MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA

Sheldon Pollock, General Editor

Editorial Board
Francesca Orsini
Sheldon Pollock
Sunil Sharma
David Shulman
POEMS OF THE FIRST BUDDHIST
WOMEN
A Translation of the Therigatha
Translated by
CHARLES HALLISEY

MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2021
 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
First published in Murty Classical Library of India, Volume 3, Harvard University Press, 2015.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Hallisey, Charles, 1953- translator.

Title: Poems of the first Buddhist women : a translation of the Therigatha / translated by Charles
Hallisey.
Other titles: Therigatha (Harvard University Press) | Tipiṭaka. Suttapiṭaka. Khuddakanikāya. Therīgāthā.
| Murty classical library of India.
Description: New edition. | Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Series: Murty
classical library of India | Includes bibliographical references | Identifiers: LCCN 2020034185 | ISBN
9780674251359 (paperback) | ISBN 9780674251410 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Buddhist poetry. | Pali poetry. | Pali poetry—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC BQ1452.E5 H35 2021 | DDC 294.3/8232—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034185
 INTRODUCTION

The Therīgāthā is an anthology of poems by and about the first Buddhist

women. These women were therīs, “senior ones,” among ordained Buddhist
women, and they bore that epithet because of their religious achievements.
The therīs in the Therīgāthā are enlightened women and most of the poems
(gāthā) in the anthology are the songs of their experiences. Dhammapala, the
sixth-century Buddhist commentator on the Therīgāthā, calls the therīs’
poems udāna, “inspired utterances,” and by doing so, he associated the
Therīgāthā with a venerable Buddhist speech genre. For Dhammapala, the
characteristic mark of “the utterance” would be “one or more verses
consisting of knowledge about some situation accompanied by the euphoria
that is felt there, for an udāna is proclaimed by way of a composition of
verses and caused to rise up through joy and euphoria.”1
As salt just seems to go with food, the adjective “first” and the Therīgāthā
seem to go together. It is easy to see why. It is an anthology of poems
composed by some of the first Buddhists; while the poems are clearly
nowhere near as old as the poetry of the Ṛg Veda, for example, they are still
some of the first poetry of India; the Therīgāthā’s poems are some of the first
poems by women in India; this is the first collection of women’s literature in
the world. As such statements suggest, to use the adjective “first” is to point
to something key to the value that these poems have for us. We often try to
draw out that value by turning our attention to the religious, literary, and
social contexts in which the poems were composed and then try to see the
Therīgāthā as expressions of those contexts. It is important, however, to ask
when we think of the poems as “first” in these different ways, whether we
may be inadvertantly predetermining how we approach the work. While
reading and appreciating the Therīgāthā for being the first of so many things
is no doubt appropriate, we also want to ask ourselves if seeing the
Therīgāthā in this way also predisposes us to read the poems mainly for
their historical information and whether this might come at the expense of
their expressive, imaginative, and emotional content, as well as their
aesthetic achievements.

