Peter Skilling
French School of Asian Studies, École française d'Extrême-Orient
Buddhist women were active participants in the construction of early Buddhism in India. Nuns and laywomen were among the sponsors of monuments, monasteries, and statues of the Buddha across India, and a collection of verses attributed to nuns is among the earliest documents of female literature in India, or, perhaps, worldwide. Were women merely donors, or were they also intellectual innovators? This paper reflects on this difficult and complex question by examining inscriptions and early Buddhist texts.
(Presented in the 2013 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum: The Emergence and Heritage of Asian Women Intellectuals, 10-11 September 2013, Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Indian Studies Center, Chulalongkorn University)