Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t3.7

c8.s1.t3.7

The narratives of the sacred writings, accordingly, unmistakably keep the female disciples, who have donned the garb of nuns, at a certain distance from the master, both in spiritual offices and in daily life. Buddhism has not had a Mary of Bethany. Buddha announces the rules, which he lays down for the order of nuns, to the monks and merely causes them to reach the nuns through them: and these regulations keep the nuns as regards the monks in perfectly submissive subjection: throughout they are treated merely as a tolerated, and reluctantly tolerated, element in the Church. Not one of the female disciples is near the master when he is dying, and it is made a matter of reproach to Ânanda, that he has granted access to Buddha’s corpse to women, whose tears bedewed the corpse. “O Kriton, let some one lead this woman home,” says Socrates, when Xanthippe appears in his prison to take a last farewell of him.