Fragile Virtue: Interpreting Women's Monastic Practice in Early Medieval India

This dissertation examines the representations of nuns in Indian Buddhist and Jain monastic commentaries from the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Although these texts comment extensively on the rules for nuns in the two traditions, they have been hitherto virtually overlooked by scholars investigating the history of Buddhist and Jain nuns. In an effort to bring to light some of this rich material, this work analyzes the rhetorical construction of women's monastic virtue in the commentaries of two roughly contemporaneous monastic scholars: the Mulasarvastiv adin Buddhist Gun&dotbelow;aprabha and the Svet ambara Jain San˙ghadasa. I suggest that, in defining the way of life of a nun, these commentators were participating in wider conversations regarding the roles and practices appropriate for women, and the importance of demonstrable female virtue for the prestige of a community. Other texts from around this period---such as debates over women's eligibility for ascetic life in the Brahminical Dharmasastras, and portrayals of female ascetics as morally questionable in a range of genres---indicate that female renunciation was a contested issue across religious boundaries in early medieval South Asia.;Through a close analysis of the Buddhist and Jain monastic commentaries' sections on nuns, this dissertation argues that their authors were aware of, and responding to, these contestations, particularly to the negative associations of renunciant women with immorality. Such perceptions presented a problem for male monastic authorities, for they had implications on the reputation and prestige of the monastic communities at large and, one might argue, on the public image, and self-image, of a celibate male monastic who is associated with a group of nuns. The commentators' prescriptions for nuns seek to create a visible distinction between them and the stereotypical loose and worldly renunciant woman. They prescribe practices and gestures that mark the nuns in their communities as modest and disciplined, while deflecting charges of immorality onto female renunciants of other groups. On the other hand, the commentators must also demonstrate that their nuns are not independent or uncontrolled, but supervised and guarded by monks. The resulting, mutually contradictory portrayals of the nuns in these texts---as superior in virtue to the female members of other communities, yet weak, incapable, and morally corruptible in comparison with monks---reflect the contradictory position in which the monks find themselves, as celibate men institutionally in charge of women.