Sundari Nanda- Buddhist FigureMortal"Foremost in Meditation Among the Nuns"

The Beautiful Nun

Sundari Nanda was the half-sister of the Buddha, daughter of King Suddhodana and Mahapajapati Gotami. Her name meant "Beautiful Nanda," and she was known for it. When Mahapajapati led the first group of Shakya women to ordain as nuns, Sundari Nanda followed. She did not follow out of spiritual longing. She followed because her family was entering the sangha and she saw no other path.

Vanity and Avoidance

Once ordained, Sundari Nanda discovered that the monastic life did nothing to loosen her attachment to her own face and body. She knew the Buddha taught about impermanence, about the decay of all physical things, and she did not want to hear it. Whenever he addressed the nuns, she stayed away. She sent others in her place. She invented reasons not to attend.

The Buddha noticed her absence.

The Vision

He devised a teaching for her alone. Using his psychic powers, he conjured the image of a woman more beautiful than Sundari Nanda had ever seen. Then he aged the vision before her eyes. The smooth skin wrinkled. The hair turned white. The body bent and shrank. The woman died. The corpse bloated, split, and rotted down to bone, and the bone crumbled to dust.

"Behold, Nanda, this foul compound body, diseased and impure," the Buddha said, according to the Dhammapada Commentary. "Train your mind to contemplate the unlovely."

Sundari Nanda's vanity broke in that room.

Foremost in Jhana

She turned to meditation with the single-mindedness of someone who had lost the thing she most relied on. Through sustained contemplation of the body's impermanence, she attained arhatship. The Buddha designated her foremost among the nuns in jhana, meditative absorption so deep it constituted mastery. Her verses survive in the Therigatha: brief, stripped of ornament, the words of someone who had finished with surfaces.