Sujato's Blog · 443 posts (24 Oct 2009 – 10 Aug 2015) · dormant since August 2015; his writing moved to the SuttaCentral forum · a clear pivot around 2012, from front-line reporting on the bhikkhuni ordination crisis to philology, translation and site-building · free, with the author dedicating everything on it to the public domain · this page is built on 23 posts of his own, spanning Oct 2009 to May 2015, including 10 from the earliest period (Oct 2009 – Dec 2010) and several on each side of the pivot · the blog has no author-curated "best of" page, so the selection was ranked by internal backlinks, external discussion, and length (essays rather than announcements)
At 7:15pm on 22 October 2009, in the hall of a monastery in Western Australia, four women took full ordination as bhikkhunis. It was the first time this had happened in the Thai Forest Tradition anywhere.
Within two weeks, Ajahn Brahm, who had made it happen, was expelled from his Thai mother monastery.
The reason given was that it was illegal. Bhikkhuni ordination is banned in Thailand. Everyone knew that; it had been cited for decades.
The other monk chanting the formal act that night was called Sujato. He did the thing almost nobody in the affair did: he went and read the ban.
He found it. The entire legal basis was a single announcement issued in 1928, when Thailand was still an absolute monarchy. What had prompted it was a man named Narin Klung, who argued that the Buddha had established four assemblies — monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen — that Thailand was missing one, and that the missing one should be restored. He donated his house as a monastery and two of his daughters ordained. The Sangha ordered the nuns arrested. Most disrobed on the spot; the two bravest were thrown in gaol and their robes torn violently from their bodies. On release they changed the colour of their robes and kept going on alms round, until one morning the elder sister was snatched away by a man on horseback.
Then the announcement came down: no Thai monk may give the going-forth to a woman.
Sujato read it line by line and found that it gets three basic facts wrong. The Pali Vinaya does not state that only a bhikkhuni can give novice ordination to a woman. The Pali Vinaya explicitly states that monks do take part in bhikkhuni ordination. And the bhikkhuni lineage had not died out — it survived in East Asia through the Dharmaguptaka line.
Then it gets better. The ruling forbids a monk acting as preceptor for a woman's ordination. At Perth the preceptor was a bhikkhuni, Ayyā Tathāālokā; Ajahn Brahm only confirmed the act on the monks' side. By the letter of the ban, he broke nothing. The people who had been breaking it for decades were the English branch of the same tradition, where the preceptor for women's ordinations had been a monk.
An archaic rule, made by an absolutist patriarchy that saw fit to imprison women for the crime of ordaining, which is based on a misreading of the Vinaya and in ignorance of the historical situation, which has not been tested for 80 years…The 1928 bhikkhuni ban, 9 November 2009
His next sentence: "This is the legal basis on which the WPP Sangha saw fit to expel Ajahn Brahm and his monastery."
That move — someone says the tradition requires it, so go and read the tradition — is the one thing this man has done all his life. Over the next fifteen years the same blade swung at larger and larger things.
He found that the "Five Points" the English elders imposed on their nuns were justified at every turn by the Vinaya, while the Vinaya has literally nothing to say about them — the order those women belonged to was invented in England in the 1980s and appears nowhere in the ancient code. So every appeal to it was improvised, which raises a question: why is the improvisation always the clause that restricts women? His summary is cold as a blade: "Notice how the Vinaya is invoked when it can be read as giving more power to the monks, but is ignored when power is given to the Elder's Council, which has no legitimacy under Vinaya."
He found that a piece of purely academic work he had done years earlier — that the earliest textual strata suggest nuns originally ordained themselves, and that the two-fold ordination was a later imposition by monks — had turned into a political bomb. As he put it: "I was originally just following a line of inquiry that was suggested to me by the texts, and only much later did the political implications become clear."
And he found something harder to say out loud. He had spent years in forest monasteries, and the training — subdue the body, let go of views — had worked on him magnificently. Then he turned it over and looked at its shadow, and stopped short: what monks must labour to push down is exactly what nuns must labour to grow. A young man's task is to stop being infatuated with his body; a woman's difficulty is revulsion at hers. A young man's task is to learn that his opinions aren't the truth; a woman's difficulty is that nobody listens in the first place.
The monks have found themselves by subduing their voice, and they don't consider that maybe the women have to find themselves by expressing their voice.Letting Go the Hero, 29 November 2010
So when nuns won't "let go and submit to the form," it isn't that they can't let go. In his words: "not because they can't let go, but because the form is wrong for them."
He also recorded, without comment, one detail from the monastery library: there had apparently been a copy of Simone de Beauvoir there before he arrived. It was burnt.
For the next decade he mostly stopped fighting and did something that looks unrelated: he helped build SuttaCentral, translated the four main Pali collections into English, and then waived all copyright and put the lot into the public domain. He wrote a long essay about it whose core is one line:
Buddhism is about letting go, copyright is about holding on.Copy this, 20 May 2015
This looks like a career change. It is the same job seen from the other side. He had already concluded that scriptures survive two and a half millennia not because the contents are great, but because the container is well made. The piṭaka of "Three Baskets" means basket — and a basket is the container, not what's in it. Scholars mock the Pali texts for their endless stock phrases and their identical openings ("Thus have I heard; at one time the Buddha was staying at Sāvatthī"), reading them as the fingerprints of later invention. He says they have it backwards: that is packaging technology. Each discourse is wrapped in those formulas like a leaf, so that it doesn't bleed into the one beside it over centuries of oral transmission.
