Can a WOMAN Become a BUDDHA？ One Line Says NEVER. Who Wrote It？

Bangkok, six in the morning. A line of saffron robes moves down the street, barefoot, bowls held out. People step out of shophouses with rice still warm in the pot. Watch the robes go past. Men and boys, some as young as seven. That boy could put on the robe tomorrow, his grandmother can't. Not in the Thai Sangha. Since 1928, Thai monks have been forbidden to ordain her. This summer, a sign outside a temple hall in Chiang Mai told women they were not allowed inside. A post about it passed four and a half million views. And inside Buddhism's own scriptures, the Buddha says a woman can wake up completely. Another passage says that as a woman, she can't be a Buddha. So where does Buddhism actually stand on women? You might think you already know the answer. Old religion, old rules, women at the back. Buddhism refuses to fit that pattern as neatly as you'd expect. Because the question in the title hides four questions. Can a woman wake up, reach what most people call enlightenment? Can she be a Buddha? Can she wear the robe? Can she walk through that door? The texts and the people who interpret them answer each one differently. One of those answers came with a cost, a prediction that the Buddha's teaching would now last 500 years instead of a thousand. Some traditions say female Buddhas already exist. They have names. People bow to them every morning, and one of the very first nuns left behind words this channel has quoted to you six times. Every time, we gave them to a man. So let's go back to the first woman who asked. Her name was Mahapajapati Gotami. She was the Buddha's aunt. And after his mother Maya died a week after his birth, she was the woman who raised him, fed him, carried him. One day, according to the Anguttara Nikaya, she came to him with a request She wanted women to be allowed to go forth, to leave home and live the same life of practice his monks were living. He said, enough, go Gotami. She asked again, same answer. She asked a third time, enough, go Gotami. And he left for the city of Vaisali. What she did next is the part people remember. She cut off her own hair, she put on ochre robes. Nobody had given her permission to wear them. And with a group of women from her clan, she followed him to Vaisali. The text describes her arrival with unusual detail. Her feet swollen, her limbs covered in dust, standing at the door, crying. That's where Ananda found her. Ananda was the Buddha's cousin and later his closest attendant. He asked her what was wrong, she told him, and he went inside to ask on her behalf. And he got the same answer she did, three times. So Ananda changed the question. He stopped asking whether women may join. He asked whether a woman who goes forth can reach the fruits of the path, every stage of it, all the way to arahantship, full awakening, the end of suffering. And the Buddha said, yes, Ananda, she would. In this account, the answer to can a woman wake up is yes. No gender limit on reaching arahantship. Nothing later in the canon takes that sentence back. Keep one word from that answer, arahant, someone fully awake. In these texts every Buddha is an Arahant too, but not every Arahant is a Buddha, and one detail most retelling skip. In this version the clever question belongs to Ananda, but the story survives in other early versions too, and in the one preserved in Chinese, in the Madhyama Agama, Mahapajapati asks it herself, right at the start, can women attain the fruits of the path? Ananda only repeats her words later. Bhikkhu Analayo, who compared the versions, points this out. Depending on which copy you read, the woman at the door is either the subject of the argument or the one making it. Back in the Pali version, Ananda pressed his advantage. This woman, he reminded the Buddha, nursed you. She raised you when your mother died, and the Buddha agreed to let women into the order. If you watched our video on Yasodhara, the Buddha's wife, you already know how this story continues. She was one of those who eventually went forth too. To see why that yes mattered, look next door. The Jains were another movement of wandering renunciants in the same part of India. But later, Jain teachers split over this exact question. One branch, the Digambaras, held that liberation is impossible in a woman's body. She would need to be reborn as a man first. The other branch, the Shvetambaras, held that a woman could be liberated as she is. The scholar Padmanabh Jaini spent a whole book on that argument. On this one question, the early Buddhist texts never needed one. They said yes from the start. And then the women started speaking for themselves. There's a collection in the Pali Canon called the Therigatha, the verses of the elder nuns. It's one of the oldest surviving collections of poetry attributed to women anywhere. These poems passed from mouth to mouth for centuries before anyone wrote them down, and tradition, more than history, decides which nun spoke which verse. But the voices are unmistakable. A nun named Muta celebrates what she walked away from, a mortar, a pestle, and a crooked old husband. Others describe the moment it happened, the mind going quiet and staying quiet. Women describe their own awakening here, in the first person. More than 2,000 years ago, and almost nobody