Preface

Summary

Nur Yalman's book, Under the Bō Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), focused on Buddhist social structures in Sri Lanka. Playing on that title, I shall explore gender and social structures that have been challenged or reversed in Buddhist Sri Lanka.

In 1983, on holiday in Sri Lanka, I met some extraordinary Buddhist women who had challenged contemporary notions of gender and social structure: they had exchanged their white sārīs for orange robes. In doing so, they had usurped the monks' sole claim to monastic legitimacy. As acting members of a self-declared monastic community, these women have become necessary components of contemporary Buddhist society. I wondered what it would be like to live cloistered as they did, what Buddhist monks and laity thought of such women? Moreover did these cloistered women's views on Buddhism differ from those of monks?

When I returned to America, I discovered that very little had been written on the robed Buddhist women I had met in Sri Lanka though much had been written on Buddhist monks. In order to fill that lacuna, I slowly began translating Pāli texts that were relevant to the topic of Buddhist female monasticism; texts that helped me link the Buddhist classical tradition with living practice. I then returned to Sri Lanka to conduct a field study of the women I had met in 1983. That study and those translations have evolved into the account that I offer below.