Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns

When the Buddha established his community over twenty-five centuries ago, he did so upon a foundation of unprecedented equality among women and men. And indeed, the earliest Buddhist scriptures celebrate the teachings and inspiring influence of these path-blazing female renunciants. Nonetheless, through much of the Buddhist world, the order of nuns has disappeared or was never transmitted at all.

Dignity and Discipline represents a watershed moment in Buddhist history, as the Dalai Lama together with scholars and monastics from around the world present powerful cases, grounded in both scripture and a profound appeal to human dignity, that the order of Buddhist nuns can and should be fully restored.