirely symmetrical structure. Each of these three accounts occupies a different level from the claim that a female body is born from bad karma, and must be treated separately.

The five hindrances themselves can be subjected to the questions about textual history pursued throughout this chapter. Their earliest source in the Pāli canon is the list of possibilities and impossibilities in the Bahudhātuka Sutta, MN 115. The list states that a woman cannot be a fully awakened buddha, a wheel-turning monarch, Sakka, Māra, or Brahmā. Yet Anālayo compared the Pāli version, its parallel in the Chinese Madhyama Āgama, the Tibetan, and other Chinese parallels. His study shows that the passage about women's impossibilities is absent from some versions, while wording and placement also vary. It is very likely a layer added during transmission, rather than an original component of the sutta.⁷ The five hindrances, eight garudhammas, and five-hundred-year prophecy each require separate examination of their textual history. The comparison of missing passages discussed above and the narrative-transmission hypothesis concerning the prophecy rely on different evidence; they cannot be combined into a single proof of later editing. The story of the dragon girl in the Lotus Sūtra, discussed next, responds precisely to this proposition already established within the canon.

Later texts do contain such statements. A ready example among Chinese Buddhist apocrypha is the Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Causes and Effects of Good and Evil, T2881. It lists a female body alongside eunuchhood and possession of both sexual organs among the karmic consequences of destroying stūpas and monasteries. Such texts may reflect broader Indian cultural views of women's status entering Buddhist formulations. They may also reflect the gradual treatment of some monastics' commentarial positions as scriptural sources.⁸

The Blood Bowl Sūtra: material evidence of cultural infiltration. The claim that patriarchal culture entered Buddhist formulations is not merely abstract. It has concrete textual cases, most notably the Blood Bowl Sūtra. This Chinese apocryphon, composed around the late Southern Song and absent from Indian-language literature, holds that blood shed by women in childbirth pollutes the earth deity. Washing the soiled clothing then pollutes river water, compromising the good men and women who draw it to make tea offerings to holy beings. Women consequently fall after death into the Blood Bowl Pool Hell. Release requires their children to observe Blood Bowl rites for three years, organize a Blood Bowl assembly, and invite monks to recite the sūtra, concluding with repentance at the end of the period. This apocryphon of just over four hundred Chinese characters circulated very widely in Ming and Qing China and spread to Japan as the Ketsubongyō, whose earliest documented Japanese occurrence dates to 1429. It converged with medieval Japanese discourse on women's buddhahood, generating a complete ritual industry directed at women. It consolidated scattered commentarial claims that womanhood itself is a karmic hindrance into a closed circuit of hell doctrine, filial ethics, and ritual economy. As doctrine, it has no early basis. As a historical force, its actual influence on women's religious circumstances may have exceeded that of most canonical texts discussed in this chapter. Recent specialist research on Japan cautions, however, that the discourse also supplied a basis for women's salvation, and women in different periods used it to meet their own needs. It should not be read solely as a one-way history of oppression.⁹

This book's judgment. Treating the proposition that a female body is born from bad karma as a central early Buddhist doctrine is inaccurate. Saying that it has no scriptural basis whatsoever is also wrong. It does occur in some later and Chinese Buddhist texts. The proposition needs to be situated historically. It is more likely a product of Indian and Chinese patriarchal cultures entering Buddhist formulations than something drawn from the core of the early teachings. The Blood Bowl Sūtra further suggests that the deepest influences on women often come from rites and institutions built around apocrypha, rather than disputed passages in the canon.

4. The Mahāyāna period: the dragon girl, the goddess, and the five hindrances¶

Before the dragon girl and the goddess, consider how the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras placed women. Reading the eleven sūtras translated by Lokakṣema and his contemporaries in the second half of the second century, Harrison found in 1987 that the teaching is addressed to sons and daughters of good family and that women can arouse the aspiration to awakening; in the Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā the eighty-four thousand wives of King Druma do so. Yet the texts scrupulously avoid calling women bodhisattvas, a female body must be changed into a male one before buddhahood, and the buddha-fields either contain no women or contain women far superior to those of this world. His conclusion is that both men and women can ride in the Great Vehicle, but only men are allowed to drive it, and that this reflects the attitudes of the men, probably monks, who produced the texts. The first essay of the Chinese-language series 专题系列《谁写了大乘经》 (Who Wrote the Mahāyāna Sūtras) draws the consequence: the early Mahāyāna sūtras are a self-portrait by literate male renunciants, in which women receive the teaching but are not among the authors. The dragon girl and the goddess below are two later solutions offered from that starting point.¹⁰

