Bhikkhuni Dhammadinna presents a rigorous, historical-critical case for transcending sectarian boundaries within and across Buddhist traditions while treasuring our inheritance from the ancient past. This is the second in a series of conversations, this time with a focus on the re-establishment of the Theravada bhikkhuni order in the 20^th century.

Bhikkhuni Dhammadinna is not just an expert on Buddhist doctrinal history, but also monastic law, the Vinaya. Here, she shares her complete perspective on the Buddhist monastic code. She uses the example of the ordination of women―for convenience, I will herein refer to bhikkhunis (Pali form) in the Theravada Vinaya tradition and bhiksunis (Sanskrit form)―in the Dharmaguptaka and Mulasarvastivada Vinaya traditions) to unravel Buddhist law’s complexities and nuances. The result is one of our website’s most thought-provoking elucidations of the Vinaya’s governance of the life of the monastic Buddhist community, through time and space up to the present day.

Buddhistdoor Global (BDG): Why is the Vinaya so foundational, while being so complex at the same time?

Bhikkhuni Dhammadinna (BD): In the Buddhist monastic context, Vinaya stands for discipline, law, or jurisprudence. I think even before discussing the Vinaya’s relevance or possible adaptation(s) in the contemporary, postmodern world (which is also a little different from the context of the contemporary Vinaya revival in the 20^th century we are going to discuss here), I think it’s really important to have a full understanding of its basic principles and the initial context of its formation. This historical context consists of the early days of the Buddhist sangha or monastic community and its institutional evolution over time. The law-maker is the Buddha himself. The sangha has no legislative power. It only holds the executive and judiciary powers.

Essentially all law is about hermeneutics or interpretation. From the start, we need to bear in mind that there is no “a rule as it is” without interpretation, with the act of interpretation being inherent to the law itself. We should understand the Vinaya as an actual legal textual corpus―originally oral―which regulates not only monastic individuals and their relationship to their community, but also the relationship between the monastics, Buddhist laypeople, and the society at large (with its own secular law and powers). In addition, Vinaya as a living institution also covers actual acts of interpretation and negotiation, it is a living process in history. And we also need to understand this as a fully-fledged legal system, with its own functioning. Thus is a synchronic or, if you like, even “panchronic” application at any given time and place that is based on the assumption that the Vinaya was not changed after the passing away of the law-maker and ultimate authority, i.e., the Buddha, and for this reason does not admit to its own textual development over time (which would be inadmissible and invalidate the perceived authenticity of the letter and spirit of the Vinaya as embodying the Buddha’s word).

With this understanding in place, we can then put the different Vinaya interpretations and ideologies that characterize different Vinaya traditions or Buddhist schools into proper historical and ideological perspective.

Let us explore this through the revival of the Theravada bhikkhuni order that has taken place in India (and from there spread to Sri Lanka and elsewhere) in the second half of the 20^th century, after having died out in the Indian subcontinent―or at least having gone off the records then―approximately in the 11^th century. There has been much debate in the Theravada world about the acceptable way to go about it. The legality, validity, and legitimacy of the revival ordinations remain controversial. Personally, after much textual study and engagement with Theravada legal principles, and without wanting to wear you out with all the details involved, I sincerely and in good faith believe that, in principle, the re-establishment of the bhikkhuni-sangha is fit to stand from a legal viewpoint. And to date there has been no conclusive rebuttal of the legality of the revival that has been able to prove it to be otherwise.

But this not merely about legal arguments and scholastic interpretations. There is far more at stake: authority claims, privilege, prestige, institutional exclusion, and so on. If you come from a purely normative perspective, you will say, this is either outright right or outright wrong, appealing to the authority of (your own side of the) tradition. If you come from a modern liberal perspective, you will suggest that we move in the spirit of the law rather than the letter, in the name of ideals of equal opportunities and honouring the spirit of the time. This is not an uncommon dichotomy. As I see it, we need to understand both positions in the light of their respective premises, their respective conditionings in terms of cultural values and identities.

