Women

The following is an excerpt from http://www.theravadabuddhism.org/ To read Buddhist texts written by the ancient nuns, see http://www.accesstoinsight.org/cgi/search/search.pl?Terms=nun

The Buddha was also the first person in known history to set up a monastic order for women. At first the Buddha was somewhat reluctant to allow an order of nuns, but this is because of the highly sexist society of ancient India. Still in this twenty-first century that we live in, women do not have full equal rights with men in most countries and do not even make as much salary as men for the same type of work. The Buddha lived in a much more sexist society than we live in. The Buddha did agree to create an order of nuns and stated that they are no different than men in capacity for enlightenment. At first there were more rules for nuns than the rules for monks, but they primarily dealt with the protection of the nuns. For example, a nun was raped when walking through a forest by herself. The Buddha followed this incident with a rule that no nun could walk through the forest by herself.

Many women joined the order of nuns, including a former prostitute named Ambapali. Many of these nuns, including Ambapali attained enlightenment.

In some Asian countries there is a cultural custom to state that only men can become enlightened. A woman’s only hope was to practice the five precepts and hope to be re-born as a man. This is not the Buddha’s teachings, but a later sexist custom added to justify continued patriarchal, male dominated rule.

In modern, developed countries dharma teachers are much more likely to be lay people. They have careers and families and usually teach without any charges. Like the monks and nuns, they generously offer dharma instruction with a genuine concern for helping others. The vipassana tradition is based on this appropriate notion of offering the teachings with no charge. These lay teachers are just as likely to be women as they are men and they share full equal rights within the Buddhist community. In spite of the added rules on the nuns during the time of the Buddha, the establishment of an order for women was highly revolutionary, taking place over five hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Another revolutionary aspect to the Buddha’s religion (philosophy or way of life, whichever you prefer) is the fact that large parts of the Buddhist scriptures were written by women. The Buddhist scriptures’ version of the “Psalms” was almost entirely written by Buddhist nuns. It includes several books and several hundred pages, nearly all written by women. (Davids, Norman, Pali Text Society) This fact is revolutionary and unparalleled in human history. No other major religion before or after the Buddha’s time included scriptures which were written by women.