A famous scene in Mahāyāna literature directly addresses whether women can become buddhas. It is the story of the dragon girl's attainment of buddhahood in the Devadatta chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra.

The story runs as follows. Mañjuśrī announces that a dragon king's daughter lives in the sea, a girl of unmatched intelligence, only eight years old, already capable of attaining unsurpassed awakening. Śāriputra doubts this, citing the five hindrances under which women cannot become Brahmā, Śakra, Māra, a wheel-turning monarch, or a buddha. Before he has finished speaking, the dragon girl appears and presents a precious jewel to the Buddha, who accepts it in an instant. She says that her attainment of buddhahood will be faster still.

A passage here is often cited as a divergence between versions. It deserves examination word by word.

The received Chinese version, translated by Kumārajīva, states that the dragon girl "suddenly became a man, fulfilled the bodhisattva practices, went at once to the Spotless World in the south, sat on a jeweled lotus, and attained complete awakening." This means that she first changes into a male body, then becomes a buddha.

The Sanskrit text is no more permissive. Diana Paul's translation of the same passage from Sanskrit describes the change in Sāgara the dragon king's daughter before Śāriputra and the whole assembly. In this rendering, "her female organs vanished, and the male organ became visible". She appeared in the body of a bodhisattva, then immediately went south and became a buddha beneath a bodhi tree of seven treasures. The Sanskrit account of the change specifies sexual organs, making it more explicit than Kumārajīva's version. Both agree on the sequence, with a change to a male body preceding buddhahood in the south.

The divergence therefore lies in reading the sūtra. On the translation side, the two versions agree. One reading emphasizes sequence. On this reading, the dragon girl must first become male, so a female body cannot attain buddhahood directly. Another emphasizes the episode's function. Immediately after Śāriputra declares that "a female body is impure, no vessel for the Dharma" and cites the five hindrances, she completes the whole process on the spot. The speed of her transformation itself rebuts his speech. The same passage accommodates both readings because it narrates events without delivering a judgment.

Historically, Chinese monastic traditions generally favored the first reading, treating the need to become male before attaining buddhahood as an article of faith. Modern feminist Buddhist scholars, such as Paula Arai and Rita Gross, and some modern Asian Buddhist reformers tend to favor the second, reading the dragon girl's story as a declaration of women's and men's equal capacity for buddhahood.

This book's judgment. Describing these readings as a difference between the Chinese translation and the Sanskrit does not accord with the wording available. Both describe a change of body, and the Sanskrit is more concrete. This makes the point more significant. Doctrine need not wait until translation to be reshaped. It is normal in Buddhist textual history for the same narrative to be read as different claims in different periods and under different concerns. This book has not collated the Sanskrit manuscripts, the Tibetan translation, and Dharmarakṣa's Zheng Fahua Jing, and makes no judgment on whether other variants exist among them. Under either reading, however, the Lotus Sūtra raises a pointed question in the Mahāyāna setting of its time. Is there a gender threshold for buddhahood?¹¹

The goddess in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra: another answer¶

Mahāyāna texts offer more than one solution to gender questions. The goddess in the chapter on contemplating sentient beings in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra represents another type alongside the dragon girl. She scatters flowers in Vimalakīrti's room. The petals cling to the śrāvaka disciples, who cannot brush them off. Śāriputra asks her, "Why do you not change your female body?" She replies, "For twelve years I have sought the characteristic of womanhood and found it wholly unobtainable. What should I change?" She then uses her powers to exchange bodies with Śāriputra, making this foremost disciple experience appearing in a female body. She explains that just as Śāriputra is not a woman yet appears as one, the same holds for all women. They appear in female bodies yet are not women. "Therefore the Buddha says that all phenomena are neither male nor female."

