ORDER OF BHIKKHUNIS - ဘိကၡဳနီ

ORDER OF BHIKKHUNIS Bhikkhuni

ဘိကၡဳနီ -       ဘိကၡဳနီမ၊ ရဟန္းမ။

ဘိကၡဳနီသာသနာသည္ မိေထြးေတာ္ မဟာပဇာပတိ ေဂါတမီ၏ စြမ္းေဆာင္မႈကုိ အေျခတည္၍ အရွင္အာနႏၵာ၏ ေလွ်ာက္ထားေတာင္းပန္မႈေၾကာင့္ ေပၚေပါက္လာရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဘိကၡဳနီ ေခၚ ရဟန္းမ မ်ားသည္ ရဟန္းေယာက္်ားမ်ားထက္ပုိ၍ သိကၡာပုဒ္ (၃၁၁)ပုဒ္ကုိ တင္းက်ပ္စြာ လုိက္နာေစာင့္ထိန္းၾကရသည္။ ဘိကၡဳနီရဟန္းမ ျပဳလုပ္ေသာအခါ ဘိကၡဳ ဘိကၡဳနီ ႏွစ္ဖက္လုံးထံ ၾသ၀ါဒ ခံယူၾကရသည္။

ဘိကၡဳနီသာသနာ ေပၚေပါက္လာျခင္းျဖင့္ အမ်ဳိးေကာင္းသမီးေလးမ်ားသည္ အမ်ဳိးသားမ်ားနည္းတူ တန္းတူအခြင့္အေရးမ်ား ရရွိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ရဟန္းမျပဳလုပ္၍ မဂ္ဖုိလ္အသီးအပြင့္မ်ားကုိ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ား ခံစားၾကရ၏။ ဘုရားရွင္သာသနာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း (၆၀၀)ေက်ာ္ခန္႔အခ်ိန္တြင္ ဘိကၡဳနီသာသနာ ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္ၿပီးေနာက္ ရဟန္းမမ်ား၏ နည္းကုိမွီ၍ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားသည္ ၈-ပါး၊ ၁၀-ပါးသီလကုိ ေစာင့္ထိန္းကာ သာသနာႏြယ္၀င္ သီလရွင္အျဖစ္ ျပဳလုပ္လာၾက၏။ ထုိအခါ အမ်ဳိးသမီးကေလးမ်ားသည္ အမ်ဳိးသားမ်ားနည္းတူ ပရိယတ္ ပဋိပတ္တုိ႔ကုိ ထမ္းေဆာင္ခြင့္ကုိ ရရွိခဲ့ၾကျပန္၏။

The order of bhikkhunῑs owed its appearance to Mahᾱpajᾱpati Gotamῑ, the Buddha’s aunt and stepmother and also to the venerable Ᾱnandᾱ who sought permission from the Buddha to set up the bhikkhuni order. Bhikkhunῑs had to observe 311 disciplinary rules, more than those for the male counterparts. With the arising of the order of bhikkhunῑs, daughters of decent families obtained the same rights as those obtained by bhikkhus. They enjoyed the results of the Path and Fruition. Their order, however, ceased to exist after six centuries of the Buddha’s Teaching. Later on womanfolk became nuns by keeping the eight or ten precepts, and by adapting the rules of the bhikkhunῑs to their requirements. Then they came to regain the opportunities to shoulder the responsibilities of learning and practices as men do.