The role of nuns in the Buddhist community is more prominent than ever and now is the time to bring to fruition the Buddha's vision of total equality and full ordination for men and women alike. This brilliant collection of resounding voices represents the movement to reinstate full ordination of women in all Buddhist traditions-amid great controversy.

Covering the breadth of Buddhist traditions, Dignity and Discipline is a seminal volume that conveys the history and the vision for the future of the role of women as ambassadors and curators of the ordained Buddhist community.

This is a collection of essays taken from a global conference on nuns bhiksuni ordination from all traditions that took place in Hamburg, Germany. The articles cover the breath of Buddhist traditions and convey the history and the vision for the future of the role of women as ambassadors and curators of the ordained Buddhist community. This book shows a shift toward granting women full ordination in all traditions of Buddhism.

Many of the issues surrounding bhiksuni nun ordination in Tibetan Buddhism are shared by other parts of the Buddhist world. While some regard the bhiksuni ordination movement to be largely driven by Western Buddhist converts, efforts to revive the female order have actually been initiated by various progressive Asian monks and nuns over the last century. New bhiksuni groups at various sites, including Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, are now at verying stages of maturity. All of these groups are participating in an ineluctable movement across Buddhism, one that is ultimately to be connected to larger shifts in our contemporary global civil society.