Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha initially declined, and only later agreed, to ordain women as bhikkhunis, fully ordained nuns, a founding narrative centered on his foster mother and aunt, Mahapajapati Gotami, who is recorded as petitioning repeatedly for ordination before the Buddha's attendant Ananda interceded on her behalf; the Buddha is described as agreeing on the condition that nuns accept eight additional rules, the garudhammas, subordinating the bhikkhuni order in certain respects to the bhikkhu order, a textual detail that has itself become a significant subject of modern scholarly and Buddhist feminist discussion regarding its authenticity and its implications for gender relations within the tradition. Once established, the bhikkhuni sangha flourished across early Buddhist India and subsequently spread, alongside the bhikkhu sangha, to Sri Lanka and other regions where Buddhism took root in the following centuries.
The Theravada bhikkhuni lineage specifically is understood to have died out, most likely by around the eleventh century CE, following invasions and political instability in Sri Lanka that disrupted the sustained quorum of ordained bhikkhunis required to ordain successors under Vinaya procedure, while the bhikkhuni lineage within Mahayana Buddhism, transmitted through China, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam via a separate ordination transmission, continued unbroken and remains active today.