outside the tradition has heard of them. So the first of our four questions has its answer. Can a woman wake up? Yes. But joining the order meant something more than waking up. It meant wearing the robe. And the robe came with conditions handed down the very same day. Imagine a nun who has worn the robe for 60 years. She has taught hundreds of students. She knows the texts better than almost anyone alive. And a 19-year-old walks into the monastery, ordained as a monk that morning. She bows to him. That's the first of what the texts call the eight special rules, the Garudhammas. According to the same Sutta, the Buddha laid them down as his condition for letting women in. Rule one says a nun ordained even for a hundred years must bow to a monk ordained that very day. Most of the other rules place the nun's community under the monks. And one of them, rule six, will matter a great deal later in this video, so hold on to it. Rule 6 says that after a woman has trained for two years, she must request full ordination from both communities. In the monastic code, the nuns ordain her first. Then she goes straight to the monks, who ordain her a second time. Two orders, one ordination. Keep that in your pocket. Then comes the line that has haunted this story ever since. In the same text, the Buddha tells Ananda that if women had not gone forth, The true teaching would have lasted a thousand years. Now that they have, it will last only 500, half the lifespan of the Dhamma, because women were allowed in. Now, something that usually stays inside the seminar room. Scholars have looked hard at this story, and it has seams. Donal Lyo points out that by the canon's own timeline, Ananda may not even have been a monk yet, when the nun's order began. The man pleading at the door might have arrived in this story later than the story itself. There's a second problem. Throughout the Vinaya, the monastic code, a rule appears only after something goes wrong. Someone causes a problem, and the Buddha answers it with a rule. That's the pattern. Over and over. Except here. Here eight rules arrive all at once before a single nun has done anything. And several of those eight turn up elsewhere in the Vinaya as separate rules, each with its own backstory, set at a different moment. As for the 500 years, Donal Lyo reads the prediction as a later layer added to the story. 500 turns up again and again in these texts as a round symbolic number. Nobody alive was there at Visali, but if this passage was added later, then a rule that ranked every nun below every monk for most of Buddhist history rests on words the Buddha may never have spoken. Some of the monastic code still shapes daily life. You can see it in Thailand without leaving the street. When a Thai woman offers something to a monk, she doesn't place it in his hand. In the Thai tradition, the monk sets down a cloth and she places the gift on the cloth. Their hands never meet. That cloth is a Thai convention born of the restraint monks keep around the opposite sex It says nothing about women being unclean, and the restraint cuts both ways. Men in Thailand get the same warning about nuns. Behind that restraint sit two rules in the monastic code. They don't describe identical acts, so take them one at a time. A monk who with desire touches a woman commits a serious offense. He faces a period of probation, then returns to his place in the community. If a man touches a nun with desire and she allows it with desire of her own, anywhere between the collarbone and the knee, she is expelled for life. different acts and different penalties. His offense ends in probation. Hers ends her life as a nun. So the robe came with a price. It came with a bow, a ranking, a stricter rule, and a prediction that her presence had shortened the teaching's life. And still none of those rules touched the yes from Vasali. If the limit wasn't on awakening, where was it? One of the clearest statements sits in a sermon called the Bahuda Tukasutta, the discourse on the many elements in the Majima Nikaya. In it, the Buddha walks Ananda through a long list of what is possible in the world and what is impossible. And partway through, he lists five things that are impossible for a woman. A woman cannot be a fully awakened Buddha. She cannot be a wheel-turning king, the ideal ruler of the whole world. She cannot fill the role of Saka, king of the gods. Or Mara, lord of desire. Or Brahma, the high god who, in the Buddhist stories, believes he created the world. And for each one the text adds, for a man this is possible. The same restriction turns up in another collection of the canon too. The Anguttara Nikaya. This was no stray line. So, a woman can wake up completely. She cannot be a Buddha. If that sounds like a contradiction, it's because most people use those two words as if they mean the same thing. In the early texts, they don't. An arahant is someone who has finished the path, fully awake, with nothing left to do. Thousands of people reach that. According to the tradition, many of them women. A fully awakened Buddha is an arahant too, with one job nobody else has. A Buddha finds the path when nobody is teaching it. He rediscovers it alone, in an age that has forgotten it, and then founds a whole teaching around it. The tradition says only one appears in a very long stretch of time. So