Once you see that, everything he did afterwards connects. He will write a whole essay in irritation at a citation number (someone rendered "chapter 9, section 1" as "9001", and he lost three seconds to wondering whether the book really had nine thousand quotations). He set his website's line height from the proportions in the Buddha's first discourse. He calls the whole genre of scholarly friction "death by a thousand papercuts": arcane terminology, massive footnotes, unreadable references, dead languages, paywalls — none of it fatal, all of it adding up to an ordinary person who genuinely wanted to read the Buddha's words quietly giving up.
Having finished berating the academy for all this, he looked back at the essay he had just written, saw it studded with Pali and insider assumptions, and added a paragraph:
I'm leaving them there as evidence for the prosecution. I'm guilty as charged.Get the stuff out of the way, let the Dhamma shine, 13 March 2013
The transferable thing here is not his conclusions — you are free to disagree with them, and some people disagree forcefully. It is the opening move: when someone tells you that's just how the rules are, go and find the rule and read it end to end. Most of the time it's shorter than you expected, older than you expected, and wrong in three places.
Glossary (the background terms this page uses, one line each)
There is a forest monastery whose custom was to inter the cremated remains of its supporters in the monastery wall: a hole is made, the ashes go in, a brass plaque covers them, a short ceremony is held.
Now suppose an archaeologist excavates that wall two hundred years from now. They would notice something very interesting. In the earliest section, nearest the entrance, the plaques read "Rest in Peace" — an unmistakably Christian formula. In the later section they read "May she attain Nibbana" — unmistakably Buddhist.
What happened? Did the monastery convert from Christianity to Buddhism? Is this evidence of an obscure sect of antipodean "Buddho-Christians"? Or was there a hidden struggle inside the wall, two factions of monks competing for donations from different religious communities?
The man who set up that little puzzle happened to be living there at the time, and his answer is: none of the above.
The plaques were ordered from a shop. This being a predominantly Christian country, the shop's normal business was Christian burial plaques, so they arrived with a Christian slogan on them. Nobody gave it any thought, until someone pointed out that a Buddhist saying would be more appropriate, so one was invented. That was all there was to it.
Then he twists the knife:
Incidentally, we did not really believe that saying 'May she attain Nibbana' on the burial plaque would really help the lady concerned to attain Nibbana; it just seemed like a nice sentiment.The Ironic Assumptions of Gregory Schopen, 22 January 2011
This sits inside a long, full-bore essay against Gregory Schopen — one of the most influential and most deliberately provocative scholars of Indian Buddhism in North America, whose programme is that we should grant priority to bones and stones (inscriptions, ruins, material remains) over texts that later hands copied and revised.
The man writing it, Sujato, is a monk. What makes his example so good is that the plaques are exactly what Schopen counts as hard evidence — firmly dated, firmly placed, physically there — and what they tell you about what these people actually believed is almost entirely false. He goes on:
Now compare this concrete, dateable, placeable, 'actual' evidence with, say, some of my own essays that are available on the Net. They have no date, no place, no concrete existence at all. Yet I regard them as a more reliable and accurate guide to my beliefs and practices than those messages on the plaques at the monastery where I stayed.Ibid.
Bhante Sujato, born Anthony Best in Perth, Western Australia, in 1966. Before ordaining he played in the post-punk band Martha's Vineyard, which toured with names like INXS and Eurythmics and broke up in 1990. This is not trivia: years later, when he came to argue against copyright, his first move was to point out that he had been an original creator himself, had made a small amount from song royalties, and that "it never affected our lives all that much."
He took full ordination in the Ajahn Chah lineage in 1994, spent several years at Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia, and in 2003 founded Santi Forest Monastery and became its abbot. Here is the detail worth holding onto: in 2012 he handed the monastery he had built entirely over to the bhikkhunis and moved back to his old monastery to live. He was not pushed out. It was his own idea.
In 2005 he co-founded SuttaCentral with Rod Bucknell and John Kelly — a site holding the early Buddhist texts in Pali, Chinese and Tibetan together with the correspondences between them. From 2012 he turned to translation, rendering the four main Nikāyas into English, all published openly and with no copyright claimed. The blog is the same: its About page states plainly that everything on it is dedicated to the public domain.
The blog runs from 24 October 2009 to 10 August 2015 — 443 posts — and then stops; his writing moved to the SuttaCentral forum. So what this page is reading is a sealed six years with clean edges, and they happen to be the most turbulent six years of his life.
His first post, 24 October 2009, is called Old Buildings. It is 213 words long and there is nothing in it to spare:
Theravada Buddhism is like an old building. It's still basically sound, the arches and architecture are still magnificent, but it is run down. Bits are falling off. Paint is peeling. Termites are gobbling underneath. One whole wing has disappeared; only a few bricks, and some tattered old building plans show that a fourth wing once completed the grand design.Old Buildings, 24 October 2009
So we renovate, he continues. It is a heritage item, so we must be very careful to fully understand the original intention before changing anything. "The building has admirers. Some of them are angry. They don't like the banging and noise that disturb the silence. They don't know about the old wing — as far as they're concerned, it's always been like this."
That was written two days after the ordination ceremony. The whole blog exists because of it.
"A fourth wing" is not free-floating metaphor; it has a precise referent. The Buddha established four assemblies: monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. The Theravāda nuns' lineage lapsed in South Asia for about a thousand years. So the question is not whether to undertake feminist reform. The question is: the plans show four wings and there are three standing — do we accept the plans?
And the root problem Sujato has wrestled with ever since is hiding in that sentence: when an institution says "that's what the plans say," who has actually looked at the plans?
