Life of a Buddhist Nun: Bhikkhunis, Rules, Revival

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-08-27

A Buddhist nun — a bhikkhunī — is a fully ordained woman monastic, the female counterpart of the monk. The order was founded in the Buddha’s own lifetime by his foster-mother, Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī. A nun’s life closely mirrors a monk’s — renunciation, meditation, study — but she keeps more rules, and the history of women’s full ordination is one of the most complex and contested chapters in Buddhism.

The short answer

The life of a Buddhist nun is, at its heart, the same renunciant path as a monk’s: leaving home, keeping celibacy and simplicity, and devoting oneself to meditation, study and the community. What sets it apart is two things. First, the rules: a fully ordained nun in the Theravāda tradition follows 311 training rules to a monk’s 227, including eight that formally subordinate the nuns’ order to the monks’. Second, and more consequentially, the question of ordination itself — because the lineage that makes full ordination possible was broken in some traditions and never established in others, so that today whether a woman can become a fully ordained nun depends entirely on which tradition you ask. This is a live and sensitive issue, closely tied to women in Buddhism, and it deserves an honest telling. (Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)

Mahāpajāpatī and the founding of the order

The nuns’ order begins with a remarkable woman. Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī was the Buddha’s maternal aunt and foster-mother, who raised him after his own mother, Māyā, died days after his birth. According to the Gotamī Sutta (AN 8.51) and the Vinaya’s account (Cullavagga X), she approached the Buddha and asked that women be allowed to go forth into the homeless life. The Buddha initially declined — the texts do not fully explain why — and only after his attendant Ānanda interceded on her behalf did he agree.

His agreement came with a condition: that she accept eight “rules of respect” (garudhammas), her acceptance of which itself constituted her ordination. She became the first bhikkhunī, and the order of nuns was established. It is important to be accurate here: the Buddha did not simply “refuse to ordain women” — he hesitated, and then he founded an order of fully ordained nuns, something almost unheard of for a religious teacher of his era.

The rules of a nun’s life

A nun’s daily discipline runs parallel to a monk’s — the shaved head, the robes, the alms round, celibacy, the single set of simple requisites — but her formal code is larger. In the Theravāda bhikkhunī Pāṭimokkha there are 311 rules, against 227 in the monks’ code: roughly eighty-four more.

Among them are the eight garudhammas, which place the bhikkhunī order in a formally deferential relationship to the bhikkhu order — the most-cited being that a nun of a hundred years’ standing should still show formal respect to a monk ordained that very day. These rules are the object of serious modern scholarly debate. Respected scholars and practitioners (among them Bhikkhunī Kusuma, and the monks Anālayo and Sujato) have pointed to internal problems in the texts — for instance, that some of the eight rules seem to presuppose an already existing order of nuns, which would be odd if they were the very conditions of its founding. Careful writers therefore neither treat the garudhammas as certainly the Buddha’s own words nor declare them certainly a later addition; the honest position is that their origin is genuinely disputed.

The broken — and revived — lineage

Here lies the heart of the matter, and it must be told tradition by tradition, because there is no single answer.

Full ordination as a bhikkhunī requires an unbroken lineage — existing nuns (and monks) to ordain the next generation. And that lineage has had very different fates:

• In Theravāda, the full bhikkhunī lineage died out — commonly dated to around the 11th century, amid the wars and upheavals that also devastated the monks’ order in Sri Lanka. For many centuries afterward, women in Theravāda lands could take only the precepts of a lay renunciant, not full ordination.
• In East Asian Buddhism — China, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam — a bhikkhunī lineage (in the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya) has continued unbroken to the present day. Fully ordained nuns have never ceased to exist there.
• Beginning in the late 20th century, a revival of Theravāda bhikkhunī ordination drew on that surviving East Asian lineage to restore the line. Landmark ordinations took place at Sarnath, India, in 1996 and at Bodh Gaya in 1998, and ordinations have continued, especially in Sri Lanka, ever since.

This revival is real and growing — but it is not universally accepted. Parts of the Theravāda establishment, notably some Thai and Sri Lankan monastic authorities, hold that a lapsed lineage cannot be revived and do not recognize the new bhikkhunīs; others, including scholars such as Bhikkhu Bodhi, defend the revival’s validity. This is a genuine, ongoing disagreement within the tradition, and we report it as such rather than declaring a winner.

Nuns across the traditions today

The picture in the present day is therefore varied:

• East Asia: fully ordained bhikkhunīs in an unbroken lineage — often highly educated and running large monasteries and universities, especially in Taiwan.
• Theravāda: a growing but contested community of revived bhikkhunīs, alongside large numbers of eight- or ten-precept renunciants such as Thailand’s mae chi and Myanmar’s thilashin — women deeply committed to the monastic life who are not, technically, fully ordained.
• Tibetan Buddhism: full bhikṣuṇī ordination was never established in Tibet, so women have traditionally ordained as novices (Tibetan ani in common speech). The 14th Dalai Lama has publicly supported working toward full ordination for women, and steps have been taken (a 2015 conference of the Tibetan schools opened a path via the East Asian lineage), but the issue is still being resolved.

A recurring point of accuracy across all of these: precept-holders like the mae chi, thilashin and Tibetan novices are not the same as fully ordained bhikkhunīs, even though they live renunciant lives — conflating the two is the most common mistake made about Buddhist nuns.

A path of great depth

Behind the technical questions of lineage stands a simple reality: across every tradition, women have lived the monastic life with the same seriousness, discipline and attainment as men, from Mahāpajāpatī and the awakened nuns whose verses survive in the Therīgāthā down to the scholar-abbesses and forest meditators of today. The debates over ordination are real and matter deeply — but they should not obscure the depth of the life itself.

For the founding figure, see Mahāpajāpatī; for the ordination question in detail, bhikkhunī ordination; for the wider story, women in Buddhism; and for the parallel path, the life of a Buddhist monk.