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A Story of the First Buddhist Women - Vanessa Sasson

The following talk was given by Vanessa Sasson at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on March 31, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Host: Welcome everybody, and welcome to today’s Sati Center event. Thank you for joining us. Our guest today is Vanessa Sasson. She is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Department of Marianopolis College in Quebec, Canada, where she began teaching in 1999. She is the author of several academic books, but a few years ago she tried something new and converted her research into a novel entitled Yasodhara and the Buddha, which tells the story of the Buddha from the perspective of his wife. Last year she also published The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women, which is the focus of today's talk. So welcome Vanessa, and thank you for joining us today. I wanted to get started by asking you: what motivated you to write this story?

Vanessa Sasson: My motivation for writing this book is partly that I had started the process with the Yasodhara book and then I just haven't been able to stop writing this way. I'm actually on my third academic novel. I'm not quite sure what to call these books—they're either called hagiographic fiction¹ or academic novels—but they're basically my research converted into something much more accessible that becomes a story.

There is a piece of me that is a little bit political, in the sense that I think there's an importance for scholars to start writing more accessibly. This is something I've been thinking about a lot in the last few years. With all the education that we get as scholars, we have to start finding ways to share our knowledge so that more people can engage with what we're doing, so that we're not just talking to each other. There is a big part of it that has a social justice feel to it: I feel like this is my responsibility, to take my research and try to find ways to make it so that other people can participate. I also wrote the material just because I love it and I was excited to write it.

A Story of the First Buddhist Women

Vanessa Sasson: The story of the first women is actually a really difficult story. The Buddha doesn't look amazing in it; it's a controversial story, a hard story. It is a follow-up to his ordination, his renunciation, and Yasodhara's² life story when he leaves the palace life.

I am sure you all know the Buddha was a prince and he leaves home in order to pursue this quest to find Awakening. He accomplishes it, but he leaves behind his palace, his family, and Yasodhara, his wife. That was what my first novel was: telling the story of what it was like to be left behind by her husband. He becomes the hero of the tradition, but as a husband, maybe not amazing. According to some texts, he leaves her the day that she gives birth to their son. It is a story that I have thought about for years and struggled with for a long time: what do I do with a character that's a hero who leaves his wife the day that she gives birth?

The Buddha is now floating in the forest. He is a hero, he is amazing, he has achieved Awakening, and men hear about this. You get stories of these men who walk into the forest and ask, "Can I join you? Can I achieve what you've achieved?" His answer is always "Yes." He accepts all kinds of men.

One of the very famous stories of the tradition is Angulimala³, the serial killer who kills a hundred—or a thousand, depending on the text—people. He is so brutal that for every person he kills, he cuts off a finger and makes a necklace out of the fingers of his victims. He is a brutal character, yet the Buddha approaches him. Angulimala asks to learn from him, and the Buddha says, "Come." That is the whole process of joining the Buddha in the forest: "Can I do it?" "Yes, come." He accepts Angulimala; he accepts kings that have blood on their hands; he even accepts his cousin Devadatta⁴, who is like the Judas of Buddhism, a "bad guy" character who is always trying to kill the Buddha. Everyone is welcome—low castes, all kinds of men—to come and sit with him in the forest. I am emphasizing this because of what is about to happen next.

The First Request

He creates this community and all these men are with him in the forest. Then, one day, the women think to themselves, "There's a community of men out there who are practicing. He's achieved this amazing thing of Awakening... I think I want to do that too." It is really quite radical and fascinating that the women take this on for themselves, that they thought they could, that they thought it was okay to ask.

The one to have that first impulse is none other than his stepmother, Mahapajapati Gotami⁵. She was the woman who raised the Buddha. Maya, his birth mother, dies seven days after his birth, and Mahapajapati steps in and raises the Buddha as her son. She is his aunt, his stepmother, and basically his mother for all intents and purposes. She cared for him all his life. Once her husband dies and she has fulfilled all of her obligations, she has this impulse: "I think I want to achieve what he's achieved."

According to the literature we have in the Vinaya⁶ collections, 500 women followed her. I have this amazing image in my head of a women's grapevine where, within that night, everybody has found out she is going. By the next morning, when she is ready to walk out, there are 500 women who are ready to go. You have a mass movement, almost like the first Women's March. They pour out of their houses and walk behind the queen. She is still operating like a queen, heading a community, but now it is a community of women.

