Good morning. I'm very happy to introduce Professor Jeanette Tia tonight, even though today, even though she may say she's not a Zen person, quite a few of us have been learning from her Up and down. Janice is the Numatha Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley this semester, and she lives primarily in Thailand, but has become kind of itinerant teacher and her work is really interesting. She said I should plug academia.edu which is free and it's all of her papers or many of her papers are there.

[01:09]

Academia.edu and when you call up Jeanette here on Google it's like the second thing that comes And you can see from the titles of her papers and books that she has a sense of humor in the midst of this earnestly serious stuff that we study. One of her books that I like quite a bit is called A Few Good Men. gender, and society. So anyway, we're really happy to have her here today, and I hope the recorder is working. Thank you, Alan. And thank you, Mel, very much for not only the invitation today, but your very warm hospitality from you and where it's from, staying in the wonderful apartment upstairs.

[02:16]

Normally I don't use a podium for a talk, but there are a number of things that I want to make sure to include in today's talk. So I'm actually going to read a little bit of it and then talk through the contents of one particularly interesting text. How's the volume? Is it looking okay? Signal if it gets too faint. I'm not always the loudest. speaker around. I should start maybe with just a brief word about how I got into the topic of working on Mahapajapati, the foster mother of the person we know as the Buddha. It was not on purpose. at all. I don't have a background in women's studies, although Alan mentioned, when you work on the Bodhisattva path, you can't avoid gender issues.

[03:20]

It begins as a very male-centric thing and remains that way in many cultures for a very long time. But what I have ended up doing is, after finishing my PhD, which was in Central Asian languages, Classical Mongolian and Tibetan, I had found a very nice short little text to do my dissertation on, very intriguing, a prophecy of the decline and disappearance of the Dharma from the Buddhist canon. And I thought, you know, Buddhists teach all the stuff about impermanence. They're wonderfully consistent. They even apply it to their own religion. I thought that was wonderful and kind of amusing and worth working on, so I did an edition and a translation of the Mongolian and Tibetan versions of this story. Just as I was finishing my PhD, I discovered that there were half a dozen versions of the same story in Chinese.

[04:24]

I like languages, but Chinese was not something I'd ever thought about doing seriously. I'd had a two-month summer crash course just for fun. I didn't know if you open the volumes, some of you know these big Taisho, Daizokyo volumes of the Chinese canon. I didn't know if you open the front or the back. And I most certainly could not read Buddhist Chinese. But I also, in good conscience, could not neglect these stories and just pretend they didn't exist and say, okay, here's the version of this text. So it was quite fortunate. There was a postdoc at Harvard at the time where I was finishing up by the name of John McRae, who some of you know of. And he offered to read these with me. So we would sit in his office and he would sight-read from the Taishokan. He would always claim, those of you who knew him know he was a very humble person. He would always claim, no, no, no, I couldn't really do that. If you hadn't told me which were the proper names from the Tibetan, I wouldn't. But he was sight-reading it. And watching him do that, I remember thinking, wow, if I could do that, I would never do anything else.

[05:35]

And that's become perilously close to the truth. There's a lot in the Chinese canon to read. The upshot of it is I've always been interested in Indian Buddhism. And I had thought I would use Mongolian and Tibetan translations. Many of you know that most of the literature Buddhist literature from India has not survived in any Indian language. The few Sanskrit texts, and now the Dhari manuscripts, and of course the large exception, Pali Canon, are the exceptions. There are many other schools with huge collections of sacred texts that we don't have, except in their Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese translations. I won't go into Manchu and Xixia, but there are others also. I wanted to learn things about Indian Buddhism from the earliest period up through early Mahayana, but then I discovered that most of the texts I wanted to read were not ever translated into Tibetan, and the Tibetan was then translated into Mongolian, so they weren't there either.

