Tag Archives: Chinese

White Bones Red Rot Black Snakes

Enchant­ing, power­ful, hor­rific, beau­ti­ful, wise, deadly, com­pas­sion­ate, seduct­ive. Women in Buddhist story and image are all these things and more. She takes the signs of the ancient god­dess – the lotus, the sac­red grove, the ser­pent, the sac­ri­fice – and uses them in aston­ish­ing new ways. Her story is one of suf­fer­ing and great tri­als, and through it all an unquench­able long­ing to be free. This beau­ti­fully illus­trated work is as layered and sub­vers­ive as myth­o­logy itself. Based dir­ectly on authen­tic Buddhist texts, and informed with insights from psy­cho­logy and com­par­at­ive myth­o­logy, it takes a fresh look at how Buddhist women have been depic­ted by men and how they have depic­ted themselves.

July 18, 2011 – 8:14 am | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Books, Study | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Bhikkhuni Vinaya Studies

Although his­tor­ic­ally mar­gin­al­ized, Buddhist nuns are tak­ing their place in mod­ern Buddhism. Like the monks, Buddhist nuns live by an ancient sys­tem of mon­astic law, the Vinaya. This work invest­ig­ates vari­ous areas of uncer­tainty and con­tro­versy in how the Vinaya is to be under­stood and applied today.

May 27, 2010 – 12:41 am | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Books, Study | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The First Council

The First Coun­cil was a crit­ical turn­ing point in Buddhist his­tory, defin­ing the dir­ec­tion Buddhism was to take after the death of its founder. Here is the account from the Mahīśā­saka Vinaya, trans­lated from the Chinese canon.

May 27, 2010 – 10:32 am | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Study, Translations | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Dark Matter

While dis­cus­sion on women’s role in the Sangha pro­ceeds, those who most need to take part in the dis­cus­sion — the monks — are con­spicu­ously absent. The issue is not so much a dia­logue as a call to the dark­ness, for a sym­path­etic hear­ing that is just not there.

May 18, 2010 – 11:59 pm | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Full Acceptance

Ordin­a­tion is more than a change in life­style. It is a fun­da­mental shift in the ori­ent­a­tion of one’s very being. While denied bhikkhuni ordin­a­tion, women are forever excluded from the heart of the Buddha’s community.

May 18, 2010 – 11:15 pm | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Essays | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off

What the Buddha Really Taught

Through care­ful atten­tion to the earli­est Buddhist teach­ings, pre­served in scrip­tures in Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit, we can not only come closer to the Buddha’s ori­ginal mes­sage, but can dis­cern the teach­ings shared among all Buddhist traditions.

May 16, 2010 – 8:12 am | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Essays, Study | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

The First Chinese Bhikkhunis

Fif­teen hun­dred years ago, Buddhist nuns from Sri Lanka braved the long sea voy­age to China in order to intro­duce the authen­tic bhikkhuni ordin­a­tion lin­eage. Here are their stor­ies, trans­lated from the ancient Chinese histories.

May 16, 2010 – 12:45 am | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Translations | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off

Mahāsaṅghika—the Earliest Vinaya?

The search goes on for some­thing that we can identify as the earli­est Vinaya, the prin­ciples of mon­astic con­duct that have set the stand­ard for Buddhist mon­ast­ics from the Buddha until now. For schol­ars this is part of the enig­mat­ic­ally mean­ing­ful need to search for the ori­gins of things. For myself as a prac­ti­cing monk, it …

October 24, 2012 – 10:13 pm | By Bhikkhu Sujato | Posted in Essays, Sects & Sectarianism, Study | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)