Are there any suttas where the Buddha discussed the kammic impact of a wife disobeying her husband’s orders? We are also interested in the kammic consequences of the husband disobeying the wife.
Have you looked at the section on wives on index.readingfaithfully.org ? Comprehensive Index of Pāli Suttas
Bad karma is unwholesome action by way of body, speech and mind. That is acts which harm oneself, others or both. It’s not, luck, fate or external account keeping.
Thanks, that was very helpful! I didn’t know that index existed.
Is this question to settle a debate? 
Jokes aside, obedience itself is not a virtue in Buddhism. But swinging to the other extreme, sheer defiance is also not a virtue.
The Buddha encouraged disobeying bad advice and instruction from teachers that are against principles of Dhamma. However, he knew that listening with respect and with an open mind were important virtues for being able to receive instruction, feedback, and to grow.
At AN 4.53, the Buddha teaches four pairs of spouses:
-
A male zombie living with a female zombie;
-
a male zombie living with a goddess;
-
a god living with a female zombie ;
-
a god living with a goddes s.
I’ll let you read the sutta! But suffice to say, it’s about ethical behavior, not blind obedience or anything else.
The Buddha universally (to all disciples of all genders) praised sovacassatā, which means being easy to speak to, and implies receiving feedback well without becoming scornful or defensive. It also includes receiving well feedback which isn’t good or useful by not getting angry at the person and so on.
SN 1.14 has a verse correcting the opinion that the best wife is a ‘maiden’ by saying that the best wife is rather a ‘good listener’ or one who wants to listen. Bhikkhu Bodhi had translated this as ‘obedient,’ but Bhante Sujato’s note on the line links to other contexts where the same word refers to listening attentively to Dhamma teachings. Being a good listener and obeying someone’s every command are very different. Sometimes good listening goes hand in hand with disobedience!
DN 31 is a great sutta for lay followers and gives some examples of guidelines for managing relationships. This is what it says for husbands and wives:
A husband should serve his wife … in five ways:
By treating her with honor, by not looking down on her, by not being unfaithful, by relinquishing authority to her, and by presenting her with adornments.
A wife served by her husband in these five ways shows sympathy to him in five ways.
She’s well-organized in her work. She manages the domestic help. She’s not unfaithful. She preserves his earnings. She’s deft and tireless in all her duties.
Of course this assumes a status-quo with a typical distribution of roles and negotiates mutual care within that. It doesn’t mean people must fit into these roles, but rather I’d say the spirit is in how each person supports with their own strengths.
At AN 5.58, the Buddha praises this quality:
a gentleman uses his legitimate wealth to honor, respect, esteem, and venerate his wives and children, bondservants, workers, and staff.
I highlighted the verbs which struck me as especially noticable here.
There is AN 5.33, where there’s advice given to ladies about to be married off. The closest you get there is it saying:
‘Our parents will give us to a husband wanting what’s best, out of kindness and sympathy. We will get up before him and go to bed after him, and be obliging, behaving nicely and speaking politely.’
Though of course doing chores and being helpful are not the same as blind obedience. And it also says:
her husband,who’s always eager to work hard, always looking after her, and bringing whatever she wants.
Finally, I’d mention AN 7.63 which is a bit of a strange sutta, ending with a lady seeming to say she is enduring a physically abusive relationship without any closure offered. It also references a type of praiseworthy wife who is obedient to her husband’s authority, though it qualifies this with “conscientious” and compares it to an elder brother-younger sister relationship, not master-slave. And the Buddha gives a list of several types of wives which are all praisworthy, not all of them said to be obedient.
I think with the last kind of wife the Buddha compares to a ‘bondservant’ (also implying he did not see it as a good situation), this sutta is best interpreted not as a recommendation to endure and be blindly obedient to abusive husbands, but of praising women who protect their mind from hatred despite the challenges as one instance of praisworthy wives among many. The key phrase might be praiseworthy “in that respect,” i.e. them not falling into hate, rather than all the dynamics of the situation being praiswothy. If we want to salvage the message.
But these texts are of course old. They can be messy and present challenges, sometimes with a diversity of voices across one another. Hope that’s helpful 
thank you so much for the time and effort put into this very thoughtful and well researched response!
Of course! Thanks for the opportunity to look more into this!
Also, if I may, I think it’s good to mention that there are different ways we can read these texts. I alluded to some of this already above. But when these texts explain how to be a “good wife,” that can mean many things.
If we take a very time-and-place sensitive reading, we could say that these are advice on how a woman in such a culture could be seen as a succesful wife to her husband, in-laws, and peers without being immoral and cultivating wholesome qualities. We could consider alternatives: how would a woman who rebelled against such norms fare in the society of that time? What were her options? Perhaps the texts are trying to give recommendations given the socially acceptable alternatives for laywomen.
This way of reading is very different from assuming they are meant to be prescriptive across all times and places to the letter. For that, I think we often need to read deeper and derive more nuanced advice. Not just in these cases, but in many suttas, many of which are conversations with particular people.
For example, imagine there were an abused worker with no way out of their situation for the time being. If I were asked advice on how to act, I might recommend that they be humble and obedient, not get angry with their boss, and practice Dhamma to the best of their ability. The alternatives might be much worse for their physical and psychological wellbeing, and at least they could keep their job. But this doesn’t mean I would thereby condone that kind of work relationship or think that in an ideal world they should be obedient. It’s contextual.
I don’t mean to compare wives in ancient India to abused workers; often we can project ideas about women’s freedoms or lackthereof without giving credit where due. That example is just meant to be a strong case of a context-centric reading. Advising specific people in a specific situation is very different from giving categorical advice for everyone.