[06:45]

At the time, I thought I would do Abhidharma. story there, but my advisor persuaded me that such things were out of fashion in the 1970s. No one does this sort of thing anymore. But the more I looked to see where were the Abhidharma texts initially and non-Mahayana scriptures in Tibetan and Mongolian, I found they had chosen not to translate them. There is some Abhidharma in Tibetan, but they tried not to translate that Hinayana stuff. the Tibetans made a kind of executive decision that they were going to have a Mahayana canon, with the exception of the Vinaya, which you've got to have, and some Abhidharma texts and treatises. So, Chinese was already on my radar screen when I had this rude awakening at the end of my PhD. So, right at that time,

[07:46]

it was not possible to do computer searches for Chinese terminology. But within a decade, there were these wonderful digital databases, and I always feel that I have to acknowledge what a wonderful Dharma gift this is to those of us who do research on this material. I would not be doing what I do today if it were not for those databases. If any of you have ever used them, you can enter a word, you can enter a phrase, and you can find all of the occurrences in the huge Chinese Buddhist canon and learn their contexts, try to figure out how they're used in these different situations. It's like having a private tutor from the second and third century, in my case, for the texts that I want to work on. So while John was doing his work on the Vimalakirti Sutra and its commentaries, I got very interested in the earlier version of the Vimalakirti done in the 3rd century. Kumarajiva is right around 400, the one I wrote in uses, but there was an earlier one.

[08:51]

And I thought, this is really interesting. A lot of its terms aren't even in the dictionaries, not even in the best Japanese Buddhist dictionaries. And that's where the best dictionaries have been and still are to a great extent. So I started working on that one in tandem with John working on his translation from the Kumarajiva version. and I was fascinated with the differences in the vocabulary. Fast forward about a decade, and as I was looking for vocabulary used by that translator, he's a fellow named Jurchen. We would say here Chinese-American for someone whose ancestors are Chinese, but they were born and grew up here. He was a Yuezhi Chinese, meaning that his ancestors were from Central Asia, but he was fully naturalized Chinese, very fluent in the literary language as well as vernacular. And so I started working on his translations as a whole to try to figure out this Vimalakirti. And when I would search for his vocabulary, one of the texts that came up over and over again was a story about Mahaprajapati.

[09:58]

And I thought, that's interesting. So I put it on the back burner, and it kept coming up, and kept coming up. And finally I decided, well, maybe I should read this text. So I did, found another one that was very closely related to it that was even earlier, and that has now become my current project, to understand what this text about Mahaprajapati says. As you'll see when I get to that in a couple of minutes, it's a text not about her life, but about her death. And in fact, this project that I'm currently doing on this Parinirvana text, essentially, of Mahaprajapati, could be referred to as the glorious death of the first Buddhist nun. And it is indeed a glorious story. So let me just start with a little background on her. I imagine most of you are probably familiar with her to some degree, but probably in varying degrees. So let me say a little bit about what we see about her in the Pali Canon. By any account, she is one of the most famous female figures in the history of early Buddhism.

[11:08]

And I'm going to read a little bit here before I go into the story itself, just for time efficiency. As a young woman, she served as the foster mother of the child who was to become the Buddha, after his own mother, who was her sister known as Maya, died just seven days after he was born. Later in life, she's renowned, or in some sources maligned, for having persuaded the Buddha, with the help from Ananda, to establish an order of nuns parallel to the order of monks for male monastics. According to traditional accounts, the Buddha rejected her request three times, and it was only when Ananda interceded on her behalf and continued to argue her case even after his own request was also rebuffed three times that the Buddha finally and reluctantly gave in. There's quite a lot to be said about that story, and I would be happy to talk about it in the question period. That's of interest. So Mahaprajapati thus holds two distinguished roles in the history of early Buddhism.

[12:12]

On the one hand, as the Buddhist foster mother, and on the other hand, as the first Buddhist nun. Now, if you look throughout the Pali Canon, you can find that she's mentioned here and there in other places. For example, there's a sutta from the collection known as the Majjhima Nikaya, a sutta called the Dakina Vibhanga. You could call it the parsing or sorting out of different types of gifts. where at an early point in the Buddha's preaching career, when she's still a laywoman, she goes to the Buddha with a beautiful pair of cloths, in other words, a robe that she's made herself and wants to offer it to him. And the Buddha refuses. He says, you should give it to the Sangha instead. The Sangha includes me. This is a much better type of gift. In other words, don't make it a personal family thing. Give it to the Sangha as a whole. Ananda, by the way, argues her case and loses. that Buddha does not give in. And there are various stories in different Buddhist canons about what happens to that robe finally. In one version, all the other monks are afraid to touch it because this is for the Buddha.

