Foremost Nuns

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Thirteen nuns are each named unsurpassed in one thing, in the same words and largely the same categories as the eighty monks before them.

The categories are the same categories

This is the first thing to establish, because it is easy to assume otherwise. Great wisdom, psychic power, memorization of the monastic law, speaking on the teaching, practicing absorption, energy, clairvoyance, swift insight, recollection of past lives, wearing coarse robes, commitment to faith — every one of these categories also appears in the monk chapters, attached to a different name.

There is no separate set of women’s virtues here. Nobody is named foremost in patience, or service, or support of others’ practice. Khemā is foremost in great wisdom, exactly as Sāriputta is; Uppalavaṇṇā is foremost in psychic power, exactly as Mahāmoggallāna is; Paṭācārā has memorized the monastic law, exactly as Upāli has. The parallelism is close enough to be deliberate, and it is the single most useful fact to have at hand when this material is discussed.

Who they are

Mahāpajāpati Gotamī, foremost in long standing, is the Buddha’s aunt and foster mother and the first woman ordained — the counterpart of Koṇḍañña at the head of the monks’ list. Khemā, foremost in great wisdom, had been a queen; a discourse in the Saṁyutta shows her handling a king’s metaphysical questions with an authority the Buddha afterward endorses word for word.

Dhammadinnā, foremost among those who speak on the teaching, is the teacher in one of the most substantial doctrinal discourses in the canon, in which she answers her former husband’s questions and the Buddha subsequently says he would have answered exactly as she did. Paṭācārā, foremost in the monastic law, came to the Saṅgha after losing her entire family in a single catastrophe; Kisāgotamī, foremost in wearing coarse robes, after carrying her dead child from door to door in search of a mustard seed from a house untouched by death.

Bhaddakaccānā, foremost among those who have attained great insight, is identified by the commentarial tradition with Rāhula’s mother — the Buddha’s former wife. The canon says nothing about that here. She is named for her attainment, in one line, like everyone else.

Thirteen against eighty

The honest thing to say next is that the list is not symmetrical in size. Thirteen nuns are named against roughly eighty monks. Explaining that away is not possible and pretending not to notice it is worse.

Several things are true at once. The nuns’ order was founded later than the monks’ and remained smaller. The canon was compiled and transmitted by a monastic community in which men held most institutional positions, and what gets recorded reflects who is doing the recording. And the tradition preserved, alongside this list, an ordination account and a set of additional rules for nuns that scholars have long regarded as difficult and quite possibly later — material that sits awkwardly beside a Buddha who names women foremost in wisdom.

What can be said without strain is that this chapter exists, that it uses the same terms, and that a substantial body of the women’s own poetry survives in the Therīgāthā, much of it by the women named here. That is a stronger position than either apologetics or dismissal, and it is the one this series takes.

Teaching this chapter

Read it immediately after the four monk chapters, without a break, so that the correspondence of categories is felt rather than announced. Then, if there is time, read one of the discourses attached to a name — Dhammadinnā’s is the best choice, because it is long, technical, and ends with the Buddha ratifying her answers without amendment.

For groups likely to have met the difficult material about women in the Vinaya, it is better to raise it than to wait for someone else to. The useful framing is that a tradition is not a single voice, that this canon preserves several, and that the reader is not obliged to pretend they agree.

Key terms