Bhikkuni: Buddhist Ordination of Women

In Thailand, with a population of 62 million, there are 300,000 monks (bhikkus). Numbers are decreasing as westernised stress erodes the leisure necessary for monasticism. For some this reduction seems beneficial as monastic ordination is largely a socialised ritual (all males are expected to be monks for about three months to gain merit for their parents) rather than the rare and intensely motivated personal decision it represents in the west. Many boys are given to a Buddhist monastery, as were oblates in St Benedict’s time, for financial or educational reasons.

Buddhism is the state religion of the Kingdom of Thailand and the monastic Sangha is legislated into the national constitution. By a reactive law of 1928, after a provocative move by a small group challenging what Dhammananda calls the structural violence again women, it became illegal to ordain women as bhikunnis. Those who wanted to live a religious life have had to do so as a maechee, white robed nuns who are popularly associated with performing the domestic functions that keep the temples and monks’ residences at the appropriate level of comfort and cleanliness. A few of these nuns have earned a reputation as spiritual teachers but they remain of inferior status and are denied access to the monk’s highereducation.

When Bhikunni Dhammananda returns to us we sit again at the stone table near the garden while she gives us a vigorous account of the history of the entrenched prejudice she is bravely contesting. Like the few other fully ordained Thai women she had to go to Sri Lanka, from a university career and a marriage and family of her own, to express the full form of her monastic calling. I tell her she reminds me a little of Sr Joan Chittister, the radical American Benedictine who has taken on similar blockages in the Catholic church. I am not so surprised when she says she knows her and has worked with her on various projects. What, I ask, does she think lies behind the antiquated patriarchal obstructionism and she asks me if she can speak directly. I say I expect she will and she does – ‘power and money’, she says.

No doubt these are considerations. The shadow side of many religions is their getting caught in the very wealth and status that they teach how to transcend. But later, reading the story of the Buddha’s first response to women’s ordination, I felt the subordination of women in religion is deeper than that. After his enlightenment at the age of thirty-five the Buddha linked the spread of his teaching to the monastic order he founded. When the Buddha’s father died his stepmother, Queen MahaPajapati, asked the Buddha for permission to follow him in the monastic state. He replied ‘Please do not ask so’. But she later arrived with a train of 500 women with shaved heads and yellow robes. The Buddha gave the same response. Ananda, his beloved disciple, asked if it was because women could not achieve enlightenment but the Buddha made it clear women and men have equal spiritual potential – a historic statement in the history of religion. Eventually he relented and bhikunnis became accepted. The problem returned soon after his death, however, and, as Bhikunni Dhammananda testifies, the position of women in most Buddhist cultures rapidly degenerated.

The story of the Buddha and the queen oddly echoes one of St Benedict and his sister, the nun St Scholastica. He once came down to her monastery to visit her.She pressed him to stay longer but obedient to his own rule he declined. She then prayed for a huge storm that broke and forced him to stay overnight. He berated her but she had got her way.

Perhaps the reason that men need to dominate women is because they fear that otherwise they will be subordinated to them. The mother-son relationship is not an equal one and for most monks (like the Buddha) that is the strongest relationship they ever have with a woman. Anyway, Bhikunni Dhamananda is not competing with the monks. She bides her time, time is on her side and she isn’t trying to frighten them. But modernity has hit Thai Buddhism as it has other religions.

Much love, Laurence Freeman OSB

Return to homepage