Buddhism in India

84 Buddhism in India

is attributed to the famous courtesan Ambapalli, while a story of

‘Subha and the libertine’ describes how a nun avoids a man trying

to seduce her by emphasising how her body will become decrepit

and in the end plucks out her eye. Clearly women are exposed to

different dangers in the ‘homeless’ life than men!

In the centuries following the Buddha’s death, many women from

royal families became nuns and it seems that women often supported

Buddhism while men turned to Shaivism or other Brahmanical sects.

In regions of more matrilineal tendencies, nuns had a stronger position.

In western India, for example, the inscriptions of the Satavahana period

record women as giving donations on their own, which means that they

must have controlled property on their own, while Nagarjunakhonda,

a famous series of monasteries, is attributed to the donations of women.

In the context of women’s social bondage to the household, the

tendency in Buddhism to take the ‘homeless life’ as the pre-requisite

for liberation tended to discriminate against women. But the denial

of essence—the denial that women were essentially creatures of

desire, that they essentially required male control—limited this

Buddhist patriarchy. The anti-women trends so visible in the his-

torical forms of Buddhism were situational and contingent. The

Buddhism of the first millennium BCE only weakly opposed the

patriarchal sentiments that pervaded the society, affecting men and

even the Buddha himself. At the same time, the anti-essentialism of

basic Buddhist philosophy provided a fundamental equalitarianism

that Brahmanism lacked.

The Dhamaa 85

The general patriarchy of the society as well as the release felt by
many women who became bhikkunis, is shown in the Therigatha,
the songs of the women who became bhikkunis. Kathryn Blackstone,
comparing the Therigathaand Theragatha (songs of bhikkus),
notes that women were much more likely to talk of their family and
other relationships, on one hand; and that most of the images of
the decaying, filthy body which were described by both men and
women were images specifically of the female body (Blackstone
2000: 59–81).
Thus, two nuns’ songs, those of Sumangala’s mother and of
Mutta, include those relating to liberation from a human being,
the husband, whereas the similar version by a monk (that of
Sumangala) speaks only of the tools of his labour:

So freed! So freed! So thoroughly freed am I! –

From three crooked things set free:

from my pestle, my shameless husband and his sun-shade making

my moldy old pot with its water-snake smell.

Aversion and passion I cut with a chop.

Having come to the foot of a tree, I meditate, Absorbed in the bliss:

‘What bliss! (Therigatha 2000: II.3)

Another beautiful depiction of a this-worldly achievement of
nibbana is the song by Patacara:

Ploughing the field with ploughs, sowing the ground with seed,

supporting their wives and children, young men gather up wealth.

So why is it that I, consummate in virtue, a doer of the teacher’s

bidding, don’t gain Unbinding [nibbana]? I’m not lazy or proud.

Washing my feet, I noticed the water.

And in watching it flow from high to low

my heart was composed like a fine thoroughbred steed.

Then taking a lamp, I entered the hut,

checked the bedding, sat down on the bed.

And taking a pin, I pulled out the wick:

Like a flame’s unbinding was the liberation of awareness (Therigatha

2000, V.10).

Patacara is later described as teaching others and as being honored
by them as a senior and liberated nun.
Another song, describing graphically the changes due to old age
and contrasting them with ‘the truth of the Truth-speakers’ words’