Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements

7. Reclaiming the Robe: Reviving the Bhikkhuni Order in Sri Lanka RANJANI DE SILVA

Chapter 7 Reclaiming the Robe: Reviving the Bhikkhunı̄ Order in Sri Lanka RANJANI DE SILVA S´ ākyamuni Buddha first began ordaining women in India in the sixth century BCE. His foster mother, Queen Pajāpatı̄ Gotamı̄, was the first woman he ordained. She became the first bhikkhunı̄.1 The Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha that developed after the ordination of Pajāpatı̄ and her five hundred followers existed in India until at least the eleventh century. The Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha produced many fully awakened women and arahants who made significant contributions to the early Buddhist monastic order in India. The Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha began in Sri Lanka when Princess Sanghamitta, daughter of Emperor Asoka and sister of the arahant Mahinda, came to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE. According to Sri Lankan chronicles, she presided over the ordination of Queen Anula and five hundred women at King Devanampiyatissa’s royal court. When Sanghamitta arrived in Sri Lanka for this historic ordination, she brought a sapling from the sacred bodhi tree in Bodhgaya with her. She planted this sapling in Anuradhapura, the capital of Sri Lanka. The descendent of this tree remains at that spot today and is regarded as the oldest tree in the world. The symbolic planting of the sapling firmly rooted Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and the ordination of nuns in that same place was a highly auspicious, legitimizing event. The order of nuns thrived in Sri Lanka for many centuries but died out around the eleventh century, probably due to famine and the Chola 119 invasions from the north. Until that time, laywomen and nuns were engaged in the study of the Buddha’s teachings and social welfare work. The bhikkhunı̄s lived separate from the monks, in nunneries with their own independent administrative structures. The order of nuns flourished with the support of Buddhist kings, the Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha, and the lay community. This early period of Sri Lankan Buddhist history, with Anuradhapura as its capital, was known as the Golden Age, a time when culture and the arts were at their peak. The country was said to be so peaceful that a beautiful woman could carry gems in her hand and journey by foot from the north to the south of the island without fear of attack. In this atmosphere, both the Bhikkhu and Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅghas developed and flourished. In the year 1017, Anuradhapura fell to the Chola invaders from South India. As a result, the orders of both nuns and monks disappeared . When King Vijayabahu (1010–1111 CE) finally defeated and expelled the Cholas in 1086, he discovered that some Sinhala monks had taken refuge in Burma.2 He invited them to return to Sri Lanka, where they restored the Bhikkhu Saṅgha. Later, on two separate occasions when conflicts and natural disasters caused the demise of the monks’ order, monks were again invited from Burma to revive the Bhikkhu Saṅgha in Sri Lanka. In 1753, when the monks’ order had declined yet again, a retinue of monks headed by Upali Thera from Siam arrived in Sri Lanka and revived the order by conferring the higher ordination (upasampadā) to six male novices. When reading these historical accounts, some questions come to mind: What happened to the nuns? The nuns disappeared along with the monks, so why was there no attempt to revive the order of nuns, either from within Sri Lanka, or from Burma or Thailand? Were there no living nuns from the Sri Lankan Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha who survived alongside the fleeing monks? If the nuns did manage to escape to Burma along with the monks, what became of them? Was there an order of nuns in Burma in the eleventh century that could have sheltered the Sri Lankan bhikkhunı̄s? Why is there no documentation of a complementary group of nuns? If such a group did exist, why did King Vijayabahu not request their return to Sri Lanka? Alternatively, could it be that he asked them to return to Sri Lanka, but the surviving nuns chose not to? These are the intriguing questions for which there are few documented answers. 120 RANJANI DE SILVA THE LEGITIMACY OF THE CHINESE BHIKKHUNĪ LINEAGE Records exist to document that nuns from the Sinhala Bhikkhunı̄ Saṅgha ventured out of Sri Lanka and offered ordination to women in China. According to the Biographies of Buddhist Nuns, a Chinese text compiled in 520...