He did not run into this in a library. He ran into it in an event he personally took part in. At 7:15pm on 22 October 2009, in the hall at Bodhinyana, the bhikkhuni Sangha and the bhikkhu Sangha sat on either side of the shrine while four women from Dhammasara nuns' monastery took full ordination. Only two monks chanted the formal act: Ajahn Brahm, and him.
Ajahn Brahm and I did the chanting, and I confess to more than one shower of rapture as the auspicious words finally came true: evam etaṁ dhārayāmi – thus I will bear it in mind.How Australia's first Theravada bhikkhuni ordination happened, 31 October 2009
Remember that sentence. It is the key to the man, and it is also evidence for section six: he was never a neutral observer. He was a party to the case. All the philological work that follows is work in support of something he had already done, and rejoiced in. That does not make him wrong — but it does mean you have to keep it in mind the whole time you read him.
Within two weeks Ajahn Brahm and the whole of Bodhinyana were expelled by Wat Pa Pong, on the grounds that the thing was against the rules.
So Sujato got to work. His question was not whether it was right to do — he had settled that long ago — but something colder and far more damaging: this rule you keep citing, where exactly is it written? Show me.
"Bhikkhuni ordination is illegal in Thailand" had been cited for decades as common knowledge across Theravāda Buddhism. Sujato went looking for its legal source and found a single announcement from 1928.
His first instinct was to establish what kind of world that document was born into. Thailand in 1928 was still an absolute monarchy, four years from the bloodless revolution that would produce its first constitution. The Sangha was governed under the 1902 Sangha Act, which vested supreme authority in a council of elders — and at the time there was no Sangharāja at all; the King of Thailand was head of the Sangha.
Then the events. In 1928 a man named Narin Klung set out to revive the bhikkhuni order, on a simple argument: the Buddha established four assemblies, Thailand was missing one, and what is missing should be restored. He donated his own house as a monastery; two of his daughters ordained, along with at least eight other women, and a photograph of them survives. The Sangha ordered their arrest. When the police came, most of the nuns disrobed; only the two sisters held out and were taken to prison, the robes removed violently from the elder one's body. On release they changed the colour of their robes and kept going for alms, and were well supported by the public — until one morning the elder sister, out on alms round, was snatched away by a man on horseback. That was the end of the first wave.
Then the announcement came down: no Thai monk or novice may ordain any woman as bhikkhunī, sikkhamānā, or sāmaṇerī.
Here Sujato inserts the hardest paragraph in the essay:
Remember this, never forget it. When they tell you how bhikkhuni ordination is illegal in Thailand, remember whose side they are taking. Instead of condemning this behaviour as brutal and uncivilized, they are giving their support to the rule that came from this act of thuggery.The 1928 bhikkhuni ban, 9 November 2009
Only then does he start on the text itself. And once he does, the rule stops standing up.
Its argument runs: by the Buddha's allowance, a sāmaṇerī must be ordained by a fully ordained bhikkhunī of at least twelve years' standing; the Buddha did not allow a monk to be the preceptor at this ceremony; the bhikkhunī lineage has died out; therefore no properly ordained novices can be produced either. So any monk who gives the going-forth to a woman is making up his own guidelines and diverging from the Buddha's.
Sujato gives the document some credit — at least it makes a rational argument, unlike the later statements from Wat Pa Pong, which he notes "eschew any attempt at a Vinaya argument and base themselves solely on power." But it makes three basic factual errors:
First, the Pali Vinaya does not state that only a bhikkhunī can give novice ordination to a woman. Second, the Pali Vinaya explicitly states that monks do give bhikkhunī ordination. Third, bhikkhunīs still exist, through the Dharmaguptaka lineage in East Asia. The third is the decisive one, because the framers simply did not know East Asian nuns existed. This is not a disagreement about law. It is a hole in the historical record of the people who wrote the law.
And then the best part. In its wording, the ruling targets a monk acting as preceptor for a woman's going-forth. At the Perth ordination the preceptor was the bhikkhunī Ayyā Tathāālokā; Ajahn Brahm did not act as preceptor, only confirming the act on the monks' side. By the letter of the ban, he broke nothing. The people who had been consistently breaking it were the English branch, where the preceptor for women's ordinations had for decades been a monk.
The one piece of paper used to expel Ajahn Brahm convicts, on its own wording, only the side holding it.
The same blade then swung at a second document. In 2009 the English Ajahn Chah elders handed their sīladharā nuns a list of "Five Points": the most junior bhikkhu is senior to the most senior sīladharā; leadership in public situations always rests with the most senior monk present; responsibility for ordaining sīladharās passes to the bhikkhu Sangha; the nuns are to invite admonition from the monks at the end of the rains; and the sīladharā training is complete as it stands and is not a step towards bhikkhunī ordination. The nuns were told they would not be ordained until they accepted.
Every point is framed in terms of the Vinaya. Sujato takes them one at a time and arrives at a single conclusion: the Vinaya has nothing whatever to say here, because the sīladharā order was invented in England in the 1980s and the ancient code does not contain one word about it. So every appeal to it is improvised — which raises the question of why the improvisation is always the clause that controls women.
Notice how the Vinaya is invoked when it can be read as giving more power to the monks, but is ignored when power is given to the Elder's Council, which has no legitimacy under Vinaya.The Five Points, 3 November 2009
The second point — that the senior monk always leads, and may "invite" a nun to do so without that establishing any new standard of shared leadership — shows his method best. He does not argue about the distribution of authority. He goes back to a discourse: in the Anaṅgaṇa Sutta the Buddha lists, among a monk's evil unwholesome wishes, the thought "may I give the blessing after the meal, and not some other monk!"
