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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".