The Female Past in Early Indian Buddhism
The Shared Narrative of the Seven Sisters in the Theri-Apadana
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.v5i1/2.209Keywords:
early Indian Buddhism, history, Therī-Apadāna, womenAbstract
The Apadana is a well-known but relatively little-studied text. The Theri-Apadana, the section of the text on women, tells of the lives of female disciples of Gotama Buddha. Alongside versified narrative accounts of the lives of these women during the time of Gotama Buddha, the text reveals the past lives of these women, under former buddhas. These past-life accounts of women as disciples of former buddhas add a new dimension to the notion of female discipleship in early Buddhism. Gotama was not alone in having a fourfold community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen; former buddhas had the same. The Theri-Apadana establishes a narrative recounting that women were motivated and enabled to practise in the remote past, and that former buddhas allowed for the ordination of women just as Gotama did. In order to highlight this, in this paper I look at a section of past life narrative in the Theri-Apadana that is repeated in the accounts of six nuns.
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