Then he writes:
This rule tells us nothing about the Vinaya, but quite a lot about the anxieties of the monks.Ibid.
One more thing belongs here, the most personal part of the whole idea. Years earlier, Sujato had done a piece of purely textual research: comparing the earliest strata across the various Vinayas, he concluded that bhikkhunīs originally appear to have performed their own ordinations by themselves, and that the two-fold ordination was a later imposition by monks. At the time he had no idea what it was for.
When I was researching this point, I was originally just following a line of inquiry that was suggested to me by the texts, and only much later did the political implications become clear. Little did I imagine how quickly a graphic example of this power-play by the bhikkhus would show itself.Ibid.
Finally, the constructive half, written in Reform in November 2009. Everyone was saying that change must wait for consensus, that the Sangha must agree first. Sujato's answer was to go through the recent history. Not one major change in modern Thai Buddhism was achieved by consensus. Prince Mongkut founded the Dhammayuttika order without asking anyone's permission, acting on the Pali texts he had read for himself, and re-ordained in a Burmese lineage to secure what he considered a valid transmission. Ajahn Mun's forest monks were treated as deviants and fiercely resisted; when the Western monks founded Wat Nanachat the local monasteries accused them of trying to destroy Thai Buddhism. By the time Sujato arrived that dispute was long past, leaving one relic: a sign hung outside a nearby temple reading simply, "We love Thai customs."
In other words: the tradition now blocking change in the name of consensus is itself the product of changes made without any.
By late 2010 the crisis had been running for over a year, and one question still had no answer for him. He put it down exactly as it stood: people still ask me why some monks have such negative attitudes towards women, and after all this time, I still really don't know.
Note the posture. This is not a man with an answer laying out his case. This is a man backed into a corner by his own situation, going off to read Jung.
What he borrows is a simple piece of energy accounting. Spiritual sublimation works by withholding psychic energy that would otherwise flow to an object of desire and directing it upward. And the conversion is never total: part goes up, and part sinks into the unconscious.
He gives two images. Squeeze a balloon in the middle and it bulges at both ends. Burn a log and the energy locked in the wood is released for good uses — but there are always ashes left behind, and these have to be dealt with.
And then there are the ashes. What is left behind? In general, all one's negative thoughts, experience, or emotions regarding the feminine.Monks and the Feminine, 4 December 2010
He stresses this is not in itself a problem — empty out the trash every so often, no worries. The problem comes from two features peculiar to monastic life.
First: monks see themselves as Heroes of Consciousness, out on the cutting edge battling defilements and attaining remarkable states, unlike those laypeople still trapped in their attachments. That strong identification makes it very hard to admit that the practice might have a cost. So the residue is pushed further away and disowned as "not mine."
Second, and more practical: on ordaining you not only stop having sex with women, you hardly even see or talk to them, especially in the first years. Which means — and this is the hinge of the essay — your capacity to understand actual women is frozen at the moment you ordained. After that the internal image runs on its own, free to idealise or demonise without the complicating business of dealing with anyone real.
Then he goes to the Middle Ages. Jung argued that the excessive idealisation of the Virgin Mary was itself what produced the witch hunts: as the value drained out of real women, the internal image took on a charge and came back projected onto them with daemonic traits. Sujato notices something sharp here. The figure that attracts the hatred is not the alluring whore but the repulsive witch — because the witch operates in the same sphere as the spiritual man. She has a source of spiritual authority that competes with his.
Which produces a lovely question:
Now who, I wonder, is the modern-day witch? Let me nominate one candidate: the feminist!Ibid.
Like the medieval witch, he says, the stereotypical feminist is "decidedly unsexy, all hairy armpits and saggy boobs, like a classic hag of old." Her strength is not in her appearance, which implicitly valorises men's desires, but in her voice and her intellect. She speaks, boldly and intelligently, and does not recognise the patriarchy's right to monopolise discourse. She intrudes on men's domain, and does not apologise.
Then comes the funniest and best line on the blog:
I'm an unusual monk: I've actually met feminists! Yes I have, and I lived to tell the tale. I've even listened to them teach, read their books, and discussed things with them. They didn't eat me up.Ibid.
His conclusion is that if the problem is disconnection from real women and projection onto them, the remedy is almost absurdly simple: read what women wrote. Then he records one incident. When the monastery acquired an edition of the Therīgāthā — the verses of the awakened bhikkhunīs of the Buddha's own time — "one of the monks rejected it, energetically pushing it away and mocking any suggestion that it might have anything worth reading. (He's since disrobed, by the way.)"
That is half of it. The other half was written a month earlier in Letting Go the Hero, the best thing on the blog, and a piece of self-dissection.
He asks a question nobody had asked: who was the training at Wat Pa Nanachat actually designed for?
He strips it to two things. On the body: subdue it. Celibacy, one meal a day, no sleep one night a week, one set of robes, strict ascetic discipline, heat, cold, sickness, snakebite — and hardest of all, enduring postures. Hours a day on hard floors, natural for Thais and deeply unnatural for Westerners, enough that many ended up in hospital. He adds: in retrospect it seems obvious that such a marked feature of the lifestyle would have significant psychological effects — "Yet it never occurred to us to discuss this. We just endured." On the mind: don't have any views. Meditation is about silence, stopping thought. If you have views your meditation is no good, so why should anyone listen to you?
