Fencing the Rice Paddies: Creating a Monastic Code of Conduct for Myanmar/Burma’s Buddhist Nuns

Myanmar’s conservative monastic bodies and associated government regulators have consistently argued that the bhikkhunī (higher ordained nun) lineage died out and therefore, according to the scriptures, it cannot be reinstated. And in fact, Myanmar’s nuns are not bhikkhunīs but a form of female renunciate called a thilashin. Yet in the early 1900s a thilashin named Daw Konmayi and the  famous monk, the Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw of Sagaing, knew that in the absence of the Bhikkhunī Vinaya there needed to be rules to protect the thilashin, thereby creating a monastic code of conduct. In 1994, the State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee, completed a revised version of these rules. This paper compares the two works and similar to Martin Seeger (2018), makes the case for looking at how these nuns have made a space for themselves in which scholars miss when focusing on the bhikkhunī debate.