Reading guide
What the discourse says
The question concerns three exclusions: from sabhā, assembly or council; from kammanta, work or business; and from travel to Kamboja, which was the long-distance trading route to the northwest.
The answer names four qualities: kodhanā, irritable; issukī, jealous; maccharī, stingy; duppaññā, unintelligent or of poor wisdom. No argument, no qualification, and no evidence is offered.
That is the whole discourse. It is four lines of question and four of answer, and there is nothing in it that a longer reading would recover.
The shape of the argument
It is worth naming what kind of claim this is, because the form is familiar and the naming is more useful than either defending or denouncing.
A social exclusion is stated as a fact, and it is explained by attributing traits to the excluded group. The exclusion is not examined; nothing is said about who maintains it or what enforces it. The traits are treated as the cause and the exclusion as the effect.
That is a recognizable pattern of argument and it has been used against many groups in many places. Whatever authority a reader grants this collection, the pattern is the pattern, and a study guide that did not say so would be failing its readers.
Note also that the premise is dubious on its own terms. Women in this period did work — the canon is full of them running households, managing property, and giving on a large scale — and the discourse’s own tradition names laywomen as major donors, which requires wealth they controlled.
What the same collection says elsewhere
The contradicting material is not scattered or obscure. It is in this same nipāta and in the same collection.
AN 4.7, seventy-three discourses earlier, names the four who grace the Saṅgha: monk, nun, layman, laywoman. The five qualifying qualities — competent, educated, self-assured, learned, having memorized the teachings — are stated once and applied to all four without a word of variation. There is no separate standard for women and no suggestion that one of the four graces the community less.
AN 4.55 has Nakula’s mother speak for herself, in the same words as her husband, and be answered together with him. AN 4.53 assesses wives and husbands by an identical ethical standard across all four cells of its grid. AN 4.57 has the Buddha take a meal from Suppavāsā and teach her on the spot.
Beyond the Fours: the Ones name outstanding nuns and laywomen alongside the men in the same series of declarations. The Therīgāthā is a whole book of verses by awakened women. The canon records women attaining every stage of the path, and at SN 5.2 the nun Somā, told by Māra that women lack the wisdom for the goal, replies asking what womanhood has to do with it when the mind is well composed.
So the collection does not speak with one voice here, and it is not close. This discourse is four lines; the material against it runs to books.
What can and cannot be said about its origin
Readers often want to be told the passage is late or interpolated. That is more than the evidence supports, and a guide should say so.
What can be said: the passage is short, it has parallels in the Chinese collections, and there is no text-critical ground for simply removing it. What can also be said: it sits in isolation, its claims are not developed anywhere in the collection, and the material that contradicts it is far more extensive and more deeply integrated.
The honest position is that the canon is a compilation assembled and transmitted over centuries by communities that held a range of views, and that it preserves some of that range. Passages like this one are evidence about the transmitters. Treating them as evidence about women is a separate move, and it is not one this page makes.
‘Persia’
One small matter of translation. Kamboja was a region in the far northwest of the Indian cultural world, in the borderlands of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, known for horses and for trade. Sujato renders it ‘Persia’ to convey ‘the distant foreign place one travels to on business’ rather than to make a geographical identification.
The point of the reference is distance. The three things named — the council, employment, the long journey — are the public, the economic, and the mobile, which between them describe a life outside the household.
Teaching this discourse
It appears in a complete translation of the Aṅguttara and therefore appears on a site that is publishing one. Omitting it would be a form of dishonesty about what the canon contains, and this series has taken the position throughout that the collection should be presented as it is.
What a teacher can do with it is limited and worth doing. First, state what it says. Second, put AN 4.7 next to it and let the two be read in sequence. Third, be clear that a tradition’s having said something is not an argument that it is true, and that this collection itself insists on that — AN 3.65 to the Kālāmas, and AN 4.25 on the teaching being given not because of tradition.
The collection provides the tools for reading this passage critically. Using them on it is not a departure from the tradition; it is what the tradition asks for everywhere else.
Key terms
The text
At Ghosita’s Monastery
§1At one time the Buddha was staying near Kosambī, in Ghosita’s Monastery. Then Venerable Ānanda went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him:
The question and the answer
§2“Sir, what is the cause, what is the reason why ladies don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia?” “Ānanda, ladies are irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent. This is the cause, this is the reason why ladies don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.