Then he identifies who those two prescriptions are medicine for, and it is himself: educated Western men in their twenties, at the height of physical strength, intoxicated by a reason they have only recently learned to use. "He is frustrated with those, like his parents for example, who simply don't get the intricate truths that he unveils. It never occurs to him that maybe they get it all too well." For that man, letting go of the body and disidentifying from thought is an enormous release.
Then he turns it over. Not all young men are infatuated with their bodies — some are confused, ashamed, frightened of sex. For them "letting go of the body" is not a needed correction to over-identification but a validation of their own self-disgust. Not all young men are caught in their own views — some are simply lost in a world of moral quicksand and want a set of values imposed from outside that they can submit to. "They love the idea of letting go of views, because they have never had any. They are happy to stop thinking, because they never really learned how to do so."
And here he stops and does something I have rarely seen anyone do: he audits the pronouns in the paragraphs he has just written.
When I was writing earlier about the stereotypical "young male" psychology I found myself using "I" and "we", while just now in speaking of the shadow I automatically shifted to the third person: "they". When I noticed this it made me uncomfortable; I felt like my language was externalizing and projecting.Letting Go the Hero, 29 November 2010
Only then does the conclusion arrive. He sets the monks' task beside the nuns' difficulty and finds them exact inversions of each other. The monk's conscious work is to stop over-identifying with the body; women's common difficulty is revulsion, doubt and image problems about theirs — he notes in passing that "the history of eating disorders before modern times is, by and large, a history of nuns." The monk's conscious work is to learn his views are not the truth; women's common difficulty is struggling to find a voice at all, and finding that what they do say glides past male ears.
Which is to say: what the monks must labour to push down is exactly what the nuns must labour to grow. Nuns had told him several times that they have to carry the shadow of the monks; he had never quite understood what that meant until he wrote this.
The monks have found themselves by subduing their voice, and they don't consider that maybe the women have to find themselves by expressing their voice.Ibid.
So the demand "why can't you just let go and submit to the form?" is the wrong question: "not because they can't let go, but because the form is wrong for them."
One detail in this section sits alone in the middle of a paragraph with no argument attached to it. Discussing how women's voices fare in such an environment, he writes:
There was apparently a book by Simone de Beauvoir at the Nanachat library before I got there: it was burnt.Ibid.
At the end of 2012, with the fight over, Sujato wrote an essay that looks impossibly pedantic. He opens by pretending it is the question tormenting us all: what does piṭaka really mean?
Piṭaka means basket; the "Three Baskets" are three baskets. The problem is that the early Buddhist texts were oral. A basket of manuscripts makes sense. What on earth is a basket of memorised texts?
His answer is one sentence, and it opens a whole world:
This is important, and I think often missed: the metaphor must originally have referred to the container, not to the contents.Concerning baskets, 26 December 2012
So who uses baskets? He traces the social history of the metaphor. Hunter-gatherers barely need containers — what you gather in the morning you eat by afternoon. Containers come into their own in the town. The capability that makes towns possible is storing food, and storing food implies an entire apparatus: roads, carts, granaries, specialist farmers, ploughs, irrigation, and a stable political authority. It also implies a new relationship to time: what is harvested each year must be set aside for the next.
So what is in those baskets is the very life of the community. If thieves take it, fire burns it, water rots it or rats eat it, starvation and annihilation are close at hand.
Then he maps this onto the canon, with a specific historical coordinate: the founding of the Kuru kingdom, roughly 1100 BCE, following Michael Witzel's work. The bulk of the Rg Veda is "family books", the jealously guarded lore of individual clans — mantras holding the secrets of the cosmos, of magic, of success in war, sharing which would be comparable to sharing military intelligence between modern nations. Yet the Rg Veda as it came down is a single standardised body that every clan possessed in full.
What glued it together? The verses prefixed and appended to harmonise the collection. He quotes the final hymn of the Rg Veda: assemble, speak together, let your minds be all of one accord; the place is common, common the assembly, common the mind.
This is no longer the voice of a tribal sage, an invoker of the gods for the immediate needs of clan. It is the voice of a nation-builder.Ibid.
Then the actual discovery. The Buddhist Pātimokkha, recited fortnightly, ends with a fixed statement of unity, present in every school's version. He compares the Pali against four Sanskrit texts — Mūlasarvāstivāda, Sarvāstivāda, Mahāsaṅghika and Mahāsaṅghika-lokuttaravāda — and finds that it shares five elements with the Vedic unity hymn: invocation (of the Buddha, of Agni); acknowledgement of the treasures just recited; repeated use of the prefix sam- for unity; the association of that unity with happiness; and a closing injunction to action.
Better still, every Sanskrit version carries a word the Pali lacks: sahita — which is the standard term for the Vedic collections themselves ("Rg Veda Saṁhitā").
The conclusion is that the Buddhist Sangha copied the literary form of the Veda — not the content, but the framing device that pins fragile words in place. His verdict on the rival tradition has a rare note of respect in it: despite all the limitations of the Vedic literature, "they got one thing right: it lasted." By the Buddha's lifetime it was already nearly a thousand years old.
Once you see this, the features of the Pali texts that most exasperate modern readers change meaning entirely. Every discourse opens with a nidāna giving setting and characters, and closes with the monks rejoicing.
Thus each text is defined by its nidana, as if it were wrapped in a leaf for safety. Without such definition, each "sutta" would blur into the next, and they would become irretrievably mixed.Ibid.
