"Oh, so Rinpoche you are still a novice?"
– Tenzin Palmo
It's circa 5th century BC. North Indian plains. The prince-turned-charismatic-leader of a significant social and philosophical movement is laying on his deathbed. Buddhism has by this point claimed hundreds of healthy and employable men and women, who have deserted their royal and civic lives for an existence of community-facilitated introspection. Now, moments before attaining parinirvana or ultimate enlightenment, the Buddha has a sudden change of heart about certain 'minor' rules guiding his community, the sangha. But his attendant monk, the distracted and overwhelmed Ananda, can't make sense of his gasping and mumbling. And so the master passes away without having his final will known, and without – at least – something akin to a self-help manual to his name. These two would've been breakaway bestsellers even today: 30 Steps to Successfully Run the Sangha in the CE and 300 Things Every Aspiring Nun Should Know (the latter, perhaps, proverbially subtitled 'It's Better to Know and Be Disappointed, Than Not to Know and Always Wonder', in case the Buddha wasn't the feminist we'd like to think he was.)
The same Ananda, Buddhist records tell us, was instrumental in getting women admitted into the sangha in the first place. When his stepmother Mahaprajapati, together with other women from the same Shakya clan begged the Buddha to let them join the sangha, he waved them off like flies. But then Ananda interceded, tricking the Buddha with some savvy reasoning into complying: "Don't you think women are capable of achieving nirvana?"
This is the most circulated story of the first women's ordination in Buddhism. But contemporary feminist hermeneutics offers some interesting interpretations of this historic moment, too. Reiko Ohnuma, an associate professor at Dartmouth college, suggests that the nuns' order was not founded due to the Buddha's good will or his belief in women's spiritual capacities, but because the Buddha simply owed it to his stepmother. In fact, she reminds us that Ananda added this weighty, regularly discounted argument: It's your stepmother you're talking to, he said to the Buddha.