The bottom line is that if you don’t understand how Vinaya law functions, you will never understand how ideological conflicts within the Buddhist community arises, no matter how well meaning and enlightened you are. Because conflicts have to do with different interpretations of the letter of the law, and of the spirit as well. And of the authority over such acts of interpretations. We are historical beings. We need to understand the normativity of the tradition itself and the exegetical layers that nourish monastic identity. And on top of this complexity, there is the additional modern, and postmodern, commentarial response to that. And issues of privilege, access to resources, status, etc.

From a historical point of view, like with the Agamas/Nikayas, the scriptural collections of the discourses (suttas in Pali, sutras in Sanskrit) of the Buddha and his early disciples we discussed in our previous interview, we don’t have one single Vinaya with a capital “V.” We have several Vinayas, which are the heirs to the initial expansion of this kind of first informal and then formal body of rules and regulations. In fact, the differences between the Vinaya-s are far greater than those documented between different Agamas, which indicates a much more layered situation in terms of textual development of the received texts.

No Vinaya will have a preface or postface saying, “I am the Vinaya of this or that tradition.” Each school regards their received Vinaya as the Vinaya. No Vinaya contains any self-identifier as belonging to a particular community. Why? Because if we, as a transmission community, were to state this is the “Theravada” or “Dharmaguptaka” Vinaya, we would implicitly acknowledge the existence of other Vinayas, which in turn jeopardizes the notion that my, our tradition is inheriting the only true Vinaya as the authentic testimony to the Buddha’s word. This is why traditional Indian Vinayas do not identify themselves. The Chinese context is very different. This already goes to show that each Vinaya community, which is basically the heir to different lineages of oral transmission considers their Vinaya to be the Vinaya. Eventually, though, in some manuscript traditions or customarily in the editions of the Chinese translations of the Indian Vinayas, we do find specific identifiers in the colophons such as “Vinaya of the Mahasanghika-Lokottaravada,” etc.

In Theravada, the prevalent Vinaya ideology is that Pali is the sole, only valid canonical language. Therefore, there is no validity in any legal act of the sangha, unless it’s carried out in Pali. The Vinaya also regulates the establishment of the territory or boundary (sima) where ordinations are to be performed. So sima means both a territory and boundary within which legal acts are carried out. Here the Pali Vinaya has its own ways to do it and does not really care about how it is done in other Vinaya traditions because these other traditions are simply irrelevant from its standpoint as the sole authentic Vinaya.

The exegetical tradition and the legal tradition in the Theravada context prescribe that a sima is established in a certain way, and that the formulas for the enactment of legal acts of the sangha are all worded and pronounced in a certain way. There is even this concern, when not obsession, with accurate pronunciation in Pali. So for the Theravada Vinaya, the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya has no relevance whatsoever to the operation of the Theravada, because this is like a different legal system. You cannot have two parallel legal systems ruling over the same territory, governing the same community. They are mutually exclusive systems. But according to the function of Pali in the Theravada tradition, ordinations are just not relevant if they are carried out in Chinese or in French, Bulgarian, Thai. Even the canonical languages of other Vinayas like Chinese or Tibetan, and through procedures, which are not the Theravada procedures, no matter how sincere they are. They are as irrelevant as Italian law inside Germany.

These aspects rarely come up in “lay” conversation, but we must immerse ourselves fully within the tradition in order to understand where its stance comes from. Let me say that this doesn’t mean that I don’t respect a Dharmaguptaka monastic as a monastic ordained within their own Vinaya framework and that I do not regard them as my monastic brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, from a traditional, strict Theravada perspective, we need to understand that an ecumenical approach to Vinaya law does not obtain in principle. Allow me to stress that this need not be my personal attitude in 2025 as we live in a world on fire, but I do think we need to acknowledge and respect the tradition as it is and on its own terms.

So now, I am saying (and par force simplifying) all of this to make the point that when you look at the revival of the Theravada bhikkhuni-sangha through the lenses of Theravada legal ideology, reviving it through the Chinese sangha doesn’t work because of this incompatibility of the legal systems.

