Bhikkhuni Ordination: The Lost Lineage & Its Revival

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-26

Full ordination for Buddhist nuns — bhikkhunī ordination — was begun by the Buddha himself, lost for most of a millennium, and revived only in the last few decades. The story of how that happened, and why it is still fiercely debated, is one of the most consequential threads in modern Buddhism. It belongs at the heart of any honest account of women in Buddhism.

What a bhikkhunī is

A bhikkhunī is a fully ordained nun — the female equivalent of a bhikkhu, a monk — living under the complete monastic code. The order was founded when the Buddha ordained his foster-mother, Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, and for centuries it flourished alongside the monks’.

It is important to distinguish full ordination from the partial forms of renunciate life that have continued unbroken: the ten-precept mothers (sil matas) of Sri Lanka, the thilashin of Myanmar, the mae chi of Thailand. These women lead devoted religious lives, but they keep fewer vows and hold a lower formal standing than a fully ordained nun — which is precisely why the revival of full ordination matters so much.

The lost lineage

Buddhist ordination is a chain of hands: it traditionally requires a quorum of those already ordained to ordain the next generation. That is its strength and its fragility. When the chain of bhikkhunīs is broken, it cannot be re-forged from books alone.

In the Theravāda world, the bhikkhunī lineage lapsed around the 11th century, in Sri Lanka, amid the invasions and upheavals that ended the great monastery culture of Anuradhapura. The monks’ lineage, when it too faltered, could later be restored by inviting monks from Burma or Siam — but the nuns’ order could not, because no Theravāda country had kept it alive. (A bhikkhunī lineage in Burma appears to have died out even earlier, by around the 13th century.) For the better part of a thousand years, a Theravāda woman simply could not become a fully ordained nun.

The modern revival

The revival, when it came, was an act of cross-tradition cooperation. The one place a continuous full-ordination lineage for women had survived was the East-Asian Mahāyāna tradition — the Dharmaguptaka lineage preserved in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The argument that unlocked the revival was that this surviving lineage could be used to restore what Theravāda had lost.

Two ordinations stand out. In 1996, at Sarnath in India, around ten or eleven Sri Lankan ten-precept nuns received full ordination, with the participation of Korean monastics. Then in February 1998, at Bodh Gayā, the Taiwanese order Fo Guang Shan organised a large international ordination — well over a hundred women from more than twenty countries — with Mahāyāna and Theravāda monastics taking part together. From these beginnings the revived order grew, especially in Sri Lanka, where senior monks such as Inamaluwe Sri Sumangala supported it.

Where it stands, tradition by tradition

The result today is a patchwork, and the differences are real:

• Sri Lanka has a flourishing revived order — by most counts several thousand bhikkhunīs. But the country’s senior monastic councils (the Mahānāyaka Theras) have largely declined to officially recognise it, holding the revival to be irregular; the monastic establishment is genuinely split.
• Thailand has bhikkhunīs — the scholar-nun Dhammananda Bhikkhunī became, in 2001–2003, the first modern Thai woman fully ordained in the Theravāda tradition (ordained in Sri Lanka). But the Thai Sangha Supreme Council does not recognise them, citing a ban issued in 1928 by the then Supreme Patriarch against monks ordaining women.
• Myanmar does not recognise full ordination for women; nuns there live as thilashin.
• Tibetan Buddhism never historically received the full bhikṣuṇī ordination at all; nuns have traditionally held novice vows. The Dalai Lama has expressed support for restoring it and convened a major congress on the question in Hamburg in 2007, but has said the decision needs cross-school consensus rather than a single ruling. (Prominent Western nuns in the Tibetan tradition, such as Tenzin Palmo, have been vocal advocates for restoring it.)

The 2025 Sri Lanka ruling

In June 2025, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka handed down a notable judgment. A fully ordained nun had for years been refused a national identity card bearing the title bhikkhunī; the state wanted to record her instead as a sil mata. By a two-to-one majority, the court held that the refusal was unlawful gender discrimination under the constitution’s equality guarantee — reasoning, in effect, that a man in her position would not have faced the same obstacle — and ordered the state to issue the card with her chosen title.

It is worth being precise about what this did and did not do. It was a ruling on civil recognition — a citizen’s legal title on a government document — not a ruling that validated bhikkhunī ordination as a matter of monastic law. The court did not, and could not, compel the Mahānāyaka Theras to recognise the order. But as a sign of where the wider current is flowing — toward equal standing — it was widely read as a landmark.

Why it matters

The debate can look, from outside, like a technicality about quorums and lineages. It is not. At stake is whether half of Buddhism’s practitioners can take up the same full renunciate life the Buddha opened to them at the very founding of the order — the life he affirmed they were fully capable of living, all the way to awakening. The history here is tangled and the traditions genuinely disagree; we have tried to lay it out without flattening either the obstacles or the progress. For the figure who began it all, see Mahāpajāpatī; for the awakened women who proved the point, the Therīgāthā. Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.