Jingjian: The Earliest Chinese Bhikṣuṇī

Notes

1. chin can mo. A creative phoneticization of 淨檢, which Tsai phoneticizes as Chu Ching-chien. For other accounts of her life, see O’Brian, “Chinese Buddhist Nuns: A History of Perseverance”; Lee, “Zhu Jingjian,” 391–393; Tsai, Lives of the Nuns, 17–19.  ↩

2. krong. Tsai (17) gives “Chung.”  ↩

3. Khenmo Dawa Drolma gives the given name as nen yan. Since we do not know the Khenmo’s sources, we follow Lee (391) and Tsai (17), who, adducing several Chinese sources, name her Zhong Lingyi or Chung Ling-i (仲令儀).  ↩

4. Khenmo Dawa Drolma gives his name as nian yan cin. However, we follow Lee (“Zhu Jingjian,” 391), who gives the name Zhong Dan (仲誕). Tsai gives Chung Tan (17).  ↩

5. kan so 甘肃.  ↩

6. She was likely still a child, since below, several years after her husband’s death, she speaks of still being in her youth, using terms usually associated with teenage years.  ↩

7. Lee (391) offers a fuller picture: “Her family came from Pengcheng (in the region of the present-day provinces of northwest Jiangsu and southern Shandong) but her father… was governor of Wuwei (present-day Wuwei District in Gansu Province), a district far from their native place. It is not known whether Zhu Jingjian went to live in Wuwei when her father was stationed there, but both Pengcheng and Wuwei were on the Silk Road, through which Buddhist influence entered China. This was particularly so in the case of Wuwei because of its proximity to Central Asia, whence came many Buddhist monks to preach in China. Thus it is conceivable that Zhu Jingjian initially came into contact with Buddhism while she was living in one of these cities. However, in later life she moved to Luoyang, the eastern capital of the Jin dynasty, where her convent life was mainly spent.” Cf. Tsai, 17.  ↩

8. jun jan—晉朝.  ↩

9. The source text reads a dri’i skyes chen, and we are unsure about a dri. The Mönlam Dictionary has it, enigmatically, as an Indian word meaning ri dang nyi ma (“mountains and sun”), which does not seem relevant. No such name or title is found in Lee (391) or Tsai’s (17) accounts.  ↩

10. 法始  ↩

11. This is a reference to a famous line from the Platform Sūtra:

    Unexpectedly one day the Fifth Patriarch called his disciples to come, and when they had assembled, he said: “Let me preach to you. For people in this world birth and death are vital matters. You disciples make offerings all day long and seek only the field of blessings, but you do not seek to escape from the bitter sea of birth and death. Your own self-nature obscures the gateway to blessings; how can you be saved? All of you return to your rooms and look into yourselves. Men of wisdom will of themselves grasp the original nature of their prajñā intuition. Each of you write a verse and bring it to me. I will read your verses, and if there is one who is awakened to the cardinal meaning, I will give him the robe and the Dharma and make him the Sixth Patriarch. Hurry, hurry!” (trans. Yampolsky, The Platform Sūtra, 128)

    Cf. Hua, The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra, 60; Shaheen, “The Great Matter.”  ↩

12. rab tu byung. This term often connotes general renunciation, but it has its roots in the sūtras and the Pāli word pabbajja. Sumana Samanera explains, “Pabbajja,... in Pali, the language of the Buddhist texts, means Going forth, namely from the household life to the homelessness of a Buddhist monk. The Pali word Pabbajja is also the term for the first ordination bestowed for entry into the Buddhist monastic Order (Sangha) by which the candidate becomes a Novice or Samanera”(“Going Forth,” https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/sumana/wheel027.html).  ↩

13. (1) Killing (To break from the root, one must kill a human being with intention); (2) taking what is not given (stealing) (To break from the root, one must steal something that could bring about legal intervention in one’s society); (3) sexual intercourse (To break from the root, one must have intention and experience orgasm. This refers to heterosexual or homosexual contact); (4) lying (To break from the root, one must lie about one’s spiritual attainments); (5) taking intoxicants (this includes alcohol and recreational drugs); (6) singing, dancing, playing music; (7) wearing perfume, ornaments or cosmetics to beautify the body; (8) sitting on a high or expensive bed or throne; (9) eating after midday; (10) touching gold, silver or precious objects (including money) [Thubten Chodron, “The sramanera/sramanerika precepts,” https://thubtenchodron.org/1996/06/precepts/].  ↩

