I think my answer to the original question is:
What does it matter?
The Arahant’s nature is something she may try and point out to us. And then it’s our business to learn that. That’s it.
As for Bhikkhuni ordination, it shouldn’t matter if supporters of it are Arahants or not. Primarily it should matter whether it’s Compassionate; secondarily it matters whether it is in line with Vinaya and based in genuine, Early Buddhist Texts.
Forgive me, those of you who have been playing “Mara’s Advocate”…there are plenty of voices who express such things and they’re not playing games. We don’t need to hear more of this. We need to stay focused on the positives. Don’t bring us down with such things. Raise us up. So on that note, I have to say that I love this comment further up by @vimalanyani! And then there’s this whole thread. And this; and let me tell you, I know for a fact, that these nuns are learning Pali so they can do the best they can at keeping their rules.
Plenty has been already said elsewhere about how the Vinaya is a thing that ought to be “lived” with Compassionate flexibility - as opposed to inflexible rigidity - because so often this is what the Buddha clearly displayed when formulating some of the rules; so I’m not going to bother to go into this now. But if you really care enough about this matter and are truly interested in prolonging the Sasana (please…the 500 year thing’s already passed…and if you try and say it’s metaphorical, I just won’t bother replying to you because you’re clearly ill-informed) then let’s give more people the chance to be guardians of the Dhamma and become these Arahants. The more contemporary female Arahants there are, the less chance there will be that their “old” worldly conditioning will have any bearing on how they view female ordination.
Anyone seeing this as a “modernist” revival is clearly unaware that they have made the Dhamma-Vinaya something only for the past. But if it’s True, then it should be true today as well. And if it’s True, then it’s also True that’s it’s impermanent and that social forces aren’t just going to shape it today, they shaped it 2600 years ago and they shaped it 1200 years ago and 500 years ago. Our job is to work out what is an EBT and what is not. Our job is see and understand the external social forces throughout history and see them clearly so that it becomes really obvious what we need to separate from what is True.
Chances are that EBTs will hold up and point to something True…otherwise our faith is founded on nothing solid. Because if you can’t trust an EBT to find what the Buddha really meant, then you can’t trust anything much and why be Buddhist at all… This is how you destroy the Sasana. By not investigating these texts, by not understanding, by not being flexible or compassionate. Not by admitting women…I mean what a gross, disgusting notion to even put forward! This is how you destroy Buddhism, by repeating this kind of stuff; if I thought for a moment that a Compassionate Arahant Buddha really thought women would destroy Buddhism, I would stop being a Buddhist. This is not my Buddhism.
But I suspect, it’s not the Arahants who are actively unsupportive of Bhikkhuni ordination. I bet they’ve got better things to occupy themselves with.
However, as to those monks who are actively supportive of Bhikkuni ordination, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an arahant or two in their ranks.
But why should we care? Take personal responsibility for why you do or don’t support Bhikkunis. And don’t play games with words for the sake of some academic argument…it’s not academic…it’s painful and impacts real people and it’s putting into writing and bringing to notice some stupid, deluded views that don’t deserve this sort of attention: which is why I mostly don’t bother with these sorts of threads so much anymore.