Bhante Nandiya

I believe there is a great deal of evidence for the inauthenticity of the eight garudhammas and Maha Pajapati story, and here I want to cover some of the most decisive arguments.

Firstly I think that there was some sort of episode in the history of the Sangha where there was a going forth of Sakyan women from the nobility. Maha Pajapati, the Buddha's foster mother, seems to have gone forth. I don't doubt that there is a measure of authenticity and credibility to the story, I doubt it's a whole-cloth fabrication. And while we'll never really know what is rightly attributed to the Blessed One, and what is wrongly attributed to the Blessed One, we can arrive at reasonable conclusions.

1) The idea of people putting words in the Buddha's mouth is not intrinsically implausible. The Abhidhamma. The mahayana sutras. Great volumes of works are attributed to the Buddha, but clearly aren't. Partly this comes from a different mindset when it comes to fact/fiction. For example it's common, even today, for people to claim that the Buddha came to them during a meditation and gave a dhamma teaching. This appears to be what happened with the mahayana suttas, it can be compared with divine inspiration, the "word of god" speaking through an ordinary person. And sometimes these volumes are given mythic authority by attributing them to the Buddha in some way. The idea of devas or nagas hiding dhamma teachings away for hundreds of years, then revealing them to the world, comes up multiple times across the traditions. If this can happen on a large scale, why not a small scale too? In fact even in the suttas, you get cases where a householder or wanderer goes to the Buddha and says "I have heard that the Blessed One teaches such and such, do those who make such a report correctly represent the Blessed One with that which is true, or do they misrepresent him?", so even in the Buddha's time people were misrepresenting the Buddha. I mention this, to establish plausibility in the idea that people can and will take something that wasn't spoken by the Buddha, and say it was.

2) The Buddha is out of character. I my previous post, I quoted the parts of the sutta where the Buddha is severely out of character. This shouldn't be hand-waved away. In AN 4.80 - "The Great References" for deciding whether dhamma or vinaya teachings are authentic, the advice is:

Originally Posted by AN 4.180

Here, monks, a monk may say thus: 'Face to face with the Blessed One, friend, have I heard, face to face with him have I received this. This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the message of the Teacher.'
"Monks, the speech of that monk should neither be welcomed nor reviled. Non-welcoming, non-reviling, every word and syllable should be well studied, placed beside the Sutta and compared with the Vinaya. When placed beside the Sutta and compared with the Vinaya, should they not fit in with the Sutta, nor accord with the Vinaya, you should come to the conclusion: 'Truly this is not the word of the Blessed One, and has been wrongly grasped by that monk.' Thus, monks, you should reject it.

Now this teaching was given when the Buddha was still alive, it's not talking about today's ideas of "sutta" and "vinaya"! Bhante Sujato says that contextually "suttas" probably refers to the core, stock, teachings, such as four noble truths, eightfold path etc - the sort of sutta you find a lot in Samyutta Nikaya. Thus if a teaching is not compatible with the basic teachings of the Buddha, it should, upon reflection, by rejected.

3) The story is internally inconsistent. These are pointed out well in other articles on the garudhammas (google "Non-historicity of the Eight Garudhammas". But just to raise a couple of points, why does the Buddha stress the need for thorough training, then have the women immediately ordained? This is not strange, if there was already a mature Bhikkhuni sangha in existence. Why do the other Bhikkhunis accuse Maha Pajapati of not being properly ordained, isn't that exceedingly mean and spiteful behavior if the only bhikkhunis were Pajapati's followers?! On the other hand, if there were already existing bhikkhunis, ordained using conventional methods, the criticism makes far more sense.

4) The story is externally inconsistent. Again, these points are made well by others. But just to raise a couple, why in her elder verses does Bhadda say she was ordained using the "ehi bhikkhuni method"? Why is there no mention anywhere in the suttas of Bhikkhunis actually observing the garudhammas?

5) It flies in the face of reason. In the suttas, female ascetics are mentioned fairly regularly, apparently they were a part of the indian spiritual scene. It seems more than reasonable that there were female ascetics hanging out with the male ascetics who were ordained by the Buddha to form the early Sangha. It seems completely reasonable to expect that these female ascetics would have followed their brothers into the Buddha Sangha, and since there were already ascetics, this wouldn't have caused even the slightest shred of controversy. Is it really plausible that either these female ascetics didn't exist, or the Buddha told them to something... else...? Were the Buddha do other than say "Ehi Bhikkhuni!", it would have violated his basic mission to establish the sangha and faith in the dhamma. And it also makes no sense at all to establish the sangha using a bunch of woman nobles, when there are veteran woman ascetics. What Baddha says in her verses is completely agreeable with what seems reasonable, the Maha Pajapati story is not.

I think that when a sutta is this full of holes and inconsistencies, we should be incredulous.

I plan to make at least one more post on this subject, the next being on how the story might have arisen and evolved into what it is today.