the no in this sermon leaves the summit open to her. What it closes is the job of building the road, which raises the obvious question, why? Look at the rest of the list. A world-ruling king. The king of the gods. The lord of desire. The god who thinks he made everything. Every single item is a position of supreme power. Ana Layo argues this is where the answer lies. In ancient India, the Buddha was imagined on the model of a universal king. The stories about his birth say a seer looked at the baby and predicted one of two futures. A king who would rule the world, or a Buddha. Both futures belong to the same kind of man and in that culture the top of the world was a man's place. Some scholars like the Japanese Buddhologist Kajiyama Yuichi have pointed to something even more literal. The texts list 32 marks on the body of a great man, the physical signs of a future Buddha or world ruler, wheels on the soles of the feet, long arms, and as the tenth mark a male organ Enclosed in a sheath. A body that has to carry that mark is by definition a male body. The Theravada tradition made it explicit. A later text called the Buddha Vamsa lists eight conditions a future Buddha must meet before his vow can succeed. The first is being human. The second is being male. Now the twist. That sermon, the Bahuta Tuka, exists in more than one version. When the early teachings spread across Asia, different schools preserved their own copies, And some survive in Chinese translation. Anilayo compared them. The Chinese version of this same sermon preserved in the Madhyama Agama has the list of what's possible and what's impossible, but the passage about women isn't there at all. His conclusion is that in this sermon, the women's list is most likely a later addition. Somebody wrote it in after the fact. One of the best known statements that a woman can't be a Buddha may not belong to the earliest form of the sermon that carries it. Whatever its origin, and the no did its work for a very long time. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, a Thai scholar we'll meet again later under a different name, wrote that Thai women are frequently told they were born female because of bad karma. Many grow up feeling they carry a heavier load than their brothers. Go back further and you find it carved in stone. In 1399, in the old Thai kingdom of Sukhothai, a queen mother left an inscription at a monastery. In it she prays that in a future life she'll be reborn a man. Anthropologists argue about how much that belief shapes women's lives today. The anthropologist Charles Keyes argued that Thai Buddhist culture never made women religiously inferior. Others read the evidence differently. That argument is still going. One woman refused the whole arrangement. You may remember the legend from our video on Tara. As a young princess, she's told that her devotion is so great that she should pray to be reborn as a man. She refuses. She vows to reach awakening in a woman's body and to keep coming back in one. A woman could finish the entire path in this life, wake up completely, and still be told that the highest seat was closed to her body. With that line written into scripture, later Buddhists had no choice. They had to argue with their own texts. Picture an assembly of monks and bodhisattvas gathered around the Buddha. And in front of them, an eight-year-old girl. She's the daughter of Sagara, a dragon king who lives under the sea. The Bodhisattva Manjushri has told the assembly she has reached awakening. A Bodhisattva named Wisdom Accumulation doubts it. This is the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential texts in all of Mahayana Buddhism. In the chapter about Devadatta, the girl appears, bows, steps aside, and speaks for herself, verses about her own awakening and a promise to teach the great vehicle. Then the monk Shariputra, the Buddha's wisest disciple according to the tradition, answers her. He tells her the body of a woman is filthy and no vessel for the dharma. And then he recites the list. A woman, he says, can never become Brahma. She can never become Chakra or Mara or a wheel-turning king or a Buddha. Recognize it? It's the same five impossibilities we met in the sermon in the last chapter. This time they come from the mouth of a character used as a weapon against an eight-year-old. The girl doesn't argue the point. She holds out a pearl, a jewel worth an entire world, and offers it to the Buddha. He accepts it at once. She turns to Shariputra and Wisdom Accumulation and asks them, was that quick? Very quick, they say. Then watch, she tells them, as I become a Buddha even more quickly than that. And in front of the whole assembly, she turns into a man, in an instant, and she becomes a Buddha, in a world to the south called the Stainless World. So is that a victory or a concession? Read it one way and it's a knockout. The girl beats Sharaputra at his own game. The thing he said was impossible happens before his eyes, faster than he can object. Read it the other way and she still needed a man's body to get there. The list survived. She went around it. Scholars still argue whether that sudden change of body undercuts the message or completes it. Some read her as proof that a woman can reach Buddhahood. Others see the old rule kept intact. Another Mahayana text took the argument somewhere far more daring. