The Eight Garudhammas

The account appears in the disciplinary collections of several schools and its shape is the same in each. Mahapajapati Gotami, the Buddha's foster mother, asks for the admission of women to the homeless life. She is refused, asks again, and is refused again. She and a company of women cut their hair, put on ochre robes and follow on foot to where the Buddha is staying. Ananda intercedes, asks whether a woman who goes forth is capable of the fruits of the path, and receives the answer that she is. The admission is then granted on condition that eight rules of respect be accepted for life.

The eight are structural rather than moral. A nun ordained a hundred years must rise, bow and pay respect to a monk ordained that day. Nuns must not spend the rains retreat in a place where no monks are available. Twice a month they must ask the monks' community for the observance day and request an exhortation. At the end of the rains the invitation to be admonished must be made before both communities. A nun who has committed a grave offence must undergo the period of discipline before both communities. Ordination must be sought from both communities. A nun may never abuse or revile a monk. And nuns may not admonish monks, while monks may admonish nuns.

The same account has the Buddha add a prediction that the true teaching will now last five hundred years rather than a thousand.

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.