And the wrapping nests: a discourse is wrapped in its nidāna, ten discourses wrapped into a chapter, chapters into a larger section, and the outermost wrapper of all is the life of the Buddha, inside which every event and teaching takes place.
This model rehabilitates a passage long treated as a scandal. The Vinaya contains instructions for a monk who cannot remember a discourse's setting: insert the usual tropes, say it happened at Sāvatthī. Schopen titled his essay on this material "If You Can't Remember, How to Make it Up."
Sujato's reply is that this is precisely what the texts are not saying. Within the packaging model, the purpose of the instruction is to preserve the real cargo — the Buddha's words — by making sure it is wrapped properly. That incidental details on the wrapping are not authentic is of little importance; what matters is that the substance goes through untouched. Likewise, if the whole discourse becomes hard to hold, write it down. This is a method for preserving a text without change, not a method for inventing one.
And so all the features usually flagged as artificial — repetitions, stock phrases, uniform language — change character. They are engineering, in service of one goal: getting the contents through intact.
His handling of Schopen is worth noting for its manners. He opens not with a rebuttal but with a concession, itemised: many of Schopen's conclusions are "obviously true" — monastics accumulating wealth, funding building projects, lending at interest, performing weddings, all of which you can watch happening in any Buddhist country today. Then the blade: "But while it is obviously true, I would also contend that it is truly obvious." It may startle academics with little contact with Buddhism in the real world; it startles nobody who meets Buddhism every day.
Then he lands two hits, both the same shape — the sentence the opponent didn't quote. One: Schopen cites the luxurious forest dwelling of a Venerable Udāyin as evidence of how the Vinaya's compilers saw forest life — omitting that Udāyin is the archetypal bad monk of the Vinaya, whose appalling behaviour prompted rule after rule, including the one occasioned by his groping a woman visitor in that very dwelling. Two: Schopen discusses at length the term paribhāvita, "infused" with ethics, samadhi, understanding and release, in inscriptions about relics, citing various unrelated Pali usages — while avoiding the single most famous occurrence of the word, the passage repeated throughout the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the very text that records the distribution of the Buddha's relics and sits at the centre of Schopen's own field.
Sujato's inference follows: those inscriptions are quoting that discourse. And their usage has drifted from "qualities a living person develops" to "relics magically infused with power" — which means the discourse must not only have existed but circulated long enough to be thoroughly reinterpreted. As he puts it, "we must be grateful to Schopen for, yet again, inadvertently offering us another proof of the existence of the early Suttas well before the Middle Period."
The methodological core of the whole essay, though, is its best line:
Wholesome states of mind leave no scar on the rocks. Meditation attainments are airily ephemeral. Insights into reality happen in the wispy world of the mind.The Ironic Assumptions of Gregory Schopen, 22 January 2011
Meaning: "trust only material evidence" is not neutrality. It is a bias with a direction. Activities that leave material traces — building, endowing, lending — get systematically overweighted, and activities that leave none — meditating, understanding, changing — get systematically zeroed. He offers a homelier version of the same point about the Vinaya, which records misbehaviour: "We would not expect to gain an accurate vision of how an ordinary person leads their daily life today by reading law books."
The last idea is the smallest and the sharpest, and it is the one with the widest reach outside Buddhist circles. The battlefield is a single word.
The standard formula for the first jhāna contains vitakka and vicāra. In everyday Pali these mean "thinking" and "exploring", and that is how Bhikkhu Bodhi — one of the most authoritative living translators of Pali — renders them. Which has led a great many meditators to believe that you can still be thinking in the first jhāna.
Sujato says this is wrong, and how he argues it is worth watching. He puts the simple evidence first, then says that what actually interests him is a subtler linguistic approach — and explains the ordering: "if you use a complex analysis of a problem, some people, understandably enough, don't have time or interest to follow it through; and often we tend to assume that if a complex argument is just a sign of sophistry and lack of real evidence."
The simple evidence is twofold. From the texts: in the Dvedhāvitakka Sutta the Buddha describes realising that he could think wholesome thoughts nonstop day and night without harm, but that by doing so he could not still his mind in samādhi — so even wholesome thoughts had to be abandoned to enter jhāna. AN 3.101 goes further: even "thoughts on the Dhamma" must go. From experience: he asks you to sit quietly for five minutes and watch. "Let me guess: most of the time you were thinking of this or that, but occasionally there were spaces of silence. And those spaces of silence were more peaceful… And yet in jhana you're still thinking? Impossible!"
Then the real argument, built on four axioms borrowed from Julian Jaynes. All abstract words derive from more concrete ones by metaphor; metaphors move from what is better known to what is less known; a metaphor carries something over and leaves something behind; and, crucially:
Axiom 4: When words are abstracted, subtle aspects of the metaphier carry over to the metaphrand, while coarse aspects are left behind.Why vitakka doesn't mean 'thinking' in jhana, 6 December 2012
His example is earth. English has separate words for "earth" (the ground) and "solidity", so you cannot feel the relation between them. Pali uses one word, pathavi, for both: in a Vinaya passage about digging it plainly means dirt, and in a meditation text about the "earth element" it plainly means something abstract, since skin, bones and hair are called the earth-element and are not dirt. In Pali you can watch the abstraction happen; in English you cannot, because it happened too long ago to still feel like a metaphor.
Then he puts the blade to the opponent's throat. He walks the first-jhāna formula word by word. Viveka: ordinarily physical seclusion, going off alone into the forest; in jhāna, the mind's withdrawal from the senses. Kāma: ordinarily the pleasures of life, especially sex; in jhāna, the mind's inclination to take pleasure through the five senses. Akusala: ordinarily "unskilful", as of someone bad at a craft; in jhāna, any tendency of the mind that creates suffering. Dhamma: ordinarily law or custom; in jhāna, any object or quality of mind. Every one of them is an everyday word lifted and refined.