Side by side, the stories show two structurally different Mahāyāna responses to the five hindrances. The story of the dragon girl, at least in the Chinese reading, represents transformation. It accepts the premise that a buddha's body is male and allows a woman to satisfy it by changing bodies. The gender threshold is bypassed without being denied. The goddess represents genderlessness. Emptiness directly dismantles the threshold itself. If the characteristic of womanhood cannot be found, the demand to change bodies has lost its object. The genderless approach is philosophically more radical. It places gender within the analysis of no-self and emptiness, depriving any claim that imposes gender restrictions of a doctrinal footing.

The historical direction, however, deserves attention. In East Asian Buddhism's actual institutions and popular beliefs, transformation predominated over genderlessness. It appeared in becoming male upon rebirth in the Pure Land, discourses of repentance over becoming a woman, and even the Blood Bowl Sūtra discussed above. The discourse of emptiness theoretically dismantled gender's essential character, yet scarcely affected gender ranks within monastic institutions. This gap between doctrinal resources and institutional reality is one of the clearest instances of the pattern repeatedly encountered in this chapter. A tradition can possess every tool for dismantling discrimination at the level of its highest doctrine while allowing discrimination to operate unchanged institutionally. Why this happens is a question for the reader and for Volume 2.¹²

5. The actual institutions of Chinese and Tibetan monasteries¶

Discussion at the scriptural level needs to be matched by examination of historical institutions as they actually existed.

Chinese Buddhism. China's bhikṣuṇī lineage came east from India with the Vinaya and historically retained a relatively complete continuity compared with Theravāda. Full ordination in Chinese Buddhism preserves the dual-sangha system, in which both monks' and nuns' communities confer ordination together. Nuns did indeed continue to exist throughout Chinese history and developed substantial traditions of learning. Actual monastic ritual and everyday organization, however, absorbed many Confucian gender norms, including the "three obediences and four virtues." Rituals in many Chinese temples assumed women's positions or ceremonial standing to be below men's. This resulted from the encounter between Indian Buddhism and Chinese culture. It does not derive entirely from the early texts, but has become an accumulated part of tradition.

Guanyin's change of gender. Chinese Buddhism also presents a phenomenon that subtly contrasts with institutional history. Avalokiteśvara appeared as male in India. Although the thirty-three manifestations listed in the Lotus Sūtra's Universal Gate chapter include female forms, the central figure remained male. After transmission to China, female images such as the white-robed Guanyin, Princess Miaoshan, and the child-giving Guanyin gradually became dominant from around the Song dynasty. By the Ming, popular belief understood Guanyin largely as female. This was the largest change of a deity's gender in Buddhist history. Chün-fang Yü's research systematically reconstructs the process.¹³ Its juxtaposition with institutions is striking. Chinese Buddhism feminized its most beloved bodhisattva in devotional imagination while maintaining women's subordinate position in the sangha. The supreme symbol of compassion could be female. The sangha's senior seat could not. This again confirms the chapter's observation. Recognition of women's spiritual power and restrictions on their institutional standing can coexist within a tradition without disturbing each other.

Taiwan: the fruits of a lineage. An account of Chinese Buddhist institutions without Taiwan would be incomplete, because Taiwan has the most flourishing bhikṣuṇī institution in contemporary global Buddhism. Several facts stand out. Nuns far outnumber monks among Taiwan's monastics, roughly three to one or more under different statistical definitions. The Tzu Chi Merit Association, founded by Master Cheng Yen, is one of the world's largest Buddhist charitable organizations. Its founder and core leadership are nuns. Nun scholars hold prominent positions in Buddhist doctrinal scholarship and social discourse. In 2001, at a public meeting, Master Zhaohui read a declaration abolishing the eight garudhammas and tore up the sheets containing their provisions on the spot. This was Chinese-language Buddhism's most direct contemporary response to the institutional problem described in Section 1. She received the Niwano Peace Prize in 2021.¹⁴ Taiwan also has a structural significance for the chapter's argument. Its flourishing is the fruit of the historical survival of Chinese Buddhism's dual-sangha ordination lineage. The 1998 Bodhgayā ordination for Theravāda women (see Chapter 9.5) was performed with the help of precisely this Chinese Dharmaguptaka lineage. In other words, the Sri Lankan lineage that crossed the sea to assist Chinese nuns fifteen hundred years ago returned through Taiwan to the Theravāda world at the end of the twentieth century. Over a span of centuries, the survival or loss of institutional transmission determines the space of possibilities for women across a whole tradition.

Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan-language Buddhism historically developed no complete lineage of fully ordained bhikṣuṇīs. Women practitioners long held novice status, śrāmaṇerikā, with preliminary monastic precepts and an evidently subordinate position in institutional power. This changed substantially in 2022, when Bhutan's Je Khenpo gave full ordination to more than 140 women and institutionalized the ordinations in subsequent years (see Section 3 of the previous chapter). Whether other Tibetan schools would recognize and follow this development remained to be seen at the time of writing. On the other hand, many Tibetan tantric practices center on female meditation deities, ḍākinīs, and there are women founders, such as Machig Labdrön, founder of the Chöd lineage. Tibetan Buddhism thus recognizes women's spiritual power in a distinctive way. Yet for nearly a thousand years before this change, that recognition did not become an institutional opening for bhikṣuṇī ordination. Spiritual respect and institutional exclusion coexisted for a long period of history.¹⁵

6. Major voices in modern feminist Buddhist studies¶

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

Rita Gross (1943 to 2015), in Buddhism after Patriarchy (1993), systematically brought feminist criticism into Buddhist studies. She criticized historical gender discrimination in Buddhism while arguing that its central concepts, including no-self, dependent origination, and the equality of sentient beings, are incompatible with gender hierarchy and can even supply resources for building a post-patriarchal Buddhism.¹⁶

Paula Arai focuses on women in Japanese Sōtō Buddhism. She reveals how, within historically male-dominated monastic institutions, women maintained a substantially intact life of transmission through private ritual lineages, Dharma transmission, and daily practice, while almost disappearing from official records.

There is no single position within the tradition. Bhikkhu Anālayo draws on comparison across traditions to explain the gradual formation of some narratives and supports the revival of bhikkhunī ordination. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, by contrast, defends the eight-garudhamma narrative and ordination requirements in his relevant writings, challenging Anālayo’s arguments.¹⁷

An enduring internal disagreement remains. Should one acknowledge the problems while seeking reform and interpretation within the traditional framework, retaining most of the tradition while correcting its gender blind spots? Or should one question the traditions' authority more fundamentally and pursue a more radical reconstruction? Scholars and practitioners take different positions.

7. An overall account grounded in the evidence¶

The following account draws together the textual and historical evidence.

Early Buddhism recognized women's capacity to attain the highest liberation, arahantship. The Therīgāthā's poems by dozens of awakened women are the strongest evidence. Somā's reply to Māra in SN 5.2 also shows that the early tradition already contained a direct rebuttal of gender essentialism, grounded precisely in the teaching of no-self itself. This matters greatly. The central position of the early teachings is that women can be liberated, rather than that their liberation is inferior.

The early Pāli Vinaya contains real institutional gender inequality in the eight garudhammas. The passages about nuns shortening the true Dharma's duration connect their very existence with its reduced lifespan, even within contexts defending the eight garudhammas. These passages cannot simply be erased, but their textual authenticity requires careful inquiry. Some may result from omissions or additions during transmission.

The proposition that a female body is born from bad karma, as a systematic doctrine, belongs more to later Buddhist formulations partly shaped by cultural infiltration than to the core propositions of the early texts. It is wrong to say that no scripture contains it, but also inaccurate to attribute it to the Buddha's original teaching.

The five hindrances and the dragon girl's story in Mahāyāna scriptures present a more complex picture. The five hindrances are a proposition questioned by the texts themselves. The dragon girl's story responds to it, while inconsistencies among versions of the Bahudhātuka Sutta suggest that the proposition may itself be an added layer. Yet the Chinese dragon girl story retains the statement that she becomes male, and the Chinese tradition as a whole has still not clearly resolved this ambiguity. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra's goddess shows that Mahāyāna already possessed a more radical solution, that all phenomena are neither male nor female. But that solution did not prevail in institutional history.

