Kāpilānī means “daughter of Kapila”

Bhaddā also appears quite regularly in the Chinese bhikkhunī vinayas. Her name is always transliterated, or it is said that she is of the Kapila clan. I don’t remember seeing any reference to red hair there.

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When I look up kāpila and kapila in a Sanskrit dictionary, I get a bunch of colors ranging from tawny to reddish and associated animals like cows and apes, and it also is used for red-haired people. Maybe that where all of this started?

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From her Apadāna

57Ahaṃ madde janapade,
sākalāya puruttame;
Kappilassa dijassāsiṃ,
dhītā mātā sucīmati

938 In the Madda country I, was
daughter of brahmin Kapila;
mother was Sucīmatī in
Sāgalā the best of cities. 57

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This:

And this:

are what prove the case to me. Actual readings.

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Somewhere in the commentarial literature there’s the detailed story of how BK ended up wedded to Kassapa against both her and his will. If I recall correctly, Kassapa tried to refuse marriage, but to quiet his parents, he sculpted a figure of extraordinary beauty, and announced that if they found a woman identical to this sculpture he’d marry her. Some Brahmins were sent out with the sculpture to search for a lookalike. Bhaddha looked so much like the sculpture that when it was brought to her town, her nurse mistook it for Bhaddha and accosted it for being out at the wrong place and time. That’s how the Brahmins learned of Bhaddha.

With all that focus on Bhaddha’s looks in the story, it’d be very odd not to specifically mention the redness of her hair if that were part of her identity.

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I here second Bhante Sujato.

Just a last comment of mine.
If some woman, named “Felicitas Rothschild” had written her memories, and which had some emancipatorical focus, then it would be equally meaningful to bring in “red” or “red hair” from the particle in their family name (Rothschild family - Wikipedia) like “the red shielded happy one”. In my youth I’ve dreamed of a girl with name “Gisela” and she was leftish (as I was) and she was called “red Gisela” - naming can get even such a turn. If she today would publish a stanza about some significant achievement in her life, and her family name were “Redherring” - well, two hundred generations later people could nicely dance about her “red hair”… (but she was not red haired, I still know exactly how she looked like :wink: )

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Wouldn’t it also be strange that a Buddhist nun, who shaves her head, would be referred to by her hair color?

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Yep. Something like that definitely would have been mentioned if only because it were so unusual.

Yes, I thought of that, too. And if she were dying her hair, she would have stopped. It’s a case of reading a name and not being aware of how it’s interpreted elsewhere. It’s a common mistake in translation, especially in the early works when it was difficult to do all the legwork. These days, we have whole corpuses of texts at our fingertips.

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a shaved head still can show the hair colour

This is interesting to know:

"Colonies of Pathans (Pashtun people) arriving in Punjab are accounted for by Sir Densil Ibbetson in the following manner:

During the Khilji, Lodi and Suri dynasties many Pathans migrated to Punjab especially during the >reign of Jalal-ud-din Khalji, Bahlol Lodhi and Sher Shah Suri. These naturally belonged to the Ghilzai >section from which those kings sprang.[4]
—Sir Denzil Ibbetson

The history of Pathans in India is much earlier. Trapusa and Bahalika, variously assumed to be merchants or slaves from Balkh were the first lay-person to accept Buddha. During that time, the regions west of HinduKush, including Afghanistan were ruled by Mauryan empire and their vassal states of Indo-Greeks. These Indo-Greeks were staunch followers of Vishnu and Buddha and ruled large parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They gave rise to the Hellenistic form of Buddhism which competed with the Mathura form. "

Pathans of Punjab - Wikipedia
Balkh - Wikipedia

both Trapusa and Bahalika were from Pashtun origin.

It seems the people from the Pashtun origin were present in the History of Buddhism from the beginning. And we know many or perhaps all them embraced Buddhism in further times. This is no strange because short time later their territory was a center for the Gandhara influence. And also we can see more centuries later the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzan, visiting Balkh 627 ace, still a main Buddhist place.

