A lay person who achieved this attitude would have advanced a long way along the spiritual path.

The scriptures do give us a few examples of lay disciples who practiced meditation outside the Sangha and reached Nibbana, but these solitary virtuosi were the exception rather than the rule. It was thought that an Arahant could not continue to live the life of a householder: after achieving enlightenment, he would either join the Sangha immediately or he would die. This, apparently, is what happened to Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father, who attained Nibbana in the fifth year of his son’s teaching mission and died the next day. When the Buddha heard the news, he returned to Kapilavatthu and stayed for a while in Nigrodha Park. This event led to a new development in the Sangha, which, it seems, the Buddha did not initially welcome.

While he was living in the Nigrodha arama, the Buddha was visited by his father’s widow, Pajapati Gotami: she was also the Buddha’s aunt, and had become his foster-mother after the death of his own mother. Since she was now free, she told her nephew, she wanted to be ordained in the Sangha. The Buddha adamantly refused. There was no question of admitting women to the Order. He would not change his mind, even though Pajapati begged him three times to reconsider and she left his presence very sadly. A few days later, the Buddha set out for Vesali, the capital of the republic of Videha on the northern bank of the Ganges. He often stayed in the arama there, which had a hall with a high-gabled roof. One morning, Ananda was horrified to find Pajapati sobbing on the porch with a crowd of other Sakyan women. She had cut off her hair, put on the yellow robe and had walked all the way from Kapilavatthu. Her feet were swollen, and she was filthy and exhausted. “Gotami,” cried Ananda; “What are you doing here in such a state? And why are you crying?” “Because the Blessed One will not have women in the Sangha,” Pajapati replied. Ananda was concerned. “Wait here,” he said, “I will ask the Tathagata about this.”

But the Buddha still refused to consider the matter. This was a serious moment. If he continued to bar women from the Sangha, it meant that he considered that half of the human race was ineligible for enlightenment. But the Dhamma was supposed to be for everybody: for gods, animals, robbers, men of all castes-were women alone to be excluded? Was rebirth as a man the best they could hope for? Ananda tried another tack. “Lord,” he asked, “are women capable of becoming ‘stream-enterers’ and, eventually, Arahants?” “They are, Ananda,” the Buddha replied. “Then surely it would be a good thing to ordain Pajapati,” Ananda pleaded, and reminded his master of her kindness to him after his mother had died. The Buddha reluctantly conceded defeat. Pajapati could enter the Sangha if she accepted eight strict rules. These provisions made it clear that the nuns (bhikkhunls) were an inferior breed. A nun must always stand when in the presence of a male bhikkhu, even one who was young or newly ordained; nuns must always spend the vassa retreat in an arama with male monks, not by themselves; they must receive instruction from a bhikkhu once every fortnight; they could not hold their own ceremonies; a nun who had committed a grave offense must do penance before the monks as well as the bhikkhunls; a nun must request ordination from both the male and the female Sangha; she must never rebuke a bhikkhu, though any monk could rebuke her; nor could she preach to bhikkhus. Pajapati gladly accepted these regulations and was duly ordained, but the Buddha was still uneasy. If women had not been admitted, he told Ananda, the Dhamma would have been practiced for a thousand years; now it would last a mere five hundred years. A tribe with too many women would become vulnerable and be destroyed; similarly, no Sangha with women members could last long. They would fall upon the Order like mildew on a field of rice.

What are we to make of this misogyny? The Buddha had always preached to women as well as to men. Once he had given permission, thousands of women became bhikkhunls, and the Buddha praised their spiritual attainments, said that they could become the equals of the monks, and prophesied that he would not die until he had enough wise monks and nuns, lay men and lay women followers. There seems to be a discrepancy in the texts, and this has led some scholars to conclude that the story of his grudging acceptance of women and the eight regulations was added later and reflects a chauvinism in the Order. By the first century b.c.e., some of the monks certainly blamed women for their own sexual desires, which were impeding them from enlightenment, and regarded women as universal obstacles to spiritual advance. Other scholars argue that the Buddha, enlightened as he was, could not escape the social conditioning of the time, and that he could not imagine a society that was not patriarchal. They point out that, despite the Buddha’s initial reluctance, the ordination of women was a radical act that, perhaps for the first time, gave women an alternative to domesticity.

While this is true, there is a difficulty for women that should not be glossed over. In the Buddha’s mind, women may well have been inseparable from the “lust” that made enlightenment an impossibility. It did not occur to him to take his wife with him, as some of the renouncers did, when he left home to begin his quest. He simply assumed that she could not be the partner in his liberation. But this was not because he found sexuality disgusting, like the Christian Fathers of the Church, but because he was attached to his wife. The scriptures contain a passage which, scholars agree, is almost certainly a monkish interpolation. “Lord, how are we to treat women?” Ananda asked the Buddha in the last days of his life. “Do not look at them, Ananda.” “If we do not see them, how should we treat them?” “Do not speak to them, Ananda.” “And if we have to speak to them?” “Mindfulness must be observed, Ananda.” The Buddha may not have personally subscribed to this full-blown misogyny, but it is possible that these words reflect a residual unease that he could not overcome.

If the Buddha did harbor negative feelings about women, this was typical of the Axial Age. Sad to say, civilization has not been kind to women. Archeological discoveries indicate that women were sometimes highly esteemed in pre-urban societies, but the rise of the military states and the specialization of the early cities led to a decline in their position. They became the property of men, were excluded from most professions, and were subjected to the sometimes draconian control of their husbands in some of the ancient law codes. Elite women managed to hold on to some shreds of power, but in the Axial countries women suffered a further loss of status at about the time that the Buddha was preaching in India. In Iran, Iraq, and, later, in the Hellenistic states, women were veiled and confined in harems, and misogynistic ideas flourished. The women of classical Athens (500-323) were particularly disadvantaged and almost entirely secluded from society; their chief virtues were said to be silence and submission. The early Hebrew traditions had exalted the exploits of such women as Miriam, Deborah and Jael, but after the prophetic reform of the faith, women were relegated to second-class status in Jewish law. It is notable that in a country such as Egypt, which did not participate initially in the Axial Age, there was a more liberal attitude to women. It seems that the new spirituality contained an inherent hostility toward the female that has lasted until our own day. The Buddha’s quest was masculine in its heroism: the determined casting off of all restraints, the rejection of the domestic world and women, the solitary struggle, and the penetration of new realms are attitudes that have become emblematic of male virtue. It is only in the modern world that this attitude has been challenged. Women have sought their own “liberation” (they have even used the same word as the Buddha); they too have rejected the old authorities, and set off on their own lonely journey.