Extract :
Introduction
THE FIRST BUDDHIST WOMEN is a study of the Therigatha, a collection of seventy-three poems in the canon of the earliest Buddhist literature. Then means “women elders,” or “women who have grown old in knowledge,” and gatha means “verse,” “stanza,” or “song.” Hence the Therigatha are the poems of the wise women of early Buddhism. In force and beauty, these religious poems rank with the best of Indian lyric poetry, from the hymns of the Rigveda to the lyrical poems of Kalidasa and Amaru.
The Therigatha was passed on orally for six centuries before being committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C.E. in the literary language of Pali. The entire collection of the Pali Buddhist Canon is called the Tipitaka (lit. “the three baskets”).’
Like all Buddhist scriptures, the Therigatha finds its source in the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. There are no records of when he was born, but Theravadin, or Southern Buddhists, reckon that he lived from 560-480 B.C.E., while Mahayana, or Northern Buddhists, maintain that his dates were 460-380 B.C.E. Both traditions agree that he lived for eighty years.
Siddhartha Gautama was born not into a king’s, but into a Sakyan chief’s family in Kapilavatthu. Tradition has it that at sixteen, he married a woman his same age, Yasodhara, the daughter of a nobleman’s family. By her, Siddhartha gave birth to one son, Rahula. At age twenty-nine, on the outskirts of his family home, Siddhartha saw first an old man, next a sick man, then a corpse. Following these sights of suffering, he saw an ascetic. Soon thereafter, because his heart was not at peace regarding the great questions of birth, suffering, old age, and death, Siddhartha left his home, wife, and child, following a tradition that was ancient in India even at that time, that of the samana, the renunciant. Six years later, after studying with the leading renunciants of his day and feeling unsatisfied with their teaching, Siddhartha resolved to sit alone under a bodhi tree until he either died or realized the highest truth. It was under that tree that he attained nirvana, the extinction of greed, hatred, and ignorance. From this point on he was a buddha, one who has attained complete enlightenment.
There are two kinds of buddhas: paccekabuddhas, who have attained complete enlightenment but who do not teach in the world, and sammasambuddhas, who are also completely enlightened but dedicate themselves to proclaiming the saving truth to all beings. Gautama would be considered a sammasambuddha because, following his enlightenment, he decided not to renounce the world completely, but to teach to others what he had discovered for himself. He chose to be a sattharo, a “teacher.” According to Buddhist tradition, such teachers appear on Earth from time to time. Their purpose is to teach dharma, the “law” or “doctrine” which is the truth, the only Reality.
Like other sammasambuddhas, Gautama founded a sangha, a community of monks (bhikkhus) and nuns (bhikkhunis), laymen and laywomen.
Gautama preached his first sermon to five fellow renunciants, men who had been his fellow practitioners before he set out on his own path. Convinced by his teaching, they were ordained by him and became his first disciples. Laywomen and laymen were the next category of followers. Because ordination of women was not permitted at first, nuns were the last group to come into the fold. The full story of the formation of the Order of Nuns introduces Chapter One.
The nuns’ sangha was a radical experiment for its time. In its earliest phase, it consisted of samani, “female wanderers” who could live in the forest alone. Women like Bhadda Kundalakesa, Nanduttara, Dantika, Uppalavanna, and Sukka did so. (Later, rules prohibiting nuns’ independent wandering were formulated.) However, it was more usual for nuns (and, for that matter, monks) to form into communities in or on the outskirts of villages.
The nuns patterned their community after the monks’ community. Like monks, nuns were allowed three saffron robes, a belt and razor, a bowl, thread and needle, and a water filter. In addition, nuns were allowed the use of a hip-string during menstruation. Like the monks, nuns lived in cells, sometimes individual cells, sometimes with a saddhivihanini, a co-resident or roommate. Their dwellings were humble shacks of mud and reeds. They lived near villages, where they would go on daily almsround to be offered cooked rice, barley, wheat, beans, rye, fruits, or vegetables. Nuns could not accept ghee, oil, honey, fish, meat, milk, or curds unless they were ill.
The term bhikkhuni sangha can mean all Buddhist nuns everywhere or the nuns of a particular locale. There were many communities in different locations, each with at least five nuns living within the same boundary, district, or locale. A panivenavasika or gana was a group of two, three, or four nuns. This did not constitute a “complete” order and therefore could not confer ordination.
THE TEXT
The Therigatha was composed and preserved according to a strict form. The gathas (“songs”) were descriptive rather than lyrical or presentational, and could sometimes be very technical. The songs were not spoken, but chanted. However, some lines originally may have been sayings (roughly comparable to the Sayings tradition of Jesus) that were converted from prose to metric form to facilitate recollection. In other words, although gathas do represent the earliest stratum of the Pali Canon, gathas may not have been the form of the original utterances.
