What Cannot Happen (II)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Certain offices in the world’s order can only be held by one being at a time and, the chapter says, only by a man — and bad conduct cannot produce an agreeable result.

The five offices

Begin with what the passage actually lists, because it is narrower than it is usually reported to be. Five roles: a fully awakened Buddha; a wheel-turning monarch, the universal righteous king of Indian political myth; Sakka, ruler of one heaven; Māra, the adversary; and Brahmā, the Divinity. Every one of these is a unique cosmological office — a position in the structure of the world, held by one being at a time. The entry immediately before them, AN 1.278, makes the same one-at-a-time claim about wheel-turning monarchs without reference to gender at all, and AN 1.277 did the same for Buddhas.

What is not on the list is the part that matters most. Nothing here says a woman cannot awaken. Nothing says a woman cannot become an arahant, cannot reach any stage of the path, cannot teach, cannot be foremost in wisdom or insight or mastery of the monastic law. The collection has, forty entries earlier, named thirteen women as unsurpassed in precisely those things, using precisely the terms it uses for the monks. The Therīgāthā preserves the awakening verses of the first generation of Buddhist women. Whatever this passage is doing, it is not denying women the goal, and any presentation of it that implies otherwise misreports it.

What the textual evidence looks like

The same list appears in MN 115, the discourse on many kinds of elements, and MN 115 has parallels preserved in Chinese and in Tibetan. Comparative study of those versions has found that the items about women are not present in all of them, and several scholars have argued on that basis that this material is a later addition to an originally gender-neutral list of impossibilities.

That argument should be reported accurately and not oversold. It is a scholarly position resting on the distribution of the material across versions, not a settled fact, and readers should be told it is contested. But it is a serious position held on textual grounds by people who work with these parallels professionally, and a teacher who presents the passage as uncontested tradition is leaving out something the room deserves to know.

There is also an internal argument available, which does not depend on any of that. This chapter sits inside a collection that names women foremost in wisdom, records women teaching doctrine so well that the Buddha ratifies every word, and closes its foremost list with an enslaved woman named foremost in learning. A canon is not a single voice. This one contains passages that pull hard in different directions, and the honest thing to do with that is to say so rather than to harmonize it.

What the later tradition did

Mahāyāna literature engaged this claim directly, and two of its responses are among the most famous scenes in Buddhist writing. In the Lotus Sūtra, the eight-year-old daughter of the nāga king awakens instantaneously in front of a skeptical Śāriputra, who has just objected that a woman’s body is defiled and cannot be a vessel for the Dharma; she presents a jewel to the Buddha, and the assembly sees her attain buddhahood. The scene is explicitly staged as a refutation of an objection of exactly this shape.

Honesty requires adding that in the received text she transforms into a male body in the course of doing so, and that this detail has been argued about ever since — read by some as a concession to the very view the scene is refuting, by others as a deliberate demonstration that the form is trivially changeable and therefore not the obstacle it was claimed to be.

The Vimalakīrti Sūtra takes the second line without ambiguity. A goddess in Vimalakīrti’s house, challenged by Śāriputra to change out of her female form, swaps bodies with him — leaving him in hers and asking him to change out of it — and then swaps back, having made the point that neither form was ever fixed or essential. That chapter is on this site, and reading it beside AN 1.279 is one of the clearest demonstrations available of the Mahāyāna arguing with the earlier literature rather than merely succeeding it.

How to teach it

Read it. Do not skip it, do not paraphrase it, and do not read it and hurry on. Then say, in this order: what it lists; what it does not list; that the canon contains the foremost-nuns chapter and the Therīgāthā; that the textual status of the passage is contested on comparative grounds; and that the later tradition argued with it in writing. That is five sentences and it is a complete and honest account.

What not to do is defend it, or apologize for the tradition on its behalf, or pretend the matter is settled either way. Students, particularly the women in the room, are generally better served by a teacher who can say plainly that a tradition they are being introduced to contains something they may well reject, and that the tradition itself contains the materials for the argument.

The rest of the chapter (AN 1.284–286)

The last three entries return to firmer ground: an agreeable result cannot come from bad bodily, verbal, or mental conduct. This is the impossibility formula applied to kamma, and it is the counterpart of the entries in the next chapter, which say the same in the positive direction. The structural claim is that the relation between conduct and its result is not arbitrary — not that it is mechanical or immediate, which AN 3.100 spends a whole discourse complicating, but that its direction cannot be reversed.

Key terms