Reading the Therīgāthā as Poetry

The Therīgāthā is not merely a collection of historical evidence of the
needs, aspirations, and achievements of some of the first Buddhist women. It
is an anthology of poems. They vary in quality, to be sure, but some of them
deserve not only the adjective “first” in a historical sense; they also deserve
to be called “great” because they are great literature.
They are literature in the way that Ezra Pound meant when he said,
“Literature is news that STAYS news.”2 Some of the Therīgāthā do seem to
be news that has stayed news, and that is part of why they are able to delight
us today and why sometimes they are also able to change how we see
ourselves. The Therīgāthā enable us to see things that we have not seen
before and to imagine things that we have not dreamed of before. We
experience a surprising pleasure from the clarity and truth of the epiphanies
the poems can trigger. Perhaps more importantly the poems give us a chance
to be free from ourselves and from our usual places in the world—at least
imaginatively—and to glimpse a different potential for ourselves. In our day-
to-day lives, we may assume all too often—and dread all too often—that
tomorrow will be just like today. In the pleasures that literature affords us,
we may see immediately that tomorrow does not have to be like today. Such
immediacy makes free.3 The poems in the Therīgāthā are about that freedom.
They are udānas about the joy of being free, and they hold out the promise, in
the pleasure that they give, of being the occasion for making us free, too.
How a literary text from more than two millennia ago can give us pleasure,
can speak to us about ourselves and about our world in astonishingly fresh
and insightful ways, is not easy to explain, but there is no doubt that the
poems of the Therīgāthā have proved capable of doing so. Moreover, there
is no doubt that they are capable of giving pleasure in translation.
This was probably the case throughout the long history of the Therīgāthā.
The imprint of linguistic difference and translation seems intrinsic,
especially in the difficulties and peculiarities that many of the verses present.
Individual poems were composed over a considerable period of time,
perhaps centuries; according to Buddhist tradition, they date from the time of
the Buddha himself, while according to modern historical methods, some
date as late as the end of the third century B.C.E.4
The poems as we receive them are in Pali, the scholarly and religious
language distinctive to the Theravadin Buddhist traditions that are now found
in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia; in the first millennium, however, Theravada
Buddhism was quite prominent in south India as well. It seems very likely
that these verses have been “translated” from whatever their original
versions may have been in any number of ancient Indian vernaculars and then
reworked as Pali evolved. The “translation” of the poems in the Therīgāthā
into Pali was key to their wide circulation. The anthology has continued to
work its magic in modern translations, including into German by Karl Eugen
Neumann in 1899, into Bangla by Bijay Chandra Majumdar in 1905, and into
Sinhala by the novelist Martin Wickramainghe.5
For Wickramasinghe, the road to pleasure, so basic to receiving the deeper
meanings of the Therīgāthā, would open up for a reader who took the time
“to remember that these verses must be read with a sensibility that is guided
by the poetry itself.”6 What does a “sensibility guided by poetry itself” look
like, and how might it be brought to bear when reading the Therīgāthā?
Taking the first verse from the poem of Ambapali as a case study can help us
see the kind of richness and pleasure that comes when we take the
Therīgāthā seriously as poetry:
The hairs on my head were once curly,
black, like the color of bees,
now because of old age
they are like jute.
It’s just as the Buddha, speaker of truth, said,
nothing different than that.7
If we read primarily for information, we could justifiably say that this
poem is about the central Buddhist teaching on impermanence. In Buddhist
thought, impermanence is one of the three marks (tilakkhaṇa) of the world,
along with suffering (dukkha) and the lack of an enduring essence (anattā):
everything in this world, including our bodies, disappoints us and causes us
to suffer because everything changes in ways we do not want; everything
changes because everything in the world is impermanent (anicca); and
everything is impermanent because everything in the world lacks an enduring
essence that would allow it to persist without changing. The lack of an
enduring essence is particularly important to note with respect to persons,
since humans are commonly prone to think otherwise, even going so far to
think that we are defined by our souls. All of this is important to know, but to
leave it at that is to reduce the poem to ideas that we expect a piece of
Buddhist writing to teach.
Reading with a sensibility guided by poetry itself encourages us to explore
how the verse also brings a quite different image into view. To prepare
ourselves to be able to see that image, we should first remind ourselves that
poetry thrives, as T. S. Eliot said, on the “contrast between fixity and flux,
this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.”8 This
contrast “which is the very life of verse,” the tension between expected
pattern and delightful surprise in actual instance, is encountered at different
levels of significance in Ambapali’s poem. It is encountered quite concretely
in the use of the same meter, which may have originated in folk songs and is
called rathoddhatā, throughout the poem.9 The prominence of meter in
classical Indian poetry meant that there was always a tension over how to
use language set in predictable patterns of meter in ways that it can evade
monotony in individual poems. Only when there was “this unperceived
evasion of monotony” could a poem be a source of surprise and pleasure for
a reader, rather than a mere occasion to admire the sterile cleverness of a
poet.10
It is not possible to say definitively just what expectations or associations
may have been set in motion for an audience at this early point in the literary
history of India. Even so, it is worth noting that rathoddhatā was often used
for descriptions of surrounding circumstances, such as springtime and
moonrise, that were thought to support and enhance themes of attraction and
love. The overt theme of impermanence as seen in what aging does to a body
that is central to Ambapali’s poem is something of a surprise, then, and
certainly does not resonate easily with surrounding circumstances
conventionally perceived as straightforwardly attractive and encouraging one
to look ahead in anticipation to what is to come. That such later associations
with the rathoddhatā meter do seem quite appropriate to bring to
Ambapali’s poem is reinforced by the overall structure of the poem itself,
which follows a pattern also quite common in later Indian poetry in which
descriptions of a woman’s beauty conventionally start from the head and
proceed downward in the same sequence that Ambapali uses to describe her
own body.11 To say that her black hair was “the color of bees” not only
describes hair color. When we take the time to see with our mind’s eye what
the metaphor suggests, we see not only color but also texture and sheen;
indeed we see the natural “movement” of her curly hair. We may feel
pleasure as we imagine the beauty of the young Ambapali’s hair. In meter,
structure, and metaphor, Ambapali’s poem thus seems to present itself within
the conventions of love poetry. Naturally, we should ask to what end this was
done.
Recognizing the conflict within the poem depends on seeing it not only
within the framework of Buddhist thought but also in association with
nonreligious lyric poetry that focuses on themes of attraction and love,
without reducing the meaning of the poem to what is to be expected
conventionally from either perspective. It is a freedom from our usual ways
of experiencing ourselves, and it is that way of being free that Ambapali
points to and celebrates in her udāna.