[13:17]

And only Maitreya, the next Buddha, finally agrees to take it. So it's a kind of symbol of transmission of the lineage. That's not in this Pali text at all, but it's found other places. So there's another sutta in the same collection called the Nanda Kovada, the teachings or exhortation by Nandaka, where Mahapajapati has already been ordained as a nun, skipping very far forward in her career. And here she goes to the Buddha together with 500 other nuns, a kind of stock figure for a lot of people, and asks him to give them a Dharma discourse. And without so much as a reply, the Buddha turns to Ananda and says, whose turn is it to lecture to the nuns today? Kind of rude on one reading. Ananda says, it's Nandaka's turn, another monk. But Nandaka doesn't want to go and talk to the nuns, so the Buddha has to talk him into it.

[14:22]

This is not giving us a very favorable impression of the relation between the monks and the nuns in general, or even the Buddha and one very particular nun, his former foster mother, in another case. Eventually Nandaka goes, it has good results, the nuns make progress, but again it gives us a rather dubious sense of women in the early Sangha. If we go to another section, if we go to the Anguttara Nikaya, we can find the account of her request for ordination, in other words, back to the time when she's not yet a nun. This is also found in the Pali Vinaya. There we see in both of these texts the Buddha's reluctance, his initial refusal to both Mahapajapati and Ananda, and his eventual, what shall we say, acquiescence, reluctant agreement to do this. Mahaprajapati's name also appears in the same collection, the Andhra Dharanikaya, on a list of outstanding nuns where she's described as foremost in seniority, that is, the first woman to have been ordained.

[15:32]

Other appearances can be found here and there of short Suta when apparently she's just, she's still a laywoman. in the Anguttara Nikaya, she goes to the Buddha and asks for a Dharma discourse. Here, I believe, she's by herself, still a laywoman. And in this case, the Buddha complies and actually gives her a Dharma talk, a very brief one, which is also known elsewhere in the Pali Canon, the one that I'm sure you've all heard of, which says, whatever is conducive to dispassion and not to passion, to liberation and not to bondage, and so on, that is the teaching of the Buddha. This small handful of passages that I've just described is the sum total of Mahaprajapati's appearances in the entire sutra collections in Pali. The four Nikayas, the Digha, Majjhima, Samyutta, and Anguttara. That's it. In fact, you've heard me mention only the Majjhima and the Anguttara Nikayas.

[16:37]

In the other two collections, the Digha and the Samyutta, she doesn't appear at all. This is a lot less time on camera than we would expect for someone of her prominence in the early history of the tradition. Now I've mentioned that there is also the account of her request for ordination in the Vinaya, virtually identical to the one in the Anguttara Nikaya. And as many of you I'm sure know, she's also one of the 73 nuns whose verses are found in the collection known as the Therigata, the verses of the senior women. group of arhat nuns. Hers is, somewhat surprisingly though, for a person of her apparent importance, she's not first in that collection, and she's not last, the triumphal last voice. She's just kind of in the middle, medium length, I believe it's six verses for her. There are others that are shorter, there are others that are longer. In other words, buried in the middle of this collection of words attributed to other nuns.

[17:43]

So when we look overall at her appearances in the Pali Canon, it would seem that she's hardly a main character at all. Very surprising, considering what we would expect from her roles. Now, that's all we have in the Suttas, the Sutras, and the Vinaya section. But if we look to another collection of texts in Pali, a collection called the Apadhanas that I would bet most of you are not terribly familiar with. This is where we find the longest account having to do with Mahapajapati anywhere in the Pali collections. Now, what's an Apadana? We might as well start with that. This is a collection of texts that struggled for acceptance as canonical in Pali. The reciters of the Digha Nikaya never did accept it as canonical, apparently, according to the commentaries. Other reciters did, so it was one of these groups of texts on the edge.

