By Tessa Bartholomeusz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
　　　　 
　　　　  Some of the most haunting and moving
　　　　  voices of the Pali canon are those that resonate through the
　　　　  fragmentary poems of the theris or nuns of early Buddhism. That
　　　　  these fragmentary verses have been preserved and included in the
　　　　  Buddhist doctrinal canon indicate that nuns were considered an
　　　　  intrinsic part of the sangha in the early years of Buddhism. Tessa
　　　　  Bartholomeusz describes the transformations and vicissitudes the
　　　　  order of Buddhist nuns has undergone in Sri Lanka, home of Theravada
　　　　  Buddhism. It is a fascinating story of transformation, innovation,
　　　　  and female resilience, responding necessarily to the political and
　　　　  social pressures of a constantly changing context. The most
　　　　  innovative feature of twentieth-century female asceticism was the
　　　　  institution of nunneries for "lay nuns," or the dasa sil matavo. The
　　　　  book is in two parts. Part 1 covers the period up to the twentieth
　　　　  century: the establishment of an order of nuns in the third century
　　　　  BCE, its demise, for reasons not yet known, around the 12th century
　　　　  CE, the Buddhist revival at the end of the nineteenth century, and
　　　　  the attempts to revive the lost order of nuns. One of the fine
　　　　  ironies of the colonial situation was that it was western
　　　　  theosophists and educators like Colonel Olcott who fuelled the
　　　　  nationalist Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka against Christianity and
　　　　  their western colonial counterparts; and it was a westerner, the
　　　　  Countess Miranda de Souza Canavarro, that Anagarika Dharmapala
　　　　  invited to reestablish the order of Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka.
　　　　  Although the Countess's "nunnery" did not survive long, the idea of
　　　　  female renunciates serving the cause of Buddhism caught on, and
　　　　  several innovative moves resulted. By the early twentieth century,
　　　　  Sinhala Buddhist women had set up the institution of "lay nuns"
　　　　  (dasa sil matavo). These were not bhikkhunis or the female
　　　　  counterparts of ordained Buddhist monks, these were lay renunciates
　　　　  who, either as individuals or in small groups, decided to follow a
　　　　  life of Buddhist asceticism. The second part of the book deals with
　　　　  some of the organizations set up by these lay renunciates, the
　　　　  "nunneries" they established, their innovative methods of
　　　　  ordination, their dress and rules of conduct, and their perceptions
　　　　  of their role as "lay nuns." Most of the Sinhala lay nuns accept the
　　　　  fact (rigidly held by a large section of the ordained monks) that