The Therīgāthā and the Pali Canon

The Therīgāthā is a Buddhist scripture. It is included in the Pali canon of
Theravada Buddhism, in a section known as the Khuddakanikāya (Minor
Collection) that contains a mix of sermons, doctrinal works, and poetry.
Among the works of poetry are the Theragāthā, an anthology of poems by
and about the first Buddhist men, which is generally paired with the
Therīgāthā; verses about the Buddha’s previous lives known as the Jātaka;
and other important anthologies of verse. The Khuddakanikāya, as a division
of a Buddhist canon, seems distinctive to the Theravada and, moreover, it
contains texts that are unique to that tradition, including the Therīgāthā.
The broad inclusion of poetry in the Khuddakanikāya indicates that the
verses of the Therīgāthā were valued as religious poetry by those who made
the Pali canon, and this is a reminder to us that we should not overlook
considering the ways in which they could serve religious purposes.
Comments made by John Ross Carter and Mahinda Palihawadana about the
Dhammapada, an anthology of verses attributed to the Buddha, seem just as
apt for the Therīgāthā: “It is a religious work, meant to inculcate a certain
set of religious and ethical values and a certain manner of perception of life
and its problems and their solutions.”12
Given the certain antiquity of some of the Therīgāthā, it is surprising that
none of the individual poems has been found in what remains of the scriptural
canons of the other ancient Indian Buddhist schools. At the same time, it is
likely that some verses of the first therīs were not included in the Therīgāthā
when the anthology was put together, just as some verses of the first Buddhist
men one might have expected were not included in the Theragāthā. There are
a number of verses attributed to theras, senior male monastics, that are
included in two extra-canonical works, the Milindapañha and the
Nettipakaraṇa—both associated with the Gandhari Buddhist traditions of
northwest India—and in Theravadin commentaries on the Pali canon.
Scattered in the same works are some verses attributed to a laywoman, Chula
Subhadda, parts of which bear a striking similarity to the verses attributed to
Rohini in the Therīgāthā.13 Referring to what she called the “unsolved puzzle
of these extra-canonical verses,” scholar I. B. Horner asks whether we are
“looking in the wrong place” for the sources of verses not included in the
Theragāthā or the Therīgāthā. “Perhaps, for example, we should be looking
not in the Pali Canon but in the Sarvāstivāda Canon,” that is, the canon of
another school of early Indian Buddhism.14
Identifying particular therīs as the authors of particular poems in the
Therīgāthā was done in the intellectual context of the still inchoate
biographical traditions that were developing in various Buddhist
communities in the centuries before the Common Era.15 Just how inchoate
these traditions were can be seen from the fact that some of the verses found
in the Therīgāthā are also found in the Saṃyuttanikāya of the Pali canon.16
The Saṃyuttanikāya is itself an anthology, and in one section it collects
together verses and stories about nuns. The same verses are sometimes
attributed to different therīs in the Therīgāthā than in the Saṃyuttanikāya.17
It seems likely that the Therīgāthā, like the Theragāthā and the other
anthologies of verses in the Pali canon, evolved over a long period of time,
absorbing new poems as a collection and changing identifications of the
authors of individual poems. But as the Bhikkhunīsaṃyutta and the verses of
Chula Subhadda make clear, not all of the known poems of the first Buddhist
women were included in the Therīgāthā.
 Even though the Therīgāthā is part of the Pali canon, and thus scripture,
the anthology and the individual poems in the anthology had a somewhat
minimal reception history in the Theravada Buddhist traditions, if we take the
presence of commentaries and of quotations in other works to be evidence
for the later use of the Therīgāthā’s poems; the Therīgāthā also seems to
have had little influence on later Theravadin writing more generally.
We should note that a similar fate of neglect seems to have happened to the
poems of the Therīgāthā as literature. They do not seem to have been
included in the canons of great poetry for later Buddhist literary cultures until
those of the twentieth century. As poetry, the Therīgāthā and other Pali
poems from the same period indicate that there must have been an abrupt
break between the poetic practices and values found earlier in India, and
evident in Vedic poetry, and those of the later poetic traditions that used
Middle Indic languages.18 We do not see any evidence that the Therīgāthā
themselves were appreciated as models of great poetry, not even in the
sophisticated literary cultures of the Theravada Buddhist world.

