Ah! Thank for pointing that out. I should have read on a bit further. I had little time this morning before going for alms.Dhammanando wrote:It's an abridgement, not a mistranslation. The Pali passage that you quoted concerning bhikkhu disciples is then repeated by the Buddha, replacing 'bhikkhus' with 'bhikkhunīs', then with 'upāsakas', lastly with 'upāsikās'. Sister Vajirā has compressed these four paragraphs into one.
So the Bhikkhuṇī Sangha was already established.Dhammanando wrote:Right. All the suttas in which the earlier conversation is reported take place during the narrative leading up to the parinibbāna.
Anyway, since the Buddha was Omniscient, he would have known that in his sāsana there would be a Bhikkhuṇī Sangha before there actually was.