Few passages in the canon have been examined as closely, and the difficulties are internal to the texts rather than imported from outside them.
Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists. A rule directing where nuns spend the rains, or requiring a formal request for exhortation, or governing the discipline of a nun who has committed a grave offence, describes an established institution with its own procedure. Imposed at the moment of foundation, before a single woman has been ordained, they have nothing to operate on. The sixth is harder still: it requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted a few pages later in the same collections, where the Buddha authorises monks to ordain nuns.
Second, six of the eight appear elsewhere in the disciplinary collections as ordinary rules, each with its own origin story describing the incident that occasioned it. A rule cannot both have been laid down at the founding and have arisen later from a specific incident.
Third, the recensions differ. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan versions vary in wording, in order and in the number of items treated as fundamental.
Bhikkhu Analayo, working across the recensions, has argued that the account is a later composition. Ute Husken reached comparable conclusions from the Pali alone. The rules remain in force where the nuns' order exists, and the scholarship has become part of the argument about reviving full ordination for women in traditions where the lineage lapsed.