[18:45]

It's a collection of about just under 600 stories, of which 40 are about women. That's not a very good ratio, but Mahapajapati is one of them. And in Apadana, there's a good discussion of this online by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who's translated, in fact, about four of these, not the one I'll talk about today. He calls it a backstory. Upadhanas are texts that usually tell about the distant past life or lives of somebody who eventually wound up as an arhat. A man in most cases, or these 40 women in the remaining cases. And what the stories tell is not of energetic meditation and scrupulous observance of the precepts. They're about merit. They're about meeting a Buddha, or sometimes they partake a Buddha, in a distant previous life, making offerings to that person, serving that person, and by doing that getting huge amounts of merit.

[19:47]

Which then for the following lives get you rebirth as things like a god, a goddess, a king, a wealthy merchant, and so forth. And ultimately rebirth in the presence of our Buddha, the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, where the person becomes an arhat. So these stories are of As Thomas Earl would put it, these aren't his exact words, but gargantuan amounts of merit from small little offerings. These are an encouragement to the lay people to make whatever offering is appropriate for your financial status, among other things. These did not appeal to the British founders of the Polytech Society. They were too mythological, perhaps, too much Too many miracles, too much stuff that requires special effects if you're going to make a movie of it. Not enough about doctrine and ethics, which were their main concerns. So amazingly, this book, this collection of 592, I believe it is, stories, has never been translated into English.

[20:57]

One was translated by an outstanding woman scholar who was in the polytext group Mabel Bode in 1911. The next translation of any one of these was not until the 1990s. And to this day, there are some total, out of the men's and women's, some total of seven translations. So this is a very much neglected source. But it's the section that has the longest story about Mahapajapati. And I'll just put a tagline here that the date of the Polly collection is quite late. We can't be sure that it existed before the sixth century of the Common Era. So these appear to be stories that were floating around out there, being told in a more popular fashion, and were eventually domesticated and pulled into the Polly, and also pulled into several other canons. We have, again, about six versions of this story that I'm going to talk about, about the glorious death of Mahaprajapati, in various canons, and they all don't fit.

[22:07]

In the Pali, these are supposed to be stories of vast merit from previous lives, right? But this one is not about her life, it's about her death. That doesn't fit. In the Vinaya of a school known as the Mula Sarasvata, the Vinaya that the Tibetans use, The story also appears, but it's inserted in a Vinaya rule about how, when the Buddha sneezes, you should not say, may you live a long time. That's not proper. The Buddha argues, you know, do you really think that if you say that, you're going to change the universe, change my lifespan? It's not appropriate. So then, at the end, there are little tweakings of the rule. What if, you know, the lay people say that? How should we respond? In the middle of this story of, you shouldn't say Gesundheit when the Buddha sneezes, is the story of Mahapajapati's death. Doesn't quite fit, so it's been pigeonholed into that section of the canon. It also shows up in the Chinese Ekottarika Agama, the discourses that start with ones and then go to things that occur in twos and so on up to 11s, and it's toward the end of that collection.

[23:19]

where it should be an 11s text, a text about 11 somethings. There are no 11s in the story at all. It's the normal Mahabharata Parinirvana story. So in every canon where it appears, I've only discussed three in detail because some of the translations are separate. They're not part of the collection. It doesn't fit. So this does suggest it was part of a shared oral literature about her that was housed successfully or unsuccessfully in various Buddhist canons. So at this point, I would like to give you a quick summary of what's in the Pali, and I will conclude by showing how radically different some other versions of this story actually are. And at this point, how much time do I have left? About 20 to 25 minutes. And does that include questions? No. I mean, yeah, including the questions. Including the questions, okay. So then I will give you the short recension of the Pali. Mahaprajapati is, according to this text, very old.

