6.11 — The Hard Cases: Angulimala, Kisa Gotami, Devadatta, and the Women

Four encounters, and each one is the teaching meeting a situation where doctrine is not enough.

Angulimala

A serial killer. He wore a garland of fingers taken from his victims — anguli is finger, mala is garland — and the traditional count is that he had nearly a thousand. A whole region was terrified of him and the king was preparing an expedition.

The Buddha walked into his forest alone.

Angulimala came after him and could not catch him, though the Buddha was walking normally. He shouted at him to stop.

And the Buddha said the line the tradition never forgot: I have stopped, Angulimala. You stop.

Angulimala asked what he meant. And the answer: I have stopped forever, having laid aside violence towards all beings. You have no restraint towards living things. That is why I have stopped and you have not.

He ordained him.

The aftermath, which is the whole point

This is the part that is usually cut, and it is the reason the story is worth having.

Angulimala becomes a monk and practises seriously, and his past does not go away.

He goes for alms and people throw stones at him. He is beaten. He comes back bleeding, with a broken bowl and a torn robe.

And the Buddha does not comfort him. He says: bear it. He tells him that he is experiencing here and now the result of actions that would otherwise have consequences far greater.

There is no absolution. He is accepted completely and he is not excused anything.

And he is later described as having attained the goal, and there is one further scene: he passes a woman in difficult labour and is distressed, and is told to go and speak a truthful statement to her. He says: since I was born in the noble birth, I have not intentionally deprived a living being of life — carefully worded to be true of his life as a monk — and by that truth may she be well.

What this establishes

Nobody is written off. This is the strongest possible version of the claim, and 5.4 showed the Gita making it too: even the worst sinner crosses over by the raft of knowledge. Two traditions, independently, refusing to exclude anybody.

And acceptance is not absolution. He is taken in and he pays. The stones keep coming and he is told to bear them.

Which is a much more honest account of what change costs than most traditions offer. A person who genuinely changes does not thereby get the past cancelled, and the world does not have to forgive them on their schedule. What changes is what they do next.

And "I have stopped, you stop" is worth having on its own. The distinction being drawn is not between a good man and a bad one. It is between someone who has stopped and someone still going, and it is offered as a description rather than a judgement.

Kisa Gotami

A young woman whose infant son dies.

She will not accept it. She carries the body from house to house asking for medicine for her child. People tell her the child is dead and she keeps going.

Somebody sends her to the Buddha.

And he does not tell her the child is dead. He does not explain impermanence. He does not offer the doctrine, all of which he had and none of which he uses.

He says: bring me a mustard seed from a house where no one has died.

She goes. House after house. Every house has a mustard seed and every house has a death — a father, a child, a wife, a grandmother. And each family tells her about theirs.

By evening she understands, and she buries her son.

Why this is the best teaching in the canon

Because he refuses to explain.

She was not short of information. She knew the child was dead. Every person who had told her so had been correct and had achieved nothing, which is exactly the point 4.7 made about grief and explanation.

What he gives her instead is a task, and the task does three things no explanation could.

It gets her moving, which is the correct response to a state that has locked (5.8).

It puts her in contact with other people's losses, one house at a time, in their own words. She is not told that death is universal. She hears it from forty households.

And she arrives at the conclusion herself, which is the difference between information and jnana (5.4). Nobody can be argued into accepting a death.

The general principle, and it is one of the most useful in this whole volume: when somebody cannot accept something, do not give them the argument. Give them a task that will bring them into contact with the reality. And be prepared for it to take all day.

Devadatta

Covered in 6.10 as an institutional matter. Here, as a human one.

He was a cousin, a genuine practitioner, and he wanted the position. He tried to kill the Buddha three times and split the community.

And the Buddha's response is worth examining because it is not what people expect.

He does not forgive him in any sentimental sense. He says plainly that Devadatta's actions will have consequences, and the tradition says he was reborn in a hell realm.

He does not retaliate. No expulsion campaign, no denunciation tour.

He does not soften the standard to keep him.

And when Devadatta's followers leave, he sends two senior monks to teach them — not to argue against Devadatta, but to teach — and they come back.

The pattern: name the harm accurately, do not retaliate, do not change what you are doing, and take care of the people caught in the middle.

That is a complete response to a hostile takeover attempt and it works.

The women

And now the episode this book will not defend, because it should not be defended.

Mahaprajapati — his aunt, who raised him after his mother died a week after his birth (6.1) — came and asked to be ordained.

He refused.

She asked again. He refused again.

She cut off her hair, put on the robe, and walked with a group of Shakya women to where he was staying — a journey of some distance — and stood outside, covered in dust, with swollen feet, weeping.

Ananda, his attendant, found her there and went in to plead. He was refused too.

So Ananda asked a different question: are women capable of attaining the goal?

And the Buddha said yes. Fully. Without qualification.

Ananda then said: then, since the woman who raised you, who nursed you when your mother died, is standing outside — should she not be permitted?

And he agreed.

The eight rules, and the prophecy

He attached eight conditions, all of which subordinate nuns to monks — including one saying that a nun ordained a hundred years must bow to a monk ordained that day, which reverses the sangha's own seniority principle (6.10).

And the text records him saying that because women had been admitted, the teaching would last five hundred years rather than a thousand.

Stating it plainly

Two positions have to be held at once and this book will hold both.

What he did was better than his society. He said women were fully capable of the highest attainment, which contradicted essentially every religious authority of his time. He created the first order of women renunciates in Indian history, giving women a legitimate life outside marriage and family — which in that world was a genuine and enormous thing. The nuns' own poems survive, the Therigatha, and they are among the earliest women's writing anywhere in the world.

And what he did was wrong, and the reasons offered do not work.

"He was concerned for their safety." Possibly, and it does not explain the eight rules, which are about rank rather than protection.

"It is a later interpolation." Serious scholars do argue this — the passage sits awkwardly, the prophecy about five hundred years is undermined by the fact that the tradition demonstrably lasted longer, and the eight rules contradict the sangha's own founding principle of seniority by ordination date. The argument is real and it is not settled, and this book will not use it as an escape route.

"He reflected his time." He did — and he contradicted his time on caste, on ritual, on sacrifice and on the authority of the Vedas. He was entirely capable of contradicting his time when he judged it wrong. Here he did not, or did so only halfway.

The honest verdict: he had to be argued into it by a man asking a question he could not answer badly, and having conceded the principle completely — women can attain the goal — he attached conditions that contradicted it. That is the most common shape of institutional failure on this subject and it is still the most common shape today.

And Ananda is the one who deserves the credit. He asked the question that could only be answered one way, and then applied it to the person in front of him. That is a technique, and it is a good one.

What to carry from this page

"I have stopped. You stop." Not a judgement about worth — a description of two states.

Acceptance is not absolution. The stones kept coming and he was told to bear them.

When somebody cannot accept a fact, give them a task, not an argument. The mustard seed is the best piece of practical wisdom in this Part.

Against a hostile takeover: name it, do not retaliate, do not change what you are doing, and take care of the people in the middle.

And when someone great fails on something obvious, say so. A tradition that cannot name its founder's error will repeat it, and this one has, for two and a half thousand years.

Next: 6.12 — the fourteen questions he refused to answer, why he refused, and the best answers anyone has managed since.