The verses of the Therigatha today are the ones that survived six centuries of oral transmission. Their exact history and how they came into their present form can only be guessed. We are confronted with utterances that were considered worth repeating and therefore memorized and passed down. Incorporated into original material were many “stock phrases,” verses that belonged to a common pool of religious literature of the day.5
Each stanza (sloka) of the Therigatha consists of four verses (pad as) of eight syllables each. The first and second padas form one line, divided by a caesura, followed by the second line, which consists of the third and fourth pad as. Here is an example:
sukham supahi thenike / katva cotena paruta /
upasanto hi te rago / sukkhadakam va kumbhiyam II
INDIAN BUDDHIST HISTORY
Indian Buddhism can be divided into three distinct periods. The phases of early or primitive Buddhism extends from the Buddha’s enlightenment and first conversions (ca. late sixth century B.C.E.) to the era of the great Emperor Asoka’s patronage of Buddhism (ca.272-236 B.C.E.). During this stage, the teachings of the Buddha and his renowned followers were collected, arranged, elaborated, and committed to memory. This oral tradition was meticulously maintained and passed down by certain individuals, female as well as male, particularly gifted in the recall of what would have constituted whole volumes of written material.
During the second period of Indian Buddhism (ca. third century B.C.E. to third century C.E.), in about 80 B.C.E.,6 these scriptures were committed to writing. Though the common tongue of Siddhartha Gautama and his earliest followers, who were all from the middle Ganges region, was Magadhi, the Buddhist scriptures were first recorded in the literary language of Pali, which, though it shows traces of Magadhi, is a different language. Pali (lit. “holy scripture”) is a form of the ancient Paishachi tongue then common in Western India. Sermons that had been delivered by the Buddha in Magadhi were, during the first centuries after his death, translated by Western Indian converts into Paishachi, which in turn developed into Pali.
During the third phase of Indian Buddhism (third century C.E. to tenth century C.E.), adaptations, interpretations, and commentaries on the original teaching and practices flourished, then waned. In the fifth century, Dhammapala, of Kancipuram, wrote a commentary in Pali on the Therigatha, as part of his larger work, the Paramatthandipani, or “Elucidation of the Ultimate Meaning.” In it, he prefixed each poem of the women elders with a narrative story. The story included a sketch of that particular woman’s life and the circumstances that led her to become a Buddhist sister. Dhammapala tells us that he drew his material from three older commentaries. The true source was the oral tradition, the body of inherited folklore that consisted of legends of antiquity probably based on a kernel of historical fact. Around the names and poems of the nuns of the Therigatha, there has been a cumulative growth of myth and legend. Some of the nuns’ stories were also recorded elsewhere in the Pali Canon, as well as in the Manoratha Purani. On the whole, Dhammapala’s work is considered by modern Thenigatha scholars to be quite accurate.
PALI BUDDHIST STUDIES IN THE WEST
“During the first fifteen hundred years of its history, Buddhism, perhaps the most powerful movement of ideas in the history of Asia, neither drew specific attack from the civilized West nor contributed positively to the formation of European thought system,” according to Guy Welbon in The Buddhist Nirvana and Its Western Interpreters. In fact, there was no appreciable European study of Buddhism until the nineteenth century, when Thomas W. Rhys Davids, an English civil servant in Sri Lanka from 1864 to 1877, collected a complete version of the Pali Tipitaka as existed in palm-leaf manuscripts. When he returned to England in 1881, he founded the Pali Text Society, to foster the cooperation of scholars in the transliteration of Pali into Roman letters and the translation and publication of Pali Buddhist texts in English. It was through his initial efforts, and later the efforts of his wife, Caroline, who succeeded him as president of the Pali Text Society, that, during the course of six decades, the nearly complete transliteration, translation, and publication of the Pali texts occurred.
The palm-leaf manuscripts of the Therigatha were transliterated with scholarly care in 1883, by Professor R. Pischel of Berlin. Working with his edition plus the one (incomplete) copy of Dhammapala’s commentary extant in Europe at that time, then later from a complete copy purchased in Burma, Caroline Rhys Davids undertook the first translation of the Therigatha into English. After she completed it, a noted publisher declined even to read the manuscript. Deciding that this boded ill for support from other publishing firms, they decided to inaugurate a series and publish it themselves.
Caroline Rhys Davids’ translation of the Thenigatha was published in 1909. Highly commendable for a first effort, it is literally accurate while being sensitive to poetic expression, although now the English is quite dated.
A second complete translation of the Thenigatha into English was accomplished in 1971 by K.R. Norman, also as a part of the Pali Text Society’s translation series. It is a critical edition, in which the author has “produced a literal, almost word-for-word translation.” Some of the poems have also been translated by Phra Khantipalo, Barbara Stoler Miller, and others. The present translation is intended to complement the work of Caroline Rhys Davids and K.R.
Norman, while presenting the poetry in contemporary English easily accessible to a general rather than scholarly audience.
