Foremost Laywomen

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Ten laywomen close the foremost list, named for learning, love, giving, absorption, nursing, verified confidence, a marriage, and the trust of someone who only ever overheard.

Khujjuttarā (AN 1.260)

Foremost among laywomen who are very learned — bahussutānaṁ, the same term used of Ānanda at AN 1.219. Khujjuttarā was an attendant of Queen Sāmāvatī, and in the tradition’s account she was a slave; her name refers to a curvature of her back. She went daily to buy flowers, heard the Buddha teach, and returned to repeat what she had heard to the women of the palace, who could not leave it.

The tradition takes this further than a single entry. The Itivuttaka, one of the short books of the canon, is by tradition attributed to Khujjuttarā’s transmission — its distinctive formula, “this was said by the Blessed One,” instead of the usual “so I have heard,” is understood as her reporting to others what she had heard directly. Whether or not that attribution is historical, its existence is the point: the tradition was prepared to say that a book of its canon came through an enslaved woman.

This entry is worth reading beside AN 1.219, where Ānanda holds the same category among monks. Both are named for hearing and holding. One was the Buddha’s cousin and constant attendant; the other bought flowers.

Sāmāvatī (AN 1.261)

Foremost among those who dwell in love, mettāvihārī. Sāmāvatī was the queen Khujjuttarā served, and the story the commentaries attach to her is grim: a rival consort’s intrigue ended with Sāmāvatī and her women burned to death in their quarters, and the tradition holds that she maintained goodwill toward those who killed her throughout.

There is a real question about how to teach a story like that, and it should not be waved through. Told carelessly it becomes an argument that victims should be serene, which is not what the canon is doing and is a genuinely harmful thing to imply. What the entry actually names is her practice, in circumstances that give the naming its weight; it does not tell anyone else to endure anything. A teacher unsure of the room is better off reading the entry and saying that the traditional story is severe, and offering it afterward to those who want it, than delivering it as an uplift.

Visākhā, Suppavāsā, Suppiyā

Visākhā, Migāra’s mother, is foremost as a donor — the counterpart of Anāthapiṇḍika, and one of the most vividly drawn characters in the canon, who appears negotiating, arguing, weeping, and getting her way. Suppavāsā the Koliyan is foremost among those who give fine things. Suppiyā is foremost among those who care for the sick, which is the only entry in the entire eighty-plus list for nursing, and the Vinaya records her attending sick monks at considerable personal cost.

That nursing appears once, and appears here, is worth a sentence. The canon elsewhere has the Buddha find a monk lying in his own waste, unattended, wash him himself, and tell the community that whoever would tend him should tend the sick. The category exists; it is named once; and it is named of a laywoman.

Confidence, marriage, and hearsay (AN 1.265–267)

Kātiyānī is foremost in experiential confidence, the same term used of Sūrambaṭṭha in the previous chapter. Nakula’s mother is foremost among those who are intimate, exactly as her husband is — the two entries are the same category, one at the end of each chapter, and reading them together is the intended effect.

The last entry of the entire foremost list is the strangest and the best. Kāḷī of Kuraraghara is foremost among those whose confidence is based on oral transmission — anussava, hearsay, report. She is said to have overheard a conversation between two spirits praising the Buddha, and to have gained confidence from that, before ever meeting him.

What makes this remarkable is that anussava is one of the ten grounds the Buddha tells the Kālāmas not to rely on. The list closes by naming someone foremost in a mode of confidence the canon elsewhere warns against relying on by itself. That is not a contradiction if the two passages are read carefully — AN 3.65 says hearsay does not settle whether a doctrine is true, not that nothing good ever begins in hearsay — but the juxtaposition is deliberate enough to be worth putting in front of a class. Almost everyone’s first contact with anything is hearsay. The question is what they do next.

Key terms