The Therigatha — “Verses of the Elder Nuns” — is a collection of 73 poems, some 522 verses, attributed to women who were among the Buddha’s early disciples. It sits in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Pali Canon.

It is, by a very wide margin, the oldest known anthology of women’s literature anywhere in the world.

What it is #

The poems are first-person statements of awakening, composed in the voices of named women, and arranged by length rather than by theme.

Most are short — a handful of verses. The longest, attributed to Sumedha, runs to 75. Each is typically introduced by a name, and the commentarial tradition, particularly Dhammapala’s fifth- or sixth-century Paramatthadipani, supplies a biography for each woman.

The companion volume, the Theragatha (“Verses of the Elder Monks”), is considerably longer — 264 poems — and the two are usually edited and studied together. The differences between them are instructive.

The dating question #

The poems are generally regarded as very old. Linguistic features, metre, and the absence of developed doctrinal vocabulary place at least a substantial core in the earliest stratum of the canon, plausibly within a century or two of the Buddha’s death.

Whether the attributions are historical is less certain. The tradition holds that these are the compositions of the named women. Scholars vary: some accept a genuine core of women’s compositions, some regard them as later compositions in women’s voices, and most take an intermediate position — an early collection, attributed and shaped by a monastic tradition that transmitted it.

What is not in doubt is that a community which preserved this material regarded women’s attainment as unambiguous, and said so in the women’s own voices.

What the poems say #

Several themes recur, and they are not the themes one might expect.

Freedom, stated plainly #

The most-quoted verse is Mutta’s, and its register is worth noticing:

So freed! So thoroughly freed am I — from three crooked things set free: from mortar, pestle, and crooked husband. I am freed from birth and death, and all that dragged me back is hauled away.

The grinding stone and the husband are named in the same breath as birth and death. The collection is repeatedly this concrete about what was left behind, and it does not treat domestic labour as too trivial for a liberation poem.

Sumangalamata’s is similar: freed from the kitchen, the pestle, and her “pot-bellied” husband, sitting at the root of a tree and thinking — ah, happiness.

Grief #

Several of the most powerful poems are by women who came to the order through catastrophe.

Kisagotami lost her child and carried the body from house to house asking for medicine, until the Buddha sent her to fetch a mustard seed from a household where no one had died. She returned without one. Her verses are among the bleakest in the canon: she speaks of the misery of women, of co-wives, of childbirth, of women who cut their own throats, of taking poison.

Patacara lost, in rapid succession, her husband, both children, her parents and her brother, and went mad with grief. Her awakening comes, in her poem, while watching water from washing her feet run down a slope — one trickle sinking in early, one further on, one further still. Seeing that lives end at different distances in the same way, she understands. She became a senior teacher, and several of the poems in the collection are by women who describe themselves as her students.

Age and beauty #

The collection is unusually direct about bodies.

Ambapali, the courtesan of Vesali who donated her mango grove to the order, composed a poem of nineteen verses, each contrasting her former beauty with her present age — hair once black as bees, now like hemp bark; teeth once white as jasmine, now broken and yellow. The refrain is that the word of the truth-speaker does not lie.

The poem functions doctrinally as a meditation on impermanence. It also reads as a woman who was valued entirely for her appearance describing, without self-pity, the end of that.

Confrontation #

Several poems record encounters with Mara, who appears to nuns meditating alone and attempts to unsettle them, often by pointing out that a woman cannot achieve what they are attempting.

Soma’s reply is the sharpest thing in the collection. Mara tells her that the state the sages attain is hard to reach, and that a woman with her “two-fingered wisdom” cannot get there. She answers:

What difference does being a woman make when the mind is well composed, when knowledge flows on, when one rightly sees into the Dhamma?

And adds that for anyone who thinks “I am a woman” or “I am a man” or anything at all, Mara is fit to speak.

The reply does two things: it rejects the premise directly, and it grounds the rejection in non-self rather than in an assertion of equality. The gendered claim fails because the identification it depends on is itself the delusion.

How it differs from the Theragatha #

Comparison with the monks’ collection brings out what is distinctive.

The poems are shorter and fewer. 73 against 264.

The reasons for going forth differ. The monks’ verses more often describe a considered response to the general problem of existence. The nuns’ verses far more often begin in a specific disaster — a dead child, a dead family, a failed marriage — or in the conditions of women’s lives.

The domestic appears. Mortars, pestles, kitchens, husbands, and co-wives are named. The Theragatha has almost nothing comparable.

There is more about the body. And more about being looked at.

Both end in the same place. The declaration of liberation is identical in form and in confidence. Whatever brought a woman to the order, the collection’s verdict on what she attained is not qualified.

Why it matters #

It is evidence. Whatever the institutional record of Buddhist treatment of women — and that record is mixed — the canon itself preserves, in a canonical collection, women declaring full awakening in their own voices, with the Buddha’s endorsement.

It is a corrective to a selective reading. Passages elsewhere in the canon are considerably less favourable to women, and they are the ones most often cited in arguments about Buddhist misogyny. The Therigatha is part of the same canon.

It is good literature. Independently of its doctrinal status, the poems are compressed, unsentimental, and frequently startling. Charles Hallisey’s 2015 translation for the Murty Classical Library made this case to a general readership and was widely read outside Buddhist circles.

Reading it #

Charles Hallisey’s Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Murty Classical Library of India, 2015) is the most readable modern translation, with facing Pali.

Susan Murcott’s First Buddhist Women (Parallax, rev. ed. 2006) presents the poems with the commentarial biographies and historical context, which is useful because many poems are opaque without the story.

Caroline Rhys Davids’s Psalms of the Sisters (Pali Text Society, 1909) is the pioneering translation and is of historical interest in its own right — Rhys Davids was among the first Western scholars to take the collection seriously.

K. R. Norman’s Elders’ Verses II (PTS, 1971) is the scholarly standard.

The poems are short and can be read in an evening. Reading them alongside the commentarial biographies takes longer and is worth it.

Common questions #

Did these women really write these poems? The tradition says so. Scholarship is divided, with most accepting an early core and a transmitting tradition that shaped it. The collection is in any case among the oldest material in the canon.

Why is it so little known? It sits in the Khuddaka Nikaya, the “minor collection,” which is the least systematically studied part of the canon, and it was not part of the standard curriculum in most monastic traditions. Its modern profile is largely a result of translations from the last few decades.

Is there anything comparable in other Buddhist traditions? Not directly, though Tibetan Buddhism has a substantial biographical literature about female practitioners — Yeshe Tsogyal, Machig Labdron, and others — and Chinese Buddhism has the Biqiuni Zhuan, sixth-century biographies of eminent nuns.

What happened to these women’s order? It flourished for centuries and the full ordination lineage later lapsed in Theravada countries, which is the subject of Bhikkhuni Ordination and Its Revival.

Sources & further reading #

Charles Hallisey (trans.), Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Murty Classical Library of India / Harvard, 2015). Susan Murcott, First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening (Parallax, rev. ed. 2006). K. R. Norman (trans.), Elders’ Verses II: Therīgāthā (Pali Text Society, 1971). Kathryn R. Blackstone, Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Curzon, 1998) — a comparative study of the Therigatha and Theragatha. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli (Wisdom, 2020) — for the linguistic context.