A Wreath Of Blue Lotuses
Incidents From The Pali Canon (Part 2)

by Sangharakshita

This, then, is the episode with which we are concerned. This is our wreath of blue lotus. Clearly, it provides us with a good deal of material for reflection. I am going to concentrate on just one important part: the eight important rules. Why did they take the particular form that they did? And what are we to make of Mahaprajapati's response to them?

Before looking at the rules, however, we must briefly examine Mahaprajapati's behaviour after the Buddha's initial refusal. As we have seen, she gets her hair cut off, dons the saffron robes, and sets off for Vaisali with a number of Shakyan women. Finally, she stands outside the porch of the Hall of the Peaked Gable. In doing all this, she seems to be trying to force the Buddha's hand. We might even say that she is trying to present the Buddha with a fait accompli. After all, she has left home, shaved her head, and donned the saffron robes. She is in effect now a nun, so the Buddha might as well accept the situation, might as well permit her to do what she has in fact already done.

Now the fait accompli is a very interesting phenomenon. Essentially, a fait accompli consists in creating a situation in which the other person is, in effect, deprived of their power of choice or decision. I say in effect because they are not literally deprived of it; nevertheless, a situation is created in which they can exercise that power only at the cost of a great deal of trouble and even a great deal of unpleasantness. The fait accompli involves an element of what we may describe as emotional blackmail and is thus a form of coercion. This of course means that it is a form of violence, and is hence completely out of place in the spiritual life. If you present someone with a fait accompli you are not treating them as an individual. But this is what Mahaprajapati did: she tried to force the Buddha's hand. Her desire to Go Forth was no doubt sincere but, in this connection, she did not treat the Buddha with very much respect. 

We are also told that she stood outside the porch ‘sad, sorrowful, weeping and wailing’. One can perhaps understand her being sad and sorrowful, but what about the weeping and wailing? It would seem that she was trying to get her way in a rather childish fashion. We can contrast this with Ananda's attitude. Ananda argued with the Buddha. He prepared his ground and gave reasons as to why women should be permitted to Go Forth-with the result that the Buddha was unable to resist his request; he was unable to resist reason, unable to resist argument.

This part of the episode is surely of some significance. The fait accompli in fact failed – as it always does in the long run. Emotional blackmail fails, attempted coercion fails. On the other hand, reason suffused with sympathy succeeds. Mahaprajapati herself failed to gain her point, but Ananda gained it for her.

 

It is now time that we moved on to the eight important rules themselves. Why did they take the particular form they did? Perhaps the first thing that strikes us about them is that they are quite severe, even quite harsh. We cannot quite help feeling that the Buddha is perhaps being rather unfair towards Mahaprajapati – though he no doubt knew her better than we do. Indeed, the Buddha seems to be being quite unjust to women in general.

The eight important rules would certainly make the blood of a modern feminist boil with rage, and they might even make some men a little uneasy. Let's go into the matter a little. 

If we look at these rules, it is rather obvious that their main function is to subordinate the order of nuns to the order of monks, to make the bhikkhunis completely dependent on the bhikkhus. The bhikkhunis, the nuns, are to be kept in a state of perpetual pupilage. What could have been the reason for this?

One scholar has suggested that Mahaprajapati's request created an ‘organisational problem’ for the Buddha (it seems that even the Buddha had organisational problems!). By this time the order of monks had been in existence for about twenty years. Organisationally speaking, the Buddha was faced with three alternatives. He could admit women to the existing order of monks, thus creating a single unified order, he could create an entirely separate and independent order for women, or he could subordinate the order of nuns to the order of monks.

The first of these options was clearly out of the question. Both monks and nuns were expected to lead lives of celibacy and this would presumably have been rather difficult if they were living together as members of a single unified order. The second alternative was out of the question too. The Buddha could hardly be the head of two quite separate, independent, orders. In any case, he was – externally at least – a man, and a man could hardly be the head of an order of nuns. If it was really to be separate and independent, that order of nuns would have to be headed by a woman. That left only the third alternative, that of subordinating the order of nuns to the order of monks. This, according to the scholar, is the alternative that the Buddha adopted.

This explanation is certainly of interest. There may even be some truth in it. But it does not really sufficient to explain the specific form in which the eight important rules were presented. Something more than organisational convenience seems to have been involved. Perhaps it would help if we tried to understand what it was that the rules were intended to prevent. To do this, however, we have to look at rules in general.

If we look at the Vinaya Pitaka or The Book of the Discipline, we find that it contains many rules, of many different kinds. There are rules for monks, and rules for nuns. According to the Theravada tradition, there are, altogether, 227 rules for monks, and 311 rules for nuns. How did these rules come to be laid down? It is certain that the Buddha did not draw them all up in advance. He did not sit down under his Bodhi tree and think, ‘What sort of Sangha would I like to have? And what sort of rules should it observe? How should it be constituted?’

The Buddha laid down rules in response to unskillful behaviour on the part of a member, or members, of the Sangha. So long as there was no unskillful behaviour there were no rules; the Buddha was not interested in laying down rules for their own sake. He was interested simply in the moral and spiritual development of the individual and laid down rules only when ‘forced’ to do so.

These eight important rules, however, were laid down in advance of any offence actually committed by Mahaprajapati. But the same principle does perhaps apply. The effect of these rules is to subordinate the order of nuns to the order of monks. It is to make the bhikkhunis completely dependent, organisationally speaking, on the bhikkhus. So what kind of unskillful behaviour are the eight rules meant to prevent? To what kind of possible offences do they refer? Clearly, they are meant to prevent the nuns from claiming equality with, or superiority over, monks. That is to say, they are meant to prevent women from claiming equality with, or superiority over, men. In other words, we could say that they are meant to prevent an eruption of feminism into the order. 

To say this does not mean that the Buddha did not believe in equal rights for women in the ordinary social sense. It does not mean that he did not believe that a woman could be spiritually superior to a man. After all, he had told Ananda quite categorically that women were capable of attaining the fruits of Stream Entry and so on, and, presumably, a woman who was a Stream Entrant was spiritually superior to a man who was still a worldling. So what the Buddha wanted to do, it seems, was to prevent women from Going Forth for the wrong reasons, that is, for social rather than for purely spiritual reasons.