Before turning to the poems themselves, there remain several outstanding questions about the ascription of each particular poem in the Therigatha to a particular nun. First—did the particular nun whose name appears at the end of each poem (in the original text) create that poem? To understand this issue, we must recognize that we are dealing with an ancient and non-Western culture. The Buddhist devotee was not interested in her or his individuality, but rather in attaining the Buddha’s experience. Indians did not have the concept of ownership of particular words or poems. There were, of course, no copyrights, and anyone could repeat a poem or borrow lines from someone else’s utterances. Thus the ascription of a certain poem to a certain author in the Thenigatha does not guarantee that person actually composed the poem. Tradition asserts that the person uttered the poem, nothing more.
A second question is—are the nuns of the Therigatha historical or legendary figures? Of the seventy-two nuns to whom poems are attributed in the Thenigatha, there are only twenty in other works of the Pali Canon. Therigatha poems are repeated in the Apadana, a canonical text of forty life histories of the sisters, though the names do not correspond in seventeen! Nor again do name and poem agree in the versions of the sisters’ poems in the Samyutta. While some of the sisters are indeed elusive historically, there is no need to doubt the existence of a considerable number of them. Some of the poems of the Therigatha refer to the author in the poem itself, either by naming her or by making a pun on her name. K.R.Norman cites thirty-two poems which appear to acknowledge the author in this way.
A third question of ascription is that raised by and K.R. Norman, as to whether these poems were really composed by women at all. While the Buddhist tradition is indisputably maledominated, this is, nonetheless, a sexist concern. The same scholars never ask, for example, whether the Theragatha was uttered by women. Two other Pali scholars offer their opinions:
Not often since the patriarchal age set in has woman succeeded in so breaking through her barriers as to set on lasting record the expression of herself and of things as they appeared to her. But to assume that, because this happened seldom, therefore, this collection of documents, though ascribed to her, are necessarily not by her, is to carry over far the truth.
There can be no doubt that the great majority of the ‘Songs of the Lady Elders’ were composed by women. First of all, the monks never had so much sympathy with the female members of the community, as to warrant our crediting them with having composed these songs sung from the very hearts of women. We need only recall the difficulties which, according to tradition, Gautama placed in the way of his foster-mother when she desired to found the order of nuns, and the reproaches which were cast at Ananda in several parts of the Canon on account of his friendly attitude towards women. For the same reason it would never have occurred to the monks to ascribe songs to the women, if an incontestible tradition had not pointed at this direction.
STRUCTURE AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK
THE FIRST BUDDHIST WOMEN includes sixty-one of the seventy-three poems from the Thenigatha. There were several criteria for the inclusion of sixty-one and the exclusion of twelve. The first was literary; I chose the translations that made good poems in English. Several gathas seemed tedious or mechanical—sometimes in the original, sometimes in the translation—and these were not included. In addition, where two poems seemed almost identical (e.g. the poems of Mitta and Bhadra, Uttara and the Thirty Nuns under Patacara), or where a poem was a composite of stock verses already encountered in one or several other poems (e.g. Another Sama, Another Uttama, and a few others), these also were not included. Finally the two final and very long poems of the Therigatha collection, those attributed to Isidasi and Sumedha, were not included because they generally are held to be later poems, perhaps composed in the third century B.C.E. This book contains the histories or legends of the nuns themselves.The primary source for these stories was Caroline Rhys Davids’ translation of Dhammapala’s Thenigatha Commentary. Bits and pieces of the women’s stories were also gleaned from the Pati Dictionary of Proper Names and from other sources in the Pali Canon. Indeed, with the exception of the Sutta Nipata, nuns are mentioned in every canonical work!
After completing the translations of the poems and selecting the stories to accompany them, it was difficult to decide in what form to present the material. The Pali Text Society’s two English translations follow the organizational method of the Therigatha itself, where the verses are grouped according to the number of stanzas per poem. Although this may have served well as an mnemonic aid in the oral tradition, on the printed page it seems a boring and arbitrary way to encounter poetry. Therefore, this volume diverges from tradition, and arranges the poems and stories into chapters based on the roles and relationships of the women.
This book is a record, for Western readers, of a major religious tradition in women’s spirituality, based on the equality of women and men in the realm of the spirit and women’s ability to assume spiritual authority in the secular context.
The model that the nuns of the Therigatha provide is one where women have the capacity to realize and understand the highest religious goals of their faith in the same roles and to the same degrees as men. In Buddhism, women can form celibate communities, teach, be ordained and ordain, preach, gather disciples, and create religious poetry of great force. Isolated examples of powerful religious women can be discovered in our own Western Judeo-Christian traditions as well, but the Therigatha is unique as a collection of original material documenting these achievements at the source of one of the world’s great religious traditions. While the religion’s founder was a man, the nuns of the Therigatha were his friends, relatives, and contemporaries. And, insofar as they uttered buddhavacana, “the words of an enlightened one,” they were his spiritual equals. THE FIRST BUDDHIST WOMEN, then, is an effort to share with contemporary readers how one world religion acknowledged from its very beginning the authority and equality of women in spiritual practice. |