[24:23]

Sometimes it says 120 years. Different versions do or don't specify her age. But she reflects on the fact that the Buddha and other leading disciples, such as Ananda and a few others, will soon enter final nirvana, parinirvana. In other words, a glorious word for the death of someone who has awakened. who has attained nirvana in this life, but will go into final nirvana at the time of her death. And reflecting on this, she decides that she would like to enter nirvana, final nirvana, before he does. In other words, she would like to die first. This is not an unusual sequence. She is, after all, his foster mother and considerably older. But she goes to the Buddha to request permission. kind of formality that may I have permission to pass into final nirvana before you. She's accompanied by 500 nuns and all of them, there's our 500 again, a large crowd of fellow practitioners and all of them we're told are arhats already.

[25:33]

So all of them are poised to enter not just death and rebirth but final nirvana with no rebirth at all when they die. They go to the Buddha and on the way a group of laywomen say, don't leave us, don't go away. They have somehow gotten wind of what's going to happen. And the 500 nuns have expressed the same wish after hearing Mahaprajapati's prayers. But they go on to the Buddha. And when they get there, she tells him what she has in mind, and he grants her permission. Mahaprajapati then is told by the Buddha, perform miracles. so that young women who are confused will have their doubts settled. We're not told what they're confused about or even who they are, but the Buddha has specifically authorized, in fact, required, requested Mahaprajapati to perform miracles, which she does in view of whoever is in the audience.

[26:37]

We don't have a really clear view of that. But she flies up into the air, she sits cross-legged in the sky, She sinks into the earth without being harmed at all, comes back up, does a bunch of really spectacular things. This is what I mean by special effects. You would need some serious techniques for making a movie of this story. We aren't told anymore about these potentially confused young women, who they might be. But the 500 nuns who accompanied her also ask the Buddha and also get permission. And they then return to their monastery together. And on the way back, again, we get a reaction from the women's lay community. A group of upasikas, again, apparently knowing what's going on, come out of their houses and cry. And what they're then told is, you shouldn't grieve, this is actually an occasion for joy. Instead, you should devote yourself to practice.

[27:39]

So when they get back to the monastery, Mahapajapati, first of all, ahead of the other nuns, then goes up through the four concentration states, known as jhana, the meditation states, and then on up through the four formless attainments, all the way to the eighth. Then, step by step, back down to the first, and again up to the fourth, where she dies. If you know the story of the Buddha's death, you'll recognize something here about exiting from the fourth stage of jhanas. The nuns then do the same thing. They die as they had vowed to do. Then the Buddha tells Ananda to go and announce her death to the monastic community. and the bodies of the women are placed on funeral piers, and the gods, these platforms, in some Chinese translations sometimes call them beds, but anyway, then the gods show up to fly through the air and transport them to the site of the cremation.

[28:51]

Again, some serious miraculous things requiring special effects. There's a spectacular cremation ceremony with the gods offering flowers, incense, and music, not just humans, and attendants, And at the end, the Buddha asks Ananda to put Mahaprajapati's ashes into a bowl, and he holds it up and praises her qualities. And he tells people not to grieve, she's liberated. And then in an echo of the Mahabharata and Bhanu Sutta dealing with the Buddha's death, the Buddha tells the audience, now you should be refuges unto yourselves. So when we look at this story, When I gave a talk on this most recently, it was to an audience that included several fully ordained Theravada nuns. And I have to say that you have to do some scrounging to find good news about nuns in the Pali materials. This story looks like it might be an exception. There are some strong points.

[29:53]

There are a lot of female characters in this story. Not only Mahaprajapati, but 500 other women who are arhats, the other nuns. There are upasikas, there are young women who are being helped somehow by these miracles that she's performing. And Mahāpajāpati's own achievements, as well as the nun's, are quite amazing. Not only the miracles, but her ability to enter these jhāna states at will, and the fact that she knows and chooses her own time to die. Now, the flip side of this is that The women, as they're portrayed in this text, when you step back from it, from the other texts that I'm going to mention very briefly that got me into this whole study, you begin to see that the women are kind of a self-enclosed community. Upasikas, women, lay people, come out of their houses and weep.

