Khema

She was born a princess of the kingdom of Madda, in the far northwest of the Indian plain, with a complexion the texts compare to the inner petal of a lotus and a face the gandharvas were said to envy. The Buddhist commentaries make extensive use of her beauty; it is the thing that almost prevents her from finding the dhamma. She was given in marriage, while young, to King Bimbisara of Magadha — the same Bimbisara who had been the Buddha's first royal patron, donated the Veluvana (Bamboo Grove) to the Sangha, and had been a sotapanna since the first year of the dispensation.

Bimbisara was a stream-enterer; Khema was not. Bimbisara loved Khema; he wanted her to hear the dhamma. Khema refused to go anywhere near the Bamboo Grove. She had heard — perhaps from her court ladies, perhaps from her own intuition — that the recluse Gotama spoke against beauty, against the body, against the very things she lived by. Whenever Bimbisara went to listen, Khema stayed behind in the palace.

The king, the Dhammapada-atthakatha records (Dhp-A 347), grew clever. He commissioned the court poets to compose songs about the Bamboo Grove — about its lotus ponds, its peacocks, its pavilions of carved stone, its night-flowering jasmine. He had the songs sung in Khema's chambers for weeks. Eventually she said: "I would like to see this place." Bimbisara provided the palanquin. The procession entered the Grove, and Khema, by careful instruction from her husband, was guided through the pavilions until she found herself standing at the doorway of the hall where the Buddha was teaching.

“She was born a princess of the kingdom of Madda, in the far northwest of the Indian plain, with a complexion the texts compare to the inner petal of a lotus and a face the gandharvas were said to envy.”

The Buddha saw her come in. He used a power that is in his repertoire only on a handful of occasions in the canon. He conjured beside himself, with the fan of a celestial woman, an apparition of a young woman of such surpassing beauty that Khema — for all her own beauty — could only stare. The apparition fanned the Buddha's face, smiling. Then the Buddha, by the same power, aged the figure: the lustrous hair grayed and thinned; the lotus-petal skin wrinkled; the eyes clouded; the body bent. The figure became old, then sick, then dead, then a swollen corpse, then a skeleton, then dust. Khema watched the entire arc, the texts say, in the time of a single discourse. The Buddha said: "Khema, look at this body, which is like that, which is going to be like that." He spoke a single verse of the Dhammapada (Dhp 347): "Beings, beguiled by lust, fall into the stream they themselves have spun, as a spider into its web." Khema entered the stream as he spoke. She returned to the palace and, having asked Bimbisara's permission, went immediately back to the Grove and asked for ordination. The texts say she was an arahant within weeks.

What she became after her ordination is the figure the canon insists on. The Anguttara (AN 1.236) places her as foremost among the bhikkhunis in wisdom (paññāvantī) — the women's order counterpart of Sariputta in the bhikkhu order. The Khemā Sutta (SN 44.1) records the most famous conversation in the canon's record of her wisdom. King Pasenadi of Kosala, visiting her in her monastery, asks the four classic metaphysical questions: does the Tathagata exist after death; does he not exist; does he both exist and not exist; does he neither exist nor not exist. Khema asks Pasenadi a question in return: "Great king, do you have an accountant who could measure the grains of sand on the Ganges, or the volume of water in the ocean?" Pasenadi says no. Khema says: "Just as the Tathagata cannot be measured by the categories of form, feeling, perception, formations, or consciousness — having abandoned them entirely — the questions you ask do not apply. They are like measuring the ocean with a teaspoon." Pasenadi later put the same questions to the Buddha himself, who answered in precisely the same way. Khema's analysis is canonical.

The Therigatha preserves six verses attributed to her (Thig 139-144). One of them — addressed to Mara, who comes to her in the forest in the guise of a young man and tries to seduce her — answers his offer with a flat clarity: "You who do not know the body, dust-bag, foul-smelling thing — go elsewhere, dark one. I have no use for sensual pleasures. They are like swords on a chopping block." Her death is not narrated in the Pali sources; she predeceased the Buddha and was given honors equivalent to those given Sariputta and Mahamoggallana in the bhikkhuni order. She is, with Uppalavanna, one of the two chief bhikkhunis of the canon — the figure the Buddha set as the standard by which all bhikkhuni wisdom would be measured.