Which produces the killing question:
If this is true, then vitakka (& vicara) are the sole exceptions. Every other term in the jhana formula takes everyday words and transforms them… Only vitakka is exempt from this, and means exactly the same thing in higher consciousness as it does in lower consciousness. This argument is not merely implausible, it is totally impossible. Words just don't do that.Ibid.
This is an elegant parity argument: you don't have to prove your reading correct, only show that your opponent's requires one unmotivated exception.
So what is vitakka in jhāna? He hands it back to you again. This time don't be quiet — have a think, then stop, and look at the space that reverberates after the words end. You will notice that the coarsest and most obvious part of thinking is the verbalisation, but it does not happen alone: underneath there is a lifting of the mind onto an object. Normally it is too subtle to notice because you are busy with the words. It becomes obvious when you try to think about something your mind isn't really interested in: you keep moving the mind towards the topic and nothing much happens. That movement is vitakka. The words are what gets left behind; the placing is what carries over.
Along the same line he delivers a much larger verdict on the modern mindfulness movement. Sati originally meant memory, and was used by brahmins for memorised Vedic scripture — to recall large bodies of text accurately you enter a zone of clarity and presence, one of the sources of what we now call meditation. And in his reading:
Modern teachings on mindfulness are almost exclusively derived from a peculiar 20th century interpretation of one text, the Pali Satipatthana Sutta.A Brief History of Mindfulness, 18 January 2011
But there are seven versions of the Satipaṭṭhāna material, plus hundreds of other texts on mindfulness. Reading them all together, he concludes that several sections of the Pali version are later additions found in no other version — including the treatment of awareness of postures as a meditation in its own right (everywhere else it is preparation for meditation), and the refrain about contemplating "rise and fall" (which originally belonged only to the fourth of the four establishments). And the purpose of satipaṭṭhāna was to attain jhāna, not to replace it.
His criticism of the mindfulness industry is, to his credit, distributed fairly. When the Guardian ran a piece in 2014 headlined that mindfulness is all about self-help and does nothing to change an unjust world, he replied with a list of parallels — "Hairdressing is all about hair. It does nothing to change an unjust world." "Curing cancer is all about medicine. It does nothing to change an unjust world." — and then: "I'm beginning to see a pattern emerge here: A thing is about the thing that it is, and isn't about something that it isn't! Excellent, that's real progress."
Lay twenty-three essays side by side and a repertoire shows up, and it transfers.
Go and find the document. This is his opening move, so simple it is embarrassing, and almost nobody makes it. "Thailand bans bhikkhunis" had been repeated for eighty years; he is the man who read the 1928 page. And it is not just reading but reading the surroundings: what year, under what political system, under which act, signed by whom, prompted by what. He devotes a whole passage to establishing that 1928 Thailand was an absolute monarchy with no Sangharāja at all. How much of a document's authority comes from its contents and how much from nobody checking its date are two different questions.
Concede generously, and concede at the top. His first sentence about Schopen is not an objection but "many of Schopen's conclusions, I think, are obviously true", itemised. He declares his own interest before attacking anyone else's — "I am a forest monk, and I believe that the Buddha and his early generations of ordained disciples were also forest monks and nuns. So when I look at the heritage of Buddhism, I naturally focus on this aspect." He will even write, flatly, that he has not followed Lamotte's arguments and "must declare my incompetence to pronounce on the date of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya."
Correct yourself in public, at the top of the page. The first four paragraphs of The Five Points are retractions: his earlier post got two things wrong, and "I apologize for this mistake, retract my previous statements, and ask forgiveness for my incorrect criticisms." Not in a footnote, not at the end — in the first thing you read.
Find the sentence your opponent didn't quote. His single most effective move, and twice the same shape: Schopen quotes Udāyin's dwelling but not who Udāyin is; Schopen surveys paribhāvita but not its most famous occurrence. A third is finer still: Schopen cites a word in a commentary to argue the original text mentioned relics, and Sujato goes and reads the commentary's very next sentence, which says "But in the text it just says 'Here are his bowl and robes'." Where the other side stopped quoting is usually where the answer is.
Use parity instead of proof. The vitakka essay is the model: he does not need to establish his own rendering, only to show that the rival reading demands one word in the formula be arbitrarily exempt. The same move appears in The Five Points: the Vinaya contains both mutual admonition and one-way admonition, so the question becomes why the one selected is always the second.
Replace the abstraction with something you can see. He rarely stops at a concept. For "material evidence lies too," you get a monastery wall reading Rest in Peace. For "repetition is preservation technology," a leaf wrapped round a thing. For scholarly self-enclosure, a reference number reading 9001. For copyright, a dandelion.
He makes jokes, and the joke is the argument. In 2013 he published "Why Buddhist men shouldn't be ordained", ten reasons consisting entirely of the standard case against nuns with the genders swapped: men's broad shoulders and top-heavy physique make them topple over in meditation, and the crashing noise distracts the women, "whose 'pear-shaped' bodies have clearly evolved for sitting still for long periods of time"; their conduct at football games proves they are too emotional for monastic life; the Buddha was betrayed by Devadatta, a man, the schism at Kosambi was the work of male monastics, and Udāyin behaved so badly that many rules had to be made for him — "Thanks, men." There is not one direct argument in it, and it demolishes the position more completely than a direct argument could.