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, Shariputra meets a goddess, and he asks her more or less, If you're so advanced, why don't you change out of your female body? Her answer is wonderful. She says she has been looking for her female state for twelve years, and she hasn't been able to find it. Then she uses her power. She turns Sharaputra into a woman and takes his form herself. And now, in his voice. She asks him the question he asked her. Why don't you change out of your female form? And Shariputra, wise Shariputra says, I do not know what to transform. He can't find it either. The thing he demanded she give up has no place where it lives. The goddess then quotes the Buddha. In all things, she says, there is neither male nor female. And she turns them both back. The monk who voiced every objection ends the scene in a woman's body, unable to say what he'd change. In Tibet, the argument went further still. There, people stopped asking whether a woman could be a Buddha and started bowing to her, Tahra. Tibetan Buddhists often revere her as a fully awakened Buddha, though some of her own texts call her a Bodhisattva. Either way, she is among the most loved figures in the whole tradition. Yeshe Tsogyal revered in Tibet's Nyingma tradition as a fully realized woman. Some call her a female Buddha. Her story has its own video on this channel too. Around them stand other sacred women who aren't counted as Buddhas at all. And the difference matters. Prajnaparamita. The perfection of wisdom sutras call wisdom the mother of all Buddhas. Later artists gave that wisdom a body. A serene goddess with a book in her hand. She is wisdom made visible. The mother the sutras describe. Then travel east into China and you meet Guan Yin. She started as Avalokiteshvara, The Bodhisattva of Compassion, mostly shown as male in early Chinese art, from around the 10th century, the figure became more and more female. By the Ming dynasty she was the goddess of mercy, and the Lotus Sutra had already listed seven female forms among the 33 this Bodhisattva could take. One more detail, Tibetan practitioners of the Vajrayana take vows called the Root Down Falls, the gravest failures a practitioner can commit. A text attributed to the Indian master Ashvaghosha lists fourteen. The fourteenth is to disparage women who are by nature wisdom. Over the centuries that followed, Buddhists who had inherited the line, a woman cannot be a Buddha, were placing women on their altars and making it a grave offense to speak badly of them. The schools disagreed about Buddhahood because they disagreed about doctrine, but the robe was a different matter. Whether a woman could wear it depended on something much more practical. Whether a line of nuns had survived in her country, and who had the power to rule on it. Remember Rule 6. A woman must be ordained by both orders, the nuns, then the monks. Now picture what happens to that rule in a country where the nuns disappear. In East Asia, they never disappeared. In China, Korea, and Taiwan, a line of fully ordained nuns has continued for centuries. In Taiwan today, by one scholar's estimate, There are roughly three nuns for every monk. Tibet is a different story. The texts for ordaining nuns did reach Tibet. But a fully ordained order of nuns never took root there. For centuries, Tibetan nuns could go only so far. That's changing. In December 2016, the Dalai Lama awarded the Geshma degree, the highest academic title in Tibetan monastic education, to 20 nuns for the first time in history. And in June 2022, in Bhutan, the country's chief abbot, the Je Khenpo, gave full ordination to 144 nuns in the Tibetan lineage. Sri Lanka is where Theravada's line of nuns broke. By the 11th century, the order disappears from the record. Nobody knows exactly why. In 1996, at Sarnath in India, Sri Lankan monks ordained 10 women with the help of Korean monks and nuns. In 1998, another ordination followed at Bodh Gaya, and after a Supreme Court decision in June 2025, Sri Lanka began issuing identity cards with the title Bhikkhuni to nuns ordained through one established monastic chapter. Others are reviewed case by case. Many of the country's senior monastic leaders still haven't formally recognized the order. Then Thailand. In 1928, the Thai Supreme Patriarch issued an order forbidding Thai monks to ordain women. As novices, as trainees, or as full nuns. In December 2014, Thailand's Sangha Supreme Council reaffirmed it. Their position in their own terms goes like this. The Theravada line of nuns died out long ago. Rule 6 requires nuns to ordain nuns. With no Theravada nuns left, nobody can perform the ordination validly. And an ordination done with the help of East Asian nuns comes from a different lineage, so the council counts it as invalid. That's a serious argument made by people who take the monastic code seriously. And some of the most respected Western monks agree. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, an American abbot and one of the most careful readers of the Vinaya Alive, has concluded that monks are no longer permitted to ordain nuns on their own. Piku Analiyo reads the same code and reaches the opposite conclusion. When no order of nuns exists, he argues, ordination by monks alone is the proper way to proceed. And this is where it all collides. The rule at the center of the whole dispute is Rule 6, one of the eight rules from Vasali, one of the same eight whose origin scholars doubt. Two respected monks read the same Vinaya and come out with opposite answers. And which reading wins decides whether the grandmother ever gets her robe. So who is the woman in white you see at Thai temples? If you've visited a Thai temple, you've almost certainly passed her. She's a Mae Chi. She shaves her head, wears white, and keeps eight or ten precepts. Thai law doesn't treat her as ordained clergy. The Sangha doesn't either. Whether she may walk the alms round at all is disputed, and many never do. Many spend their days in meditation and temple work. Some have become respected teachers of Pali. The Thai Mae Chi Institute registered about 16,000 of them in 2019, and one scholar estimates there may be 20,000 in all. Some Thai women went further. In 2003, a former university professor named Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, the same scholar from Chapter 3, received full ordination in Sri Lanka. She became Venerable Dhammananda, and by her own description, Thailand's first fully ordained Theravada nun. By 2025, according to a report in Tricycle, Thailand had about 280 bhikkhunis in 33 monasteries. Most were ordained abroad. In September that year, more than 100 nuns and novices met at Chulalongkorn University for the first Thai Bhikkhuni Sangha Seminar. They gave it a title that sounds like a plan. Intergeneration and sustainability. Neither the Sangha Supreme Council nor the state recognizes any of them. Which brings us to the fourth question. The door. This July, a sign at the Silver Temple in Chiang Mai, Wat Si Su Pan, went viral. Women may not enter its ordination hall. The sign states the rule without explaining it. Thai social media users explained it with old Lanna beliefs about sacred space. and about menstruating women making that space impure. Some temples in the north keep similar rules. None of that comes from the Buddha. You won't find it in the suttas or the Vinaya. It's a local belief that settled into Buddhist buildings, and it now sits on a temple door in front of millions of phones. So the robe and the door are still argued over in councils and comment sections. Institutions disagree, and even the scholars can't settle it. Which makes the oldest answer worth hearing again. The one a woman gave in her own words to Mara's face. Her name was Soma. She was a nun and one day she went into a forest grove, sat down at the foot of a tree and began to meditate. Then Mara came. Our video on Buddha versus Mara covered who he is. Think of him as the voice that pulls you off the path. The doubt and the craving dressed up as a reason. He wanted her to give up and he went straight for her body. He told her that the state the sages reach is hard to attain and that no woman could reach it with her two-fingered wisdom. What does two-fingered wisdom mean? Even the ancient commentators couldn't agree. One says it simply means a little wisdom. Another thinks of the two fingers a woman uses to spin cotton. A later one pictures a cook pinching a grain of rice between two fingers to test if it's done. Those are later readings, but every one of them points the same way. At the small work the world expected of a woman, Soma didn't flinch. In Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation, she answered him, What does womanhood matter at all when the mind is concentrated well? And then she turned his question back on him. Anyone who thinks I'm a woman, or I'm a man, or I'm anything at all, that person, she said, is the one Mara should be talking to. Think about how sharp that is. Mara tried to trap her inside a label. She answered that the label is the trap, the one who clings to I'm a man as every bit is caught as the one who clings to I'm a woman. Mara understood he'd been recognized, and in the words the texts use, every time he loses, he vanished on the spot. She wasn't the only nun Mara came for. He found another one, Vajira, sitting alone, and this time he tried a different trick. He asked her a philosophical question. Who made this being? Where is its maker? Vajira answered with an image. In Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation, just as with an assemblage of parts, the word chariot is used. So, when the aggregates are present, there's the convention of being. Does that sound familiar? It should. If you've watched this channel, you've heard that chariot many times. Wheels and axle, and no chariot anywhere apart from the parts. We've told it in our videos on the five aggregates. On Jung and the Buddha, on Confucius, on death, on Krishna, and on the self that's watching right now. Six times and every time we credited the monk Nagasena debating the Greek king Melinda. Nagasena does use the chariot, but open the Milinda Panha itself, the very text we quoted, and look at what he says right after. He tells the king the verse was spoken, and I'm quoting, by our sister Vajira, in the presence of the Blessed One. Nagasena was quoting a nun, and he said so. We didn't. That's a mistake we made, and we're correcting it here. In one of those videos, we even said the Buddha often used the image. In the canon, the chariot verse comes from Vajira, who first thought of a chariot as a way