[30:53]

Upasikas, men, they don't show up. There's very little interface between her and the monks, with the exception of those that she's close to already, Ananda and her own biological son, Nanda, and a couple of others, but lots of interaction with other women. So you almost have the sense that there's a kind of bubble of the women's sangha, and then the men are around kind of telling the women what to do, but not interacting with them on a regular basis. And that story about Nandika not wanting to go preach to the nuns does come to mind here. Well, the story that brought me into all this is radically different. And each of the half dozen versions that we have in Chinese, Tibetan, fragments in Sanskrit, and this Pali one, are really quite different from one another. The oldest Chinese one, I told you the Pali, It can be dated to sometime up to the 6th century of the Common Era.

[31:56]

We don't know how much older it is. The Chinese is an anonymous translation, the oldest one, but based on language and style, it's very unusual, sort of, Buddhist Chinese. And it's virtually certain to date from right around 200 of the Common Era, end of the 2nd, beginning of the 3rd century. So our linguistic evidence suggests it's much older. When we look at the content, I think it's very clear that it's from a different layer of the tradition. Here, a lot of the story is the same. She goes to request permission to die before the Buddha. He gives permission, but he doesn't tell her to perform miracles. She doesn't need that sanction. She goes back to her monastery with the other nuns, and they do this in private. They don't do it in public. So we don't need the Buddha in there with a commentary. The commentator, I suspect, saying, it's really okay for women to do this. The Buddha said so. He gave her permission. In the early Chinese version, they're simply, this is something that they're capable of doing and they do.

[33:01]

But what I'd like to really draw your attention to in closing is the social context of this story in this oldest Chinese version. What happens when Mahaprajapati makes this decision? Ananda, first of all, you won't be surprised if you know Ananda well, is overcome with grief. And he collapses on the ground. He says, I'm totally disoriented. I can't tell one direction from the other. I can't remember any of the dharmas that I've learned. This is terrible. And the Buddha says, what? You think she's going to take all these dharmas with her when she goes? And he names a bunch of numbered lists that are elsewhere associated with Shariputra. And in fact, if we look in a different part of the Pali Canon, we find that exactly the same story of Ananda's grief and the Buddha's reproach, mentioning these numbered lists, shows up in the account of the death of Sariputta, who died before the Buddha and before Ananda.

[34:06]

So it's virtually certain that this little textual chunk, this little pericope, as it's called technically, was borrowed into the Mahāpajāpati story from there. It's not in the Pali, but it's in this oldest Chinese version. Clearly not something made up in China. This is an Indian piece of tradition that was moved. So Ananda grieves. But even more striking, after she has died, the Buddha sends Ananda into town to inform the leading wealthy, influential lay devotee. We think his name was something like Yashoda. It's not clear from the Chinese transcription. And he, like Ananda, collapses on the ground with grief. loses his balance, he's totally upset, and he says, what did we do to offend the nuns, not just Mahapajapati, all the nuns, that they've died without telling us? And then he says, from now on, the monastery will be empty. Their practice seats will be empty.

[35:08]

The city of Vaishali itself will be empty. Never again will we see them coming for alms. This is a dramatically connected community. It's not just the upasikas, the women, who are actually devoted to these nuns. It's the men. And this man then is told by a nun to go and bring the other laymen. They perform the funeral, which is also spectacular. So if we look at the other versions, there's all kinds of variety, but one of the biggest areas that we see a difference is in the situation of the nuns within the larger Buddhist society. So I think what we're seeing is a higher status for the women vis-a-vis the men in the early period, higher than what we're seeing in the Pali version. There's lots more that could be said, but I would rather hear from you in whatever time remains, so I'd be happy to hear. histories from an anthropological perspective, that being that we've lost so many different varieties of ways it means to be human.