Wrap the conclusion before handing it over. This one is easy to mistake for a matter of taste; for him it is ethics. He calls the habits of academic writing "death by a thousand papercuts": arcane terminology, massive footnotes, obscure references, dead languages, paywalled journals, "pedantic explanations of the obvious and unstated assumption of the unobvious", and the pervasive sense of a dialogue between scholars rather than with people actually interested in Dhamma. His criterion is hard:
The presentation of a text conveys, unconsciously but unmistakably, what the designer thinks of the text.SuttaCentral: designing the Dhamma, 17 July 2013
Having said all that, he looked back at the essay he had just written — dense with Pali and insider assumptions — and added: "I can see how I am not yet practising what I preach. I'm leaving them there as evidence for the prosecution. I'm guilty as charged. But, your honour, I really want to change!"
Start with the most specific, because it lands squarely on his most famous argument.
On vitakka, one objection keeps being raised: he does not meet the consistency standard he holds others to. In ordinary contexts he renders vitakka as "thought", but in the jhāna formula as "placing the mind". Critics — for instance a page at lucid24.org compiling the case, attributed to a forum participant called frank — argue that a translator's job is to render a term consistently unless there is compelling reason not to, and that this produces incoherence; they also cite passages such as MN 125 where the texts seem to use vitakka as thoughts. I read that compilation itself rather than the full forum threads it draws on, so I report the shape of the objection without adjudicating it. One thing is worth noting either way: reading vitakka/vicāra non-discursively in jhāna is also the position of the Theravāda commentaries, and Bhikkhu Bodhi's notes go the same way — his disagreement with Sujato is less about translation than about how deep the first jhāna actually is. This is not a settled question.
The larger problem is an asymmetry of rigour. On home ground — Pali philology — he is careful enough to decline to date a Vinaya. Off it, the brake comes off.
Writing on the economics of copyright, he first concedes that he looked for demographic data and could not find any, then writes: "here is my thesis: the flow of money from copyright is, on the whole, from the poor to the rich; from the colored to the white; from the female to the male; from the underdeveloped countries to the developed; and from the young to the old. Prove me wrong!" That is a shifting of the burden of proof, and it is exactly the sort of move he would pounce on elsewhere. Arguing that God does not exist, he writes in passing that "Einstein showed that the shortest distance between two points is in fact a curve, due to the influence of gravity" — a dubious statement of general relativity, and in any case non-Euclidean geometry had unsettled that postulate well before Einstein. In the same essay he defines God as omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and morally perfect, then adds: "If they reject these, we are probably in the sphere of the pagan small-g gods, to which my argument does not apply." The strongest opponent — the classical theology that does not treat God as one being among beings — is ruled out of the field before certainty is declared. He faults Dawkins for the wimpiness of "almost certain", but that reservation is precisely the kind he would applaud in a textual question.
Third is a conflict of interest, and he is the one who wrote it down. Announcing the Authenticity Project in 2013, he mentions the Wikipedia page on the Pali canon: he noticed that the scholars affirming authenticity were all specialists in the field while the doubters were scholars of later Indian Buddhism and Tibetan tantra, "So I changed the page to acknowledge the backgrounds of the relevant scholars." The edit may be entirely correct. But a monk preparing a book arguing for the authenticity of those texts, editing the public reference page on that very question in order to adjust readers' impression of scholarly disagreement, is something that calls for disclosure and outside review — and he reports it in the tone of a chore ticked off.
Fourth is structural and hardest to answer. His two main bodies of work point the same way: the early texts are broadly reliable (so they carry authority), and your tradition has misread them (so someone is needed to read them properly). Both moves raise the standing of the same role — the person who can read the texts — and he is that person. This does not make him dishonest; his arguments have to be judged one at a time on their merits. But it is a systematic tilt, and he has installed nothing to correct for it.
Finally, push the criticism to its sharpest point. His finest sentence — "Wholesome states of mind leave no scar on the rocks" — cuts both ways. As an exposure of the bias in "material evidence only" it is powerful. But turn it around: if early Buddhism as a meditation movement could not leave archaeological traces, then no archaeological finding could ever disconfirm his picture. Which is exactly the fault he charges Schopen with — giving one means of knowledge absolute priority and going blind to the broader perspective. His own half-sentence applies to him.
In fairness, one more thing should be recorded: he has demonstrated a rare capacity for self-correction — stopping halfway through Letting Go the Hero to audit his own pronouns, catching himself projecting the shadow outward, and writing it down on the spot. He is not missing the organ. He just never attached it to the argument that mattered most to him.
This page also draws on: Old Buildings (2009-10-24, the blog's first post), Causing Trouble (2009-10-24), How Australia's first Theravada bhikkhuni ordination happened (2009-10-31), The Five Points (2009-11-03), Reform (2009-11-25), Fundamentalism & pornography (2010-02-18), On the interpretation of Buddhist myth (2010-03-25), Monks and the Feminine (2010-12-04), A Brief History of Mindfulness (2011-01-18), Is the Lotus Sutra authentic? (2011-10-18), On authenticity (2013-01-15), Get the stuff out of the way, let the Dhamma shine (2013-03-13), SuttaCentral: designing the Dhamma (2013-07-17), Why Buddhist men shouldn't be ordained (2013-07-19), The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist texts (2014-04-23), Mindfulness is what it is (2014-08-07), Why we can be certain that God doesn't exist (2015-01-14). His translations and SuttaCentral are at suttacentral.net.