She carries these women through the forest to the grove where the Buddha is sitting with his male monks. She walks in—the audacity of this moment! She presents herself to the person who is basically her son and says, "I would like to ordain. It would be nice if the Buddha gave us permission." She is very polite about it.

The Buddha does something super bizarre. He doesn't say "Yes" and he doesn't say "No." He says, "Maybe don't ask me this question." It is the most evasive, frustrating line in the entire Canon. Everyone argues about it; there are a million theories as to what it meant. Why would he say, "It would be better if you did not ask me this question"?

She does something even more audacious: she asks a second time. He says, "I would prefer if you don't ask me this question." She thinks, "Okay, I have to do the third time, then he'll say yes." She asks the third time, and he says, "I would prefer if you didn't ask me this question."

That is the end of the negotiation, because three times is the magic number. If you are ever in India and somebody offers you rice, they are only going to do it three times. The third "no" is the "no." So she got "no" three times, or she got some kind of "I'm not enthusiastic about you asking me this question" three times. He said "Yes" to Angulimala, he said "Yes" to bloody-handed kings, he said "Yes" to his arch-rival Devadatta. But to her, he says, "I'd prefer if you didn't ask me this question."

The Journey to Vesali

He leaves the grove and leaves the women behind. He walks to Vesali⁷, another town. The women are left having to decide how to handle the situation.

The concept of renunciation in Indian history is such that when you make the choice to renounce, you are not supposed to undo that choice. These women have left their homes; they are moving towards a life of renunciation. They are looking for a community to absorb them so that they can practice in safety, with direction, and with teachers. He has rejected them, but they cannot go back home. They are in limbo—they belong nowhere and to no one.

They decide to go ask a fourth time. They basically chase him down. He goes to the next town, and they show up right behind him. They are breaking the glass ceiling. They go to the next town, show up at his door, and then—this is the best part—they stand at the gate and wait. They just stare him down. They don't bang on the door or show up with bows and arrows; they just stand there.

One of our favorite monks, Ananda⁸, comes out. Ananda is the Buddha's attendant; he takes such good care of the Buddha. He sees the women. Everyone else is happy to ignore them, but he cannot handle the death stare. He rushes to them. The text gives a detail that is really quite special: he approaches and notices that their robes are dusty, their faces are tear-stained, and—this is the clincher—their heads are shaved.

Nobody told us their heads were shaved before or that they were wearing robes. Suddenly, in this scene, we are told their heads are shaved. This could mean that the first Buddhist nuns acted in defiance of the Buddha himself. That is one interpretation.

Ananda asks, "What are you doing here?" The Queen says, "We've come to ask for ordination." He says, "But he already said no... Let me go check."

The Eight Garudhammas

Ananda goes to see the Buddha privately. He asks a really important question: "Can women achieve Awakening like men, with the proper training?" The Buddha answers unequivocally: "With the proper training, women, like men, can achieve Awakening." Period. Non-negotiable.

Then Ananda makes a mistake—or a great move—and tries to guilt the Buddha: "Why is it that your stepmother over there, the one who raised you and took care of you, is out there in dusty robes waiting for you to notice her?"

The Buddha eventually says, "Okay, I will ordain these women." But he gives them a condition. He says, "I will ordain the women, but they have to agree to eight heavy rules." These are the Garudhammas⁹.

Rule number one is the heaviest: If a woman has been ordained a hundred years and a man has been ordained one day, she is junior to him.

In traditional Buddhist life, hierarchies are really important—where you sit, how you bow. Everything is organized by age of ordination. To tell women that their place on this hierarchical ladder is at the bottom is a profound statement. No matter who the men are, no matter what their attainments, they will always be above you. She has to accept those rules in order to be ordained. And she does.

Mahapajapati accepts the eight rules, she gets ordained, and then the first thing she does in the Vinaya is say to Ananda, "Go ask the Buddha if we could drop the first rule."

