Indispensable for dispensation: The agency and experience of Buddhist nuns in the early history of the <i>bhikkhunī saṅgha</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The entry of women into Buddhist monasticism was permitted with great reluctance and a special set of rules. Within the disciplinary framework of institutional subordination, Buddhist nuns created spaces that provided women with spiritual opportunities away from social and domestic ties. Although monks dominated both the Buddhist saṅgha and religious texts, the earliest nuns worked assiduously and creatively to strengthen their practice. This article explores early Buddhist texts to unravel gendered monastic experiences. The nuns could not have registered a vital presence in the history of Buddhism if they had remained passive members. Social relations before they joined the order, as well as the newly forged bonds within, played a significant role in their progress in comprehending and observing spiritual practices. When seen on their own terms, the position and contribution of nuns appear stronger and more agentive than has been usually assumed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".