Therefore Buddhism was very rooted at those lands from early times, in order to last so long time.

Besides the important mention to Trapusa and Bahalika, it seems no more mentions about the presence of individuals from Pashtun origin inside the Buddha Shangha. However, when seeing the Buddhist History of their territories, it sound really strange believing only in the presence of those two disciples. Also one should keep in mind the logical movements of people because commerce, slavery, migrations, marriages, etc. People was in movement.

At least I don’t believe in the ancient India like a territory with a monolithic ethnical group, with all the people with “dark hair”. Obviously this was the appearance of most of people, although not all in an absolute way. Today still it would be the case if we use those ancient borders to include at least those Pashtun territories


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Speaking as a regular user, not as a mod here.

Based on the textual evidence shown above -association of family name, similar occurrences in multiple places in the text. Yes, the word does seem to indicate, as Bhante and others suggested- a patronymic relationship. I’m not a Pali scholar, so naturally I ultimately defer to the experts.

But again, it is only probable hypothesis ( very, yes- but still a hypothesis as we can truly never know) and as with all hypotheses can be challenged, and should be allowed to. So please don’t attempt to shut down threads or resort to mockery of alternate views just because you assume these views are pandering to ‘privilege and perspective’. They might have some element of truth that we may not have yet come across.

I don’t mean to offend or accuse anyone but I need to clear the air here.

Kapila has [many meanings] and significance (Kapila - Wikipedia) in India, some pre-dating even Buddhism.

Likewise, naming conventions are also very diverse

And please don’t give value to Statements like

Obviously Indian women have black hair,

This is stereotyping, plain and simple. I’m very sorry to see this. Callings spade a spade here.

And just because the text doesn’t specifically say otherwise, does NOT make it a fact. Yes, I may be wrong about the word being debated here, that’s not what I have an issue with. It’s the evidence for the argument based on a stereotype.

It’s as if I, as a South Asian woman, talked about the diversity in the physical features of Native/ Indigenous/ First Nations peoples without any related study, experience or knowledge.
And I just based my conclusions on religious texts written for a totally different purpose.

If I was an anthropologist immersed in the culture, yes.

Otherwise, No.

I wish I was trained in Indian history or anthropology, but I’m not. So I’m Not stating any facts here. Just my observations and lived experiences. And so are some of the others with alternate views. Even the idea of the term red hair may seem sacrilegious to many of you, but it’s not at all alien to those from the subcontinent. People are also named in such a variety of ways in India . No one is forcing their views here. Just sharing them. Explore possibilities etc… They should be allowed to do that.

But ignoring or dismissing observations of the actual diversity of Indian people, seems like privilege to me. Something we all want to avoid, right?

Maybe some knowledge of a culture outside the insular world of “religious studies” is a good thing.

Again, forgive me if this offends you, I just had to say something as it had been bothering me when I first saw this post :pray:t4: That’s all I’ve got to say about it. Thanks for your time.

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Also speaking very much as a user here, and not trying to moderate anyon.

What I see, reading through the above discussion that @Ficus is commenting on, is possibilities building on a background of ambiguity, possibilities that are produced on the basis of the small amounts of knowledge that are available in different fields.

So no complaint about the paucity of sources: merely regret that it is so difficult to access the distant past.

Since there is total agreement that Matty Weingast’s translation is not a translation, I can’t complain about his title, ‘Bhadda Kapilani - Red Hair’. Creative use of language is encouraged in original compositions and, personally tonight at least, I choose to read this as a clever response to a pun that works in English and not in Pāḷi, as well as a comment on the scholarly debate over the German translation: quite nifty really! Many will disagree with my analysis, but that’s fine: this is creative work and different responses to poetry are to be encouraged.

But here is a complaint: the amount of generalising in the above discussion, and the refusal by people on both sides of the argument to consider the possibility for even a nanosecond that there might have been – possibly – just one woman in the Kāpilānī clan who happened to have/wear red hair.