[36:23]

What's your anthropological understanding of what it meant to be alive then to give us some context in which these stories take place? Well, I wouldn't claim to have an anthropological understanding, but what I would say is that These Buddhists assumed multiple lifetimes. They assumed the possibility of arhatship for women as well as men. So they assumed that practice can be done, it's valuable, it has a goal, it can be attained. And I think especially the idea of multiple lifetimes that have brought a person to the point of practice is different than things that would be widely shared in our culture today. I don't know if that's the kind of thing you were looking for. It teases it. I mean, the idea of what it meant to be not only Buddhist, but to be alive in that time presupposes some of these kinds of assumptions, some of these kinds of beliefs. And it's always been my supposition, much as what I think I hear from you, that women had a different place then that was not what happened to them as the Pali Canon was written later, where we kind of wrote them down and wrote them out in order to kind of create the separation and the superiority that we've lived in for such a long time.

[37:37]

There is, I think, a general understanding, and again, I don't know that this is really anthropological, but that the status of women went down after the time of the Buddha. And this happened with the rise of two things. Empires, centralization with male power at the top. You very much see this in the Gupta period later on. But also with the rise of the Brahmanical tradition that increasingly placed its own women members in lower and lower positions. So those are probably things to look at to understand why we see these changes. We're not gonna find equality even on day one. But we do see a certain trend down that I think these days has been reversed. Yes. Yes. So this response of the layman, whose name is We think it's Yashoda. Yashoda. This response is so much more feeling and empathic than any of the responses of either the Buddha or, well, except for maybe Ananda.

[38:51]

And so, actually, that in itself is kind of showing a striking difference in how the community internally is dealing with the nuns. And I'm just wondering if they were so contained that they had no purpose. They didn't see themselves as having the same level of purpose as the monks in terms of both teaching the Dharma and representing it. Because in later Buddhism, we don't look to miracles as the best path to practice the Dharma. That's not the teachings of the Buddha, actually, generally. We don't think of it that way, at least in Zen. Well, even in Theravada, there's a Vinaya rule that monks and nuns are not supposed to show miracles to lay people, which is probably one reason the Buddha had to say, do it, because there were probably lay people in the audience. That shouldn't be the inspiration for Dharma. Whenever I was studying with Zen Master Sun Tsang, he always stated that's not the reason to practice the Dharma.

[39:58]

Sure. Even in these texts, I think it's It's supposed to be impressive, but it's also a side effect. The important thing is that these women have become arhats, and that when they pass, and this is something that's a little different than contemporary Western Buddhism, it's very important for them that when they pass into final nirvana, they will not be reborn. That's not an issue for most American practitioners, but for them it was an extremely important part. And as far as the men showing emotion, this It's not as much emotion but empathy, like a sense of the tragedy of it. Look at the community, the women outside saying, please don't leave, we want the connection with you. And then the grief of this man. And the other men, I should say there are of course 500 other men, they have the same kind of experience of grief and collapsing. In both cases, we see the women in some function as teachers and mentors, and also as sources of merit when you give food offerings, as in many Buddhist countries today.

[41:08]

But the real dramatic difference is the strong feeling the men exhibit of their connection to these women and their admiration for them, and their feeling of loss when these nuns die. If a group of people did this today, we'd think of them as a cult, by the way. If they all died together, absolutely. We would consider that action to be occult. And there's examples, that's one thing. And the other thing is that there's examples of the Buddha saying, you know, this example where he says this remark to Ananda, he also, in other cases, he hears a crow. This is a translation from Bhikkhu Bodhi. He hears a crow and he comments on how irritating that sound is, you know, and so we have elevated him to some level. And there's another teaching in which he says a woman offers something, somehow it involves maybe he would touch her or something. I can't remember exactly the detail.

[42:10]

But he says, I would rather, do you know this line? No, but I can imagine what it's going to be. Could eat. Horrifyingly aversive to her. So really, and it's maybe some way to teach the monks that are around him, but it's horrifyingly aversive. And we're talking about the removal of suffering, which is about not having aversion. It's interesting. I mean, broadly speaking, which is the pro-incident and that and that. One of the reasons that studying non-Pali traditions is so interesting is sometimes we have the same story as here. in Chinese or in some other language, Tibetan. And when we compare them on a number of occasions, it turns out the Pali is more misogynist than others. All the Pali Jatakas, for example, every single previous life of the Buddha, he was a male, human or animal, but always a male. But that's not true in Chinese Jataka collections.