This is amazing. She waits to get ordained, gets the status, and the second she has the status, she challenges the system. It is evidence that she knew exactly what her oppression was and understood how to navigate it. Ananda goes to see the Buddha and says, "Gotami asks if we could get rid of this first rule." The Buddha’s answer is context-specific: "It would not be well if people of other communities saw the monks bowing to women." His answer is that socially, they cannot afford it.

Wrestling with the Tradition

Ava: I read your first book and I've been tormented ever since. I know there are a million theories out there, but I really want to know what you think. How can a fully enlightened being not see the humanity of women? How is that possible?

Vanessa Sasson: That is the question that these stories land us with. We have to wrestle with those questions, and I don't know if we'll ever get an easy answer. In some ways, that's the question that made me want to write these books.

One of the most common readings is that the Buddha was a man of his time, that he did not understand women as having that kind of agency. The problem with that is that the Jains¹⁰ did have nuns. Jainism is a religion in India arriving at the same time, maybe a little before Buddhism, and the Jain community had instituted nuns. So the notion of a female renunciate did exist in his time and place.

If the Buddha himself cannot challenge the system, who will ever have a chance of challenging it? He flies through the sky, flowers fall from the heavens when he speaks... and he cannot challenge that one thing?

There is one more detail that has haunted me. In the Vinaya, after the women take ordination, the Buddha is described as making this declaration: "The community would have lasted a thousand years, but now that women have come to the community, it's going to wither and die. It's going to lose half of its life... because women are like mold on a rice field or rust on a chariot."

It is devastating. I came across that line in graduate school 25 years ago and I'm still not over it. In my book, The Gathering, I knew I had to put that line in, but I couldn't make the Buddha say it. It was too far for me. So I took a monk in the literature who refuses to teach the nuns and I made him say it.

Buddhism has to wrestle with this misogyny throughout its history. It never quite goes away. My answer to how to live with this story is: you just have to face it. The tradition is messy. If we are going to be honest, we are demanded to deal with it.

Miman: I don't know the history well enough to know whether that first rule is still upheld?

Vanessa Sasson: It is still practiced, but it depends on the community. Traditions are always renegotiating their rules to make sense of themselves where they live. In some communities, the Garudhammas are followed quite strictly; in others, they are quietly forgotten.

In the Theravada¹¹ tradition, the lineage says that the order of nuns died out around the 11th to 13th century. Lineage is really important; it's like a thread that goes from the Buddha generation to generation. If the thread breaks, you can't start it up again. So in Theravada communities, women have often been told they have to live as "unofficial nuns" without status.

In Himalayan traditions (Tibetan Buddhism), the nuns' ordination never started. It doesn't exist. So Tibetan Buddhist nuns historically are not fully ordained. The women have begged the Dalai Lama to challenge this system, and he has refused to get involved.

However, last year, for the first time in Himalayan history, the King of Bhutan and the Chief Abbot of Bhutan legally created a way for nuns to be ordained. 143 women were ordained. It is the first time we have Himalayan women ordained in a Himalayan tradition in history. So this stuff is really current. These stories affect how we understand women's desire to ordain today.

Mindy: I so appreciate this idea of academics writing things that are more accessible. I'm curious about your process in writing The Gathering. How did you select who the featured characters were going to be?

Vanessa Sasson: When I wrote Yasodhara, I went straight to her voice—first person. For The Gathering, I decided on third person to make it more complicated. I realized the character could not be somebody that people feel devotional about.

My first thought was to do Mahapajapati, but I was horrified. She is like the female Buddha. I couldn't take on her voice; she's too important. I didn't want to invade sacred territory. So I chose characters that were marginal, that had virtually no story, like Vimala. I needed "problem characters" that were not too sacred. Patacara¹² is as close as I got to a well-known figure.

Barbara: Most of my adult life has been through yogic traditions. I feel like the historical context provides really important information for the resilience of the human spirit, particularly women historically. We know deep within ourselves that there was a system set up for safety. I feel like you can't pull the devotional and the historical apart.

Vanessa Sasson: I think that's right. What happens in the stories informs what happens down the road. Every community is messy. Every community has its misogyny, its racism, its shortcomings. Buddhism is included. The muck is Buddhist. That's the first Noble Truth: everything is suffering (dukkha)¹³, including Buddhism. We have to wrestle with that and face it.