In areas like this it is important to avoid overgeneralisation, stereotyping, relying only on one’s own discipline, reaching for hasty conclusions, and overly long discussions. :rofl:

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I guess there’s a reason why Weingast wrote Red hair next to Bhadda Kapilani. It could be a wink to all associations made with red-headed people. Weingast is a Jew and Ashkenazi Jews are known to have red hair more often than other people, just like the people of the British Isles. In paintings from the Italian Renaissance till today, Jews have been -pejoratively - depicted as red-haired people. Other characteristics associated with red-headed people (and at times with Jews) were - and might still be - being an outsider and being fierce and free-spirited. So then a link is easily been created with a Therigatha nun, from his POV. Who knows.

Also, capelli is Italian for hair and it is etymologically a diminutive of the Italian and Latin word capa (head) and as well a common Italian surname. Weingast might have linguistically, very creatively and mistakingly associated kāpilā with capelli, who knows. He’s the only one who really knows!

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yes. And that diversity also existed in past times.

This is a paiting inside Ajanta Cave 17. We can see (top left) a red-head being like saying “hello I’m here don’t forget”. We don’t. Also we can see asian, african, persian, etc… The Ajanta paintings are from 5 CE , although that portraying trying to include everybody who heared the Buddha teaching is wonderful and quite evident of the Indian panorame,

be merchants, inner or neighbour kingdoms, etc… they were people adherents to the Buddha teaching. A similar reality existed in Buddha times. Probably there are more things to discover in the Past than to rectify

I don’t have idea about the writer reasons, although I wonder about the simplest explanation. Maybe the writer only rescue what the buddhist sources shows, a red-head nun.

Red-head people exists everywhere in the world. We can see in example the melanesian people, without foreign contact. Perhaps they become read-head with sun and food. Who knows and who cares. Only are human colours, only rupa. No special meaning, and also nature can produce many things when she wants.

well, to me the interesting point is the pressuposition or that automatic switch to deny what the buddhist sources shows when something doesn’t fit in our image about that ancient world.
Why a red-hair nun should be impossible in Buddha times. Also there is the possibility the translation can be wrong, although there is need of solid proofs. Specially when one checks the red-head people really existed in ancient India.

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Thank you for sharing this - I was also thinking whether “reddish” may be a relative description. What we describe as red hair in the west (i.e. red hair for a White/Caucasian person) could be different from red for an Indian person? My mother is Indian and has dark brown/black hair AND it is described as red in our family because of the tint (not sure if that is the technical term in hair colour lingo) … essentially her hair has a reddish color when the sun hits it a certain way. This is of course speaking of contemporary descriptions in India and not sure how well that does or doesn’t relate to descriptions during the time of the Buddha …

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Welcome @indrani!

:wave:

Thanks for chiming in here on the forum. :relaxed:

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Maybe a daughter of Kapila means a Samkhyan since Kapila is said to be the primordial sage in Samkhya.

Disclaimer: I am a white-skinned woman of Anglo-Saxon heritage with grey hair which was once mid-brown.

If this thread was pulling apart an issue of what colour hair the English had at the time of the Norman invasion … back and forth … more black here, … no a bit of of white there … yellowish tinge … ooh some brown left … pepper and salt … and on and on … and so on … I would start to feel extremely objectified.

Should we all stop, pause breath, and ask ourselves how the women of the Subcontinent who are reading this thread – whether as contributors or as non-members we have never met are feeling right now?

Generalisations and forensic examination of one’s own, one’s mother’s and grandmothers’ natural physical characteristics simply isn’t comfortable.

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This thread seems to have run its course. Why Ven Kapilani bore the name she did is something we will never know and is ultimately unimportant. What is important is that

Bhaddā Kāpilānī
is master of the three knowledges, destroyer of death.
She bears her final body,
having vanquished Māra and his mount.

Let us all… with hair or without… of black, brown, red, yellow, gray, white or whatsoever color… bear that in mind as we strive to emulate her!

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