The Chinese tradition has always been more ecumenical as far as different Vinayas are concerned. They do carry out the procedures through the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya, which was a composite text more than the Theravada Vinaya. And they crosscheck other Vinayas, as did the eminent Vinaya scholar Master Daoxuan (596–667). Most modern Dharmaguptaka monastics would be willing to acknowledge the Theravada side because their tradition is open and accustomed to cross-referencing for the sake of establishing best practices, but this is not mutual.

As to the question of whether women’s ordination is valid or not valid, another important aspect to bear in mind is that an ordination is both a legal action and a ritual action. It is not merely a ritual: it’s like a legal act conducted in a ritualized way. So, for an ordination to be legal, you have to set up all the procedures, all the formulas, and the requirements of sangha members involved in the ordination, according to principles which are legally consistent with the Vinaya that is being utilised to carry it out.

So, legality and validity are two different legal notions. Firstly, an ordination that is carried out in a way not observant vis-à-vis the legal principles would be seen as illegal. It is simply wrongly conceived and inconsistent with its own legal frame of reference. Secondly, you can have a theoretically legal ordination, but this is carried out in the wrong way. You can set up a legally valid ordination, but you can carry it out imperfectly, by which that ordination becomes invalid. For example, if you mispronounce the legal formula, the procedure is invalidated.

Why am I bringing this up? You can have an ordination that is legal and not valid, but nobody is aware of its invalidity. Those monastics are not, technically speaking, ordained monastics, but they are unaware of their own defective legal status up until the point that maybe one suddenly finds out that something was not done properly during their ordination. This happens all the time. This was something that the charismatic Chinese reformer Hongyi (1880–1942) discovered had happened to his 1918 ordination over a decade later, much to his horror (as discussed in an in-depth study by Raoul Birnbaum 2023, 23–94).

One aspect of the validity of the ordination procedure relies on the unbroken purity of the sangha. But we don’t have any way to know for sure. Each institution likes to believe that they enjoy an unbroken lineage. But we cannot possibly know.

Let us consider the hypothetical scenario of some monastics who were parajika (which basically means they were no longer monastics because they had irreparably compromised their monastic condition by committing one of the gravest offences against the monastic code), but they were not aware of it, or they had not disclosed it. And then they were tasked with ordaining another group of aspiring monastics. From the viewpoint of the Theravada legal tradition, the moment you break one of those basic rules, you revert, as a matter of fact, to the state of a layperson (the situation is less straightforward in this respect in other Vinaya traditions such as the Dharmaguptaka). Let’s say my ordination was carried out by a sangha composed of one of these “non-monastics.” Or perhaps the sangha was in good standing and ordained in good faith, but their ordination wasn’t quite right, and this affects the composition of the minimum quorum required to perform an ordination in the sense that there wasn’t a sufficient number of monastics in good standing who performed the ordination. This situation invalidates the ordination. As a result, at least within the context of a highly Vinaya-sensitive monastic environment, this may well throw into question the legitimacy of one’s whole monastic status and identity.

That being said, the reality on the ground is that, apart from the institutional fiction of a pure, unbroken monastic lineage dating back to the Buddha, we rarely know what truly happened during the vast majority of ordinations. And yet, the integrity of one’s ordination, at least to the extent that it can be assumed or ascertained on good faith, remains a critical ideological need, a projection instrumental to the grounding of the sense of monastic identity. The idea of an unbroken lineage from the Buddha is a necessary rhetorical construct, so to say. All we can meaningfully do is to be willing to admit the necessity to investigate of what might have happened if there are questions of validity. That is all you can do.

I know this is complex and even tragicomic (or absurd!). It could easily go above everyone’s head. But the reason I am bringing all of this in is to suggest that, in my opinion, we need a middle way between becoming legalists obsessed with such details―almost superstitiously yet in the name of utmost adherence to the Buddha’s mandate―and wholly disregarding the way tradition functions. After all, tradition may only be fictitiously unbroken when we look closely at such details, yet it has enabled the actual continuation (hardly unchanged) of the Buddha’s teachings and kept access to monastic life possible for those who are called to that option.