[43:11]

There are others. So, it appears that the Pali collection was not made by the most progressive group or the most progressive time. And some of them may simply be it's more recent. Things have gotten worse. Yes? Can you talk a little bit about the connections between China and India, that there were Chinese translations from the second century? Yes. Was there active communication? Because we hear about Bodhisattva going to the West as the introduction of Buddhism, but I thought that that happened much later. It's an amazing story. Basically, it's merchants and missionaries going to China no later than the first century of the Common Era, because there are references in poetry and secular historical sources that just intentionally say, you know, even a shramana, in other words, even a Buddhist monk couldn't resist her beauty. Things like that. So they know about this, that it exists. But the way that we, aside from these casual mentions,

[44:15]

Starting in the middle of the second century, there were people coming to China, bringing Buddhist scriptures from India. Scriptures of different sorts. The very first translator we have, a guy named Anshu Gal, was not Indian. The first translators in general weren't Indians, they were Central Asians, but they had Indian texts in Indian languages. He was a Parthian, and he was a Sarvastivadin, which means that he translated a whole bunch of scriptures that are basically like Pali suttas and Abhidharma material. He didn't translate Mahayana at all. That was in around 140, 148 of the Common Era. Quite a productive translator. And then about 20, 30 years later, we start getting Mahayana scriptures translated by different people, Parthians as well as Yuezhir, which might be related to the Kushan Empire. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. So we have quite a few texts translated during the Han Dynasty already. Then in the third century, after the Han collapses, and you have China breaking up into different regions, you have texts that are not only coming in through Central Asia on the so-called Silk Road, but coming by ship.

[45:27]

And many of you, I think, know the Dhammapada. That came to Southeast China in the first half of the third century, in a version very close to the Pali. But there was also another one floating around that people think was probably Milosar Rastavan, with a different school altogether. And the translator who did this took the 26 chapters that lined up with the Pali, and then glommed on the extra 13 that he found in the other version, put it all together, and had the latest, greatest Dharmapada. So we get some things like that going on. So there was actually a steady flow of literature, starting at least in the second century. And what that means is a lot of material that didn't survive in India, in any Indian language, is there in the Chinese, if we can figure out how to read it. Believe me, this is weird Chinese from the second and third centuries. The translators differ from each other, as well as from any classical Chinese, much less modern. So part of the fun of this kind of stuff is you get to write dictionaries as you go along, because a lot of the words aren't in the dictionaries.

[46:35]

You have to figure out, what does this mean? So it's quite an amazing saga, how Buddhism came to China. Yes? I have a question about the loss. You mentioned the loss of a great deal of probably written material after the 1860s. But is it because of the invasions, the Muslim invasions, and Buddhism pretty much over a period of time. But so I wondered if the literature is missing because of that or something else. There's no something else. It's partly because of that. It was really a double whammy from the Muslims and the Hindus. And on the Islamic side, as you mentioned, there were invasions. And of course, for a Muslim to go into a Hindu or Buddhist temple and see all these statues, it's just anathema.

[47:40]

They just thought this was horrible. and they did destroy texts and kill monks and smash statues. The Hindus, on the other hand, did a co-opting move. Oh, the Buddha, yes, of course. He's one of the avatars of Vishnu. He's one of our guys. You don't need all these Buddhist texts, just study the Hindu ones, and you'll learn all you need to know. So that's quite a simplification on my part, but the upshot of it is the Buddhist communities were seriously undermined by both of these. Hostility on the one hand, and too much friendliness on the other hand. By the 12th century, there was very little Buddhism left in India. In that climate, if you're not copying the text regularly, they're going to disappear. Unlike Central Asia, where you put them in the ground, come back two millennia later, and they're still there. That's what happened. The Pali is a real exception, but there were Thousands and thousands, surely tens of thousands of texts.

[48:40]

Some of them just memorized. Others written starting probably in the first century BCE, the first writings. But luckily we have a lot of those in Chinese. There's a lot to read.

[48:52]

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