14. In Tsai (18–19), he is identified as Kashmiri.  ↩

15. kri hran.  ↩

16. Khenmo Dawa Drolma gives kro nen dgon. However, since Tibetan phoneticizations are extremely idiosyncratic, we follow the name Zhulin, given by Lee (“Zhu Jingjian,” 392).  ↩

17. shar jun; 东晋. Lee (“Zhu Jingjian,” 392), gives the more specific “Xiankang reign period (335–342).”  ↩

18. hrin can.  ↩

19. Lee (392) and Tsai (19) specify that this was the Mahāsānghika Vinaya.  ↩

20. Ann Heirman (“Chinese Nuns and Their Ordination in Fifth Century China,” 289) discusses what seems to be this very controversy in China, though the characters she refers to have different names:

    When the discussion on the validity of a nun’s ordination that was only held before the bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha reached its peak, the Chinese nun Hui-kuo asked whether Chinese women could receive the ordination in the way that Mahāprajāpatī did. She too did not receive the ordination from the bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha. As mentioned in the Pi-ch’iu-ni chuan, the central Asian monk Guṇavarman was of the opinion that there was no difference between Mahāprajāpatī and the Chinese women. The Pi-ch’iu-ni chuan is not clear as to why Guṇavarman accepted Mahāprajāpatī’s ordination as a precedent, but it seems to suggest that he put the absence of a bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha at the time of the first ordination in China at the same level as the absence of nuns at the time of Mahāprajāpatī’s ordination. In both countries, the ordination of the first nun necessarily had to be carried out without a bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha. However, when the nun Hui-kuo insisted on the case, Guṇavarman added that according to the vinaya rules, a candidate must receive the ordination from a minimum quorum of ten fully ordained nuns, except in border areas where five nuns are sufficient. When asked what exactly a border area is, he seems to consider also China as belonging to it, in which case a minimum quorum of five nuns is needed. This explains why Guṇavarman says: "The correct view is that, if there is an established assembly present, one cannot but go along with all the requirements.

    And she continues:

    Once a bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha had been established, the only way to receive an ordination was through an ordination ceremony in both saμghas by means of a jñapticaturtha karman. This obligation is one of the eight fundamental rules accepted by Mahāprajāpatī, and is never to be transgressed. It assures the proper and uninterrupted transmission of the rules for women from the time of the Buddha onward.

    As already mentioned above, this obligation created a major problem in China. In the absence of a bhikṣuṇīsaṃgha, the first Chinese nun was ordained in the presence of a chapter of monks only. At first, the Vinaya master Guṇavarman did not seem to consider this a problem, maybe because he thought that China was that far away from India that it was permitted to nuns to follow in Mahāprajāpatī ’s footsteps and to start all over again. However, pressed by more questions, he agreed to a new ordination, this time in the presence of a chapter of Sinhalese nuns. Doing so, he never said that the first ordination was invalid, he only said that a second ordination would augment the value of the first one."(293)  ↩

21. This seems to stem from recondite debates about the technical boundaries of a monastic body and the rules that pertain to those bodies, defined by their boundaries. For communities on water, a boundary called an udakukkhepasīmā applies, which seems to have offered a loophole to the nuns in our story. See Kieffer-Pülz, “Translocal Debates and Legal Hermeneutics,” 117–118.  ↩

22. Lee (392) offers the following account:

    During the Xiankang reign period (335–342), the monk Sengjian obtained a copy of a nun’s ritual and rule book of the Mahāsānghika sect and by 357 this book had been translated into Chinese in Luoyang. A foreign monk (whose origin is not specified) then built a dais for the purpose of bestowing the precepts on nuns. However, the Chinese monk Daochang objected to this on the basis that, according to the monastic rules, an assembly of nuns was required to be present at the ordination of nuns and therefore, since there were no nuns in China at that time, the ordination could not take place. His objection was not acknowledged but, according to one interpretation of Zhu Jingjian’s biography in Lives of the Nuns (Biqiuni zhuan), she and four other women received the precepts according to the newly translated rule book on a boat on the Si River, possibly because of the objection. Zhu Jingjian is therefore honored as the first Chinese Buddhist nun.  ↩

23. 到升平, 357–361 CE, following Tsai (19). The Khenmo writes shar jun rgyal rabs kyi mjug, “at the end of the Eastern Jin Dynasty,” which seems to conflate the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420), with the Shengping sub-era of 357–361.  ↩

24. lha’i bu mo  ↩

25. ‘ja’ lus ’pho ba chen po  ↩