BDG: Given these nuances and subtleties in the Theravada Vinaya, as a Theravada bhikkhuni yourself, what is the right procedure for ordaining a bhikkhuni?BD: I can answer in two ways. One way is to give the most acceptable normative answer from the point of view of Theravada legal ideology. And from this point of view, the optimal way to revive the bhikkhuni–sangha was to ordain a group of women through an all-male, bhikkhu–sangha only first by way of a one-off revival proto-ordination. The bhikkhu sangha is the ultimate legal agent. Without bhikkhus, you cannot ordain bhikkhunis, but you can ordain bhikkhus without bhikkhunis. Whatever our feminist or egalitarian instincts, there is no way to escape from the asymmetry in gender power or the institutional inequality and subordination baked into the Vinaya. After the revival proto-ordination, all subsequent ordinations of new bhikkhunis after that can and need to be done through a dual procedure in which a woman is admitted to the sangha through a dual ordination carried out by the bhikkhunisangha and the bhikkhusangha. In my understanding, this procedure is legal and legitimate from the point of view of Theravada legal thought.

BDG: So how do you navigate this predicament?

BD: Here I do need to honestly acknowledge that Vinaya is about interpretation, and my “Theravada” understanding is challenged by other ‘Theravada’ interpretations. You see, there are multiple voices, views, opinions. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, there has been to my mind no substantial and consistent refutation of this conclusion.

Obviously, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a Theravada bhikkhuni if I didn’t believe that my ordination stood on legitimate grounds. With that said, you may know of the different trajectory of the Theravada bhikkhuni sangha that involves the Chinese and Korean sanghas through the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya adopted by the Chinese and East-Asian traditions. This method has been considered valid and acceptable by other portions of the bhikkhu–sangha. In a nutshell, that has weight due to the bhikkhus carrying the ultimate legal power. In my understanding, this solution is not really compliant with orthodox Theravada understanding. It certainly is not accepted by many orthodox legal scholars on the basis of the Theravada legal exclusivity I have elaborated upon earlier. I don’t wish to take, dogmatically, the position that those bhikkhunis whose ordinations stem from this or that particular revival line are illegitimate bhikkhunis because this would amount to taking a position which does not acknowledge the fact that Vinaya is based on interpretation. We must keep in mind that these revival movements have been conditioned by certain historical causes and conditions, understandings, etc.

So what do I do? I walk a fine line and have this subtle method of keeping my heart and my mind open, while at the same time acknowledging what is in adherence with the normative model. Even if I felt the revival via the Dharmaguptaka cooperation was normatively shaky, what’s done is done, no? We are now past this revival period of the Theravada bhikkhuni order, and also, the lineages have been cross-fertilized; we have seen ordinations carried out by bhikkhunis ordained through the bhikkhus or bhikkhunis who have been ordained through the Dharmaguptaka tradition. You know, chasing alleged purity and lack of ‘cross-contamination’ has become nearly impossible now. I have come to like it because it forces us to confront the raw realities of religious history head-on. The way things have come to be conditionally.

I feel that beholding such complexity can even bring about deeper insight into the conditioned nature of all human phenomena. Why become so impassionate with either side of the divide? Seeing this predicament for what it is perhaps is more mature and realistic―also in the sense of being aligned with reality―than, say, the good-will attempt to erase the nuances and exegetical problems of bhikkhuni ordination through the spirit of egalitarianism. It’s more complicated than that and we should be mindful of these different layers of interpretations and negotiations.

