Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī

Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī — Mahā (great) + Prajāpatī (lady of progeny); Gautamī the feminine of the Buddha’s clan name Gautama — is the foundational first woman ordained as a Buddhist nun. The Pali form of her name is Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī. By traditional account she was the maternal aunt of the historical Buddha (her elder sister Māyā — the Buddha’s biological mother — died seven days after his birth) and, married subsequently to the Buddha’s father Suddhodana, became the Buddha’s foster mother and raised him to adulthood.

The request for ordination

The narrative of her ordination is one of the foundational and most-discussed passages in [[pali-canon|the Pali Canon]], preserved in the Cullavagga (Smaller Section) of the Vinaya Piṭaka. After King Suddhodana’s death and several years of the Buddha’s substantial public teaching career, Mahāprajāpatī — now in her later years — traveled with five hundred Śākyan women (many widowed in the same period) to the Buddha in [[san-francisco|the city]] of Vaiśālī to request ordination as nuns.

The Buddha declined three times. The traditional account does not give the Buddha’s reasons explicitly; modern scholarship reads the declination as reflecting the substantial social and institutional difficulties that women’s ordination would face in 5th-century-BCE Indian society, where unprotected ascetic women were subject to substantial vulnerability and where the introduction of a female monastic order would be a significant social disruption.

Mahāprajāpatī and her companions did not abandon the request. They cut their hair, donned the [[saffron|saffron]] robes of monastic life as a public declaration of intent, and walked from Vaiśālī back through the substantial heat of the journey — arriving at the monastery where the Buddha was staying with their feet swollen and substantially bloody. The Buddha’s attendant Ānanda, encountering them, was moved by their evident commitment and asked the Buddha on their behalf.

Ānanda’s intercession is recorded as taking the form of three questions:

Lord, are women, having gone forth from the home life into homelessness in [[buddhism|the Dharma]] and discipline taught by the Tathāgata, capable of realizing the fruit of stream-entry, of once-returning, of non-returning, of arhantship?

To each question the Buddha answered: Yes, Ānanda, they are capable.

Ānanda then made the substantial argument: if women are capable of the substantial fruits of the path, and if Mahāprajāpatī in particular — the Buddha’s own foster mother — has nourished him from infancy and now requests the opportunity to undertake the practice, then granting the ordination is the appropriate response.

The Buddha agreed, on the condition that the new bhikkhunīs accept eight additional rules (the garudhammas — heavy rules) that subordinated the bhikkhunī sangha procedurally to the bhikkhu sangha. The garudhammas have been a substantial point of subsequent scholarly and feminist analysis; modern critical scholarship has substantial questions about their authenticity (the linguistic and structural features suggest later interpolation rather than original promulgation, and parallel Vinaya traditions vary substantially in their treatment of the rules). The contemporary Buddhist scholarly and practical debate over the garudhammas continues.

Mahāprajāpatī accepted the conditions; she and her five hundred companions were formally ordained as the founding bhikkhunīs of [[buddhism|the Buddhist tradition]].

Her attainment

Mahāprajāpatī subsequently attained arhantship — full liberation — and is recorded in [[pali-canon|the Pali Canon]] as one of the foremost of the early bhikkhunīs. Her verses are preserved in the Therīgāthā (Verses of the Elder Nuns) — the substantial collection of poetry composed by the early ordained Buddhist women, one of the most-important early Indian women’s literary corpora and the oldest known anthology of women’s religious literature in any tradition.

The Therīgāthā contains substantial verses attributed to Mahāprajāpatī herself; representative lines (rendered freely):

Homage to you, Buddha, foremost of all beings, Who freed me from suffering and substantial others. Now I have nothing to fear; I am cooled. I have done what was to be done.

She died, by traditional account, at age 120 — substantially before the Buddha himself — surrounded by the bhikkhunī community she had founded. Her funeral, according to the traditional accounts, was attended by the Buddha personally and substantially marked the recognition of her foundational role.

The bhikkhunī sangha through history

The bhikkhunī sangha Mahāprajāpatī established continued across the Buddhist world for over a thousand years. The substantial early continuity included substantial bhikkhunī communities in India, Sri Lanka (the Sri Lankan bhikkhunī community was substantial enough that bhikkhunīs from Sri Lanka traveled to China in the 5th century CE to give ordination to the founding Chinese bhikṣuṇī community), and the broader Buddhist Asian world.

In the Theravāda contexts — Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos — the bhikkhunī ordination lineage was extinguished sometime between the 11th and 13th centuries CE, likely through a combination of warfare, political disruption, and institutional indifference. The Theravāda world subsequently went for approximately a thousand years without fully-ordained bhikkhunīs.

The East Asian Mahāyāna bhikṣuṇī lineage (preserved through Chinese ordination tradition since the 5th century CE) has continued unbroken; from the late 20th century, substantial efforts have used the East Asian lineage to restore Theravāda bhikkhunī ordination. The restoration is now substantially advanced in Sri Lanka (the first restored Theravāda bhikkhunī ordinations occurred in 1996 and have continued at substantial scale since) and is in process in Thailand and Burma. [[dalai-lama|The 14th Dalai Lama]] has substantially supported the parallel restoration of full bhikṣuṇī ordination for Tibetan Buddhism.

The restoration is, in a real sense, the recovery of the lineage Mahāprajāpatī founded — and one of the principal ongoing issues in the modern Buddhist world.

What she gives

The foundational establishment of women’s full ordination as a continuing Buddhist tradition — a substantial precedent that, even through the Theravāda extinction and the contemporary restoration, has anchored [[buddhism|the Buddhist tradition]]‘s continuing affirmation that the path to liberation is open to women on equal terms with men. A demonstration, through her own attainment, that the substantial fruits of the path are accessible across the substantial range of conditions and persons. And, through the Therīgāthā and the continuing bhikkhunī tradition she founded, one of the substantial early articulations in any contemplative tradition of women’s spiritual realization in their own voice.

See also

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• Parallels: [[sangha]]
• Member of: [[person]]
• Part of: [[buddhism]]