of seeing the self is beyond anyone's proof. But the earliest version in the canon is in a woman's mouth, and the man who made it famous gave her the credit. The canon kept both answers. Soma's face-to-face with Mara. Vajiras, which went on to become one of the best-known images in all of Buddhism. Generations of monks memorized them and carried them for two thousand years. Whatever else those same monks wrote about women, they didn't erase these two. So can a woman become a Buddha? Here are the four answers, plainly. Can she wake up? Yes, and the nun's own poems are the proof. Can she be a Buddha? As a woman, the Pali Canon says no, though in one of its best-known sermons that no may be a later addition. Mahayana texts argued with it for centuries. Tibetan Buddhism bows to female Buddhas. Can she wear the robe? That depends on where she stands. In Taiwan, yes. In Bhutan, since 2022. In Sri Lanka, yes, with many senior monks still withholding recognition. In Thailand, only from monks outside the Thai Sangha, abroad or through groups the Sangha doesn't recognize, and then home to a Sangha that won't count her. In the door, a local rule explained today through old Lanna beliefs now kept on a Buddhist hall. Now go back to a street like that one at six in the morning and meet one woman. Her name is Damakamala. Before she became a bhikkhuni, she was a mae chi, white robes, shaved head. When she walked out with her bowl in white, people greeted her with smiles and gave her food. Then she was ordained and she put on saffron. On her first morning out in the new robe, she told Tricycle she received no food. Only insults. Same woman, same bowl, and a different robe. It got worse. Someone posted her photograph online. Local monks called her a fraud and insisted there are no bhikkhunis in Thailand. She has her own way of reading that morning. She treats that kind of hostility as a test of practice, and she put it in one line. Dhamma flourishes because of obstacles. She isn't alone. An hour west of Bangkok in Nakhon Pathom, There's a monastery called Songdama Kalyani. Venerable Dhamma Nanda leads it now. Her own mother, Vora Mai, was ordained in Taiwan back in 1971, long before any of this was possible at home. Every morning, the nuns of Songdhammakalyani walk out in saffron with their bowls, the way the monks do. In the early years, some households turned their backs as they passed. They walk anyway. The bhikkhuni tricycle spoke to see those mornings the same way Dhamma Kamala does A morning like that one is part of the practice itself. A chance to face the mind's old conditioning, the sankharas, head on. The insults land, and the work is watching what they stir up, and they're making sure it continues. When a new woman asks to ordain as a novice, senior bhikkhunis, qualified to give that ordination, travel long distances to be there. A nun from Nong Khai, in the far northeast, described it at that seminar in Bangkok last year. Each ordination like that is one more woman on the street at dawn, and one more teacher for the woman who comes after her, and the obstacles are real. A robe brings food, teachers, a place to live, a community that will catch you if you fall. When a council refuses to count a woman's ordination, it can cut her off from much of that. Official standing and the backing of the wider sangha. Thailand's bhikkhunis have built monasteries and networks of their own, without that backing. Questions two, three, and four are still being argued in councils and courtrooms, and they may be argued for decades more. Question one was answered at Vaishali and answered again under a tree by a woman who told Mara his label was the trap. No council has ever voted on that one, and Soma's answer reaches past them to you. You carry labels too. Somebody handed you every one of them. A family decided what a son does, what a daughter does. A school decided whether you were the clever one, a workplace decided how loud you get to be, a culture decided what a body like yours is allowed to want and how far it's allowed to go. Some of those labels were kind, even useful. Others were written for a world that no longer exists. Most of them you never chose, and you've carried them so long you've stopped noticing their weight. Try it right now. Notice the next thought that says people like me don't, then ask who put it there Usually you can find a name or a sentence somebody said once, years ago, that never left. Soma's first name's thoughts like that. I'm anything at all. Anyone who takes one of those as the measure of what a steady, clear mind can do, she said, is someone Mara can talk to. Two thousand years of rulings decided where women could stand and what they could wear. Those rulings mattered, and some of them still decide who eats. A ruling can make a woman believe that thought. You heard in Chapter 3 that many did. What no ruling can do is make it true. Every label you carry was handed to you by someone. None of them can sit down in your place and look at your own mind. If you've ever watched a line of monks pass at dawn and wondered where the women were, tell us in the comments what you saw and where I read them. If this video changed how you think about that question, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Thank you for watching Buddha's Wisdom. Stay curious. Stay wise.