Actual monastic institutions, both Chinese and Tibetan, have historically contained arrangements disadvantageous to women. Some came from Buddhist texts, such as the eight garudhammas. Others entered from external Confucian or Brahmanical cultures. The latter could even become fixed ritual and economic structures through apocrypha such as the Blood Bowl Sūtra. Distinguishing these sources matters for discussions of reform. At the same time, Taiwan's flourishing bhikṣuṇī institutions and Bhutan's ordinations since 2022 (see Section 3 of the previous chapter) show that institutions can change. Historically, the means of change have been precisely the survival and reconstruction of ordination lineages themselves.

The overall picture is mixed. Early Buddhism was relatively inclusive concerning liberation, since women could be liberated. It was institutionally unequal in gender, with nuns subordinate. Its cultural formulations absorbed local gender prejudices as it spread into different regions. This mixed account comes closer to historical reality than either of the simple narratives that Buddhism oppresses women or that Buddhism was egalitarian from the beginning.

Closing note: Professor Duan Qing¶

In its discussion of Theravāda Buddhism (Chapter 9.5), this book named three figures of exceptional importance in making that tradition accessible to modern readers: Bhikkhu Bodhi, the lay scholar Zhuang Chunjiang, and Venerable Mahinda. Here, in the book's final chapter, the author wishes to mention a fourth separately, Professor Duan Qing.

Duan Qing (1953 to 2022), a professor in Peking University's School of Foreign Languages, specialized in Sanskrit, Pāli, and Indology. Her scholarly career crossed philology, religious history, and textual criticism. She was one of the very few Chinese academics whose research on early Theravāda texts reached an international standard. She organized and led the projects translating the Pāli Dīgha Nikāya and Majjhima Nikāya into Chinese, writing a detailed introduction to each. The significance of these projects for Chinese-language scholarship can be compared with Bhikkhu Bodhi's significance for the English-language scholarly world.

In both introductions, she consistently described herself as an outsider to Buddhism. This was a declaration of position, rather than modesty. She read the texts as a philologist and historian of ideas, without beginning from religious faith. Precisely this distance gave her descriptions particular weight.

Her central judgment was that the Buddha in the Majjhima Nikāya is "a great human being." His greatness lies neither in innate gifts nor divine endowment. He grasped earlier theories and practices extensively, reflected deeply on their deficiencies, and tested them personally before beginning his own creative work. He was a thoroughgoing practitioner. In the Dīgha Nikāya's Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the Buddha carries his ailing body northward from Vesālī to Kusinārā. He is "a kind old man, already eighty years of age and gravely ill, yet still clear in thought." Sustained by almsfood and river water, he completes his final journey. For Duan, the account "shows that the Buddha was more than a preacher. He was a practitioner. Leading by example, he demonstrated true practice to his disciples until the end of his life."

Ānanda leans against a doorway and weeps. The Buddha compassionately consoles him, "Those united in love must eventually part." Reading this, Duan writes that the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta "still brims with the love for the Buddha felt by disciples who had known him personally." Two and a half millennia later, the feeling in the words remains alive.

She also describes the Buddha's focus and restraint. "Even someone as great as the Buddha did not concern himself with everything. He spoke only on matters related to rescue from the sea of suffering, deliberately attending to some things and leaving others aside." She believes this still offers something to people today amid the explosion of information. Her introduction to the Majjhima Nikāya ends with a very quiet sentence. "In this turbulent world, reading the Majjhima Nikāya may at least give us a little time of peace." It is signed September 6, 2020, at Peking University's Foreign Languages Building. A year and a half later, she died, her work of translation still unfinished.

With her linguistic command, her grasp of early texts, and her understanding of the Dharma's original concerns beyond sectarian boundaries, she should have become one of the most important figures helping the Chinese-speaking world understand Theravāda and early Buddhism. Her actual influence in that world ultimately fell short of the other three named in Chapter 9.5. The reason lay in life's impermanence, rather than in the quality of her work.¹⁸

References¶