Overriding these difficult conversations does not do a good service to the bhikkhuni–sangha, either. The ship has sailed; a bell cannot be unrung. We are where we are―very many of us by now sincerely in the robes of Theravada bhikkhunis―thanks to the efforts and the courage of the pioneers of the bhikkhuni revival movement. Rarely things in history are wholly black or wholly white. The Buddha’s teachings give us tools to put our own standpoints into perspective. We have an advantage point here. We don’t need to wait for tomorrow’s historians of the Buddhist monastic order to gain a nuanced picture. We can embrace that ourselves right in the present. If we don’t acknowledge our shadow side, and pretend that it’s all light―everything a beautiful empowerment of women’s spirituality and a step forward in gender equality―we overlook the persisting serious institutional problems. By overlooking them, not facing them, we are bound by them. We do have Vinaya training challenges. We do have problems of figuring out a meaningful and respectful approach to the Vinaya in the absence of established supportive conditions for that. Just emphasizing the empowering side of the revival, is historically or even psychologically unbalanced.

We do need to find a way to make to do with what we have. Maybe we need to engage with a different level of complexity.

BDG: You are trying to navigate a middle way to acknowledge that this is more complicated than we thought, in the same way that perhaps we could say about modern feminism—for all it has achieved—has led to social, cultural, and economic consequences that feminists themselves are only now coming to grips with. Yet we should take on board what has been accomplished, and come to a better understanding of how interpretations can be integrated.

BD: One more point here is this: in traditional Theravada countries as well as in the West, the bhikkhuni-sangha remains, largely, a marginal group. We are largely not accepted institutionally. We may be tolerated, we may be accepted on a personal level, and obviously there must be bhikkhu-sanghas who participate in our ordinations and fully endorse them but, by institutional acceptance, I mean to ask: do the majority of Theravada bhikkhus participate in legal acts of the sangha pertaining to the ordination of bhikkhunis or the affairs of the bhikkhuni order? Unfortunately, that is not the case. Let’s not overstate the sparkling power of this revival, because, unfortunately, the real situation on the ground does not match wholly optimistic accounts. Legal problems of such magnitude simply do not exist nowadays for the East-Asian Dharmaguptaka bhiksuni-sangha. The Taiwanese or Korean bhiksuni-sanghas are certainly neither marginalised nor marginal.

Once we take this into account, we fully come to terms with the reality of the bhikkhuni–sangha as a marginalized group. And in all marginalized groups, there is a feeling of disempowerment and you try to counterbalance that with a reassertion of identity, such as femalehood, womanhood, the ‘female sangha.’ So, with mindfulness, which is the foundation of our Vinaya practice, we must understand how we may overreach and ‘ideologize ourselves’ as a response to patriarchal oppression and hegemony.

A final important aspect, and here I do want to respond to those that insist on pure or unbroken lineages, is the fact that that the continuity of the Vinaya also relied on countless generations of those who dirtied their hands and got into the “messiness” of sub-optimal (from a normative point of view) practices. Would it be better if the possibility to live the monastic life as best as we can would have been wiped out completely based on unrealistic, intransigent approaches? I don’t think so. Seen historically, the “pure Vinaya” ideal is a form of conceit, in the sense of being a conceiving not necessarily grounded in reality and in the sense of building a sense of communal identity based on this false premise. My decades of living within Buddhist institutions have led me to appreciate the contributions that each of us makes. I was way more conservative than I am now! We may as well just do our best without chasing the Cheshire cat of religious conceit.

BDG: Perhaps the problems are inherent.

BD: Yes, absolutely intrinsic and inescapable, if not intractable. The Vinaya is a human institution. We do not throw away the entirety of the ecclesiastical majesty and erudition of the Roman Catholic Church despite how violent, deceitful, and greedy it was during periods of medieval and even modern history. It still enabled the continuation of classical Western culture through the Middle Ages and well into the modern period. And thanks to the imperfect institutions of the sanghas, shaped by the Vinayas, we have the Buddha’s dispensation alive in our world today. Keeping this in mind, we need not be over-idealistic—or overly disillusioned.

References

Raoul Birnbaum. 2023. “Vinaya Master Hongyi’s Vinaya Problem,” (pp. 23–94). In Ester Bianchi and Daniela Campo. “Take the Vinaya as Your Master”: Monastic Discipline and Practices in Modern Chinese Buddhism. Leiden: Brill.

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The Spirit of Buddhist Truth: Conversations Beyond Sectarianism with Ven. Bhikkhuni Dhammadinna

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