It is 6am and a Thai woman dressed in the orange robes of a monk is walking the streets of Nakhon Pathom, near Bangkok, begging for alms, accompanied by a handful of foreign female monks, and nuns dressed in white. The orange robes worn by Samaaneri Dhammananda Bhikkhuni signal a revolution.
To the male bastion of the Thai Sangha, the Theravada Buddhist school hierarchy, she is a dangerous rebel. 'I am not doing anything wrong, because Lord Buddha permitted women to be monks,' she said.
Thailand has Buddhist nuns, but women are not allowed to be ordained as monks - or become part of the Sangha hierarchy. That was until Chatsumarn Kabilsingh (her lay name) came along. She threw the 300,000-strong monkhood in Buddhist-majority Thailand into confusion when she was ordained in Sri Lanka three years ago.
The former lecturer in Buddhist philosophy at Thammasat University said she was following her mother, who was ordained as a monk in the Mahayana tradition in Taiwan. (Mahayana Buddhism is said by its followers to be more developed than Theravada Buddhism, although the followers of the latter say their tradition is closer to what Buddha taught). Two other women have followed Dhammananda's lead.
Social critic Sulak Siravaksa said: 'If Thai people really understood Buddhism, they would know that 2,500 years ago, Lord Buddha entrusted both male and female disciples.'
Aged 59 and quietly spoken, Dhammananda hardly looks a rebel. She does not go round holding up a banner saying women have the right to pursue the path to enlightenment. But she has enlisted the Senate to look into the issue of ordaining women.