The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order

Bhikkhu Analayo's The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, published in the Hamburg Buddhist Studies series by projekt verlag in 2016, is a peer-reviewed scholarly study examining the textual accounts of the founding of the Buddhist nuns' order, comparing versions preserved across different early Buddhist canonical traditions. Its strength is that Analayo is a leading specialist in comparative early Buddhist textual studies and the work draws directly on multiple canonical recensions rather than one alone. Its limit is that it is a specialist textual study focused on the order's founding narrative specifically, so a claim about the nuns' order's later historical development needs a different source addressing that later period.