The Therīgāthā and Early Indian Buddhism

Basic Buddhist ideas common to all schools of early Buddhism are obvious
in the poems of the Therīgāthā. These include ideas about the nature of the
world that early Buddhism shared with other Indian religions, such as the
ideas of rebirth and karma (the law of moral cause and effect) that structure
the conditions of experience and action for beings as they are reborn in
samsara; in this general cosmology, when one does good actions then good
conditions follow in this life and in future lives, including lives of pleasure
in various heavens; when one does bad actions, then conditions defined by
suffering and oppression inevitably follow, including lives of unspeakable
misery in hells. Like other renunciant movements that were contemporary
with the Buddha’s, early Buddhism affirmed that a complete liberation from
samsara was possible. This liberation is nirvana, and many of the udānas of
the first Buddhist women in the Therīgāthā express the joy of the therīs at
the achievement of this state of “unsurpassed safety from all that holds you
back”19 and their happiness in the knowledge that they would not be reborn
again. As Sumedha says, “There is nothing better than the happiness of
nibbana.”20 The poems of the Therīgāthā celebrate the experience of nirvana,
however, rather than go into doctrinal discussions of what nirvana is. Ideas
distinctive to early Indian Buddhism are also obvious. These include the
Four Noble Truths that the Buddha is remembered as teaching in his first
sermon, “Setting in Motion the Wheel of Truth”: all this is suffering; suffering
has a cause; suffering can be ended; and there is a path to that end, the noble
eightfold path.21 Also everywhere assumed in the poems of the Therīgāthā is
the standard Buddhist redescription of a person in impersonal terms, “the
dhamma about what makes a person.”22
Instead of seeing a person in terms of a soul (ātman) or an enduring self or
some other form of stable personal identity, early Buddhist teaching
redescribed what makes a person as a concatenation of things and events:
physical things, as in the body; feelings; perceptions; innate dispositions; and
consciousness. These things, bundled together (khandha), constitute a
person, each khandha co-dependent with the others, the parts and whole of a
person constantly changing. To perceive oneself in such terms is conducive
to freedom from the mental constructions that one has of oneself, and many of
the meditative practices alluded to in the Therīgāthā are meant to cultivate
such perceptions of oneself.23 The result of learning how to see oneself in
this impersonal way is expressed in Sakula’s verse:
I saw my experiences as if they were not my own,
born from a cause, destined to disappear.
I got rid of all that fouls the heart,
I am cool, free.24
As Sakula’s reference to “all that fouls the heart” indicates, the human
psychology assumed in the Therīgāthā is Buddhist. It is alert to how human
desires, habitual mental projections, and deep unsavory dispositions are all
causal factors in the ways that we construct and experience the world around
us and prompts to action that bring about our own ruin and suffering. In the
poems, various features of our psychology fetter us to patterns of
disappointment and suffering. Most visible in the Therīgāthā is the
awareness of features of our psychology that ooze out from within to
contaminate all experiences we have of the world; these include
preeminently ignorance, anger, and passion. As udāna, the individual verses
often celebrate the necessity of uprooting these dark features, as can be seen
in the following verse spoken to Tissa by the Buddha:
Tissa, train yourself strictly, don’t let
what can hold you back overwhelm you.
When you are free from everything that holds you back
you can live in the world
without the depravities that ooze out from within.25
In general, the poems of the Therīgāthā wear their Buddhist doctrine quite
lightly, and they avoid most specifics of Buddhist practice, whether it be the
disciplinary practices of monastics or the mental training of meditators. The
poems celebrate individual transformation that ends in liberation, but they
give little specific instruction about how someone who wants to imitate the
therīs might begin to undertake practices that can transform a person into
what the poems celebrate.
At the same time, the poems display a moral acuity and keen perception of
social realities that are less visible in most other early Buddhist texts. A
good place to discern the collection’s distinctive moral acuity, albeit a
surprising one, is with the anthology’s arrangement. It looks arbitrary, with
poems grouped together into sections (nipāta) according to the number of
verses in each poem. Other rationales for the placing of poems in the
anthology seem to be at work, however, including themes based on
commonality of experience and actual personal relationships between therīs.
Some of the most poignant examples of thematic links among poems that
suggest a moral perception of social realities are the poems of mothers
whose children have died.26 We also see poems grouped together that suggest
the moral importance of social relationships between women, such as
friendships that endure the transition between lay life and ordained life and
the enduring relationships between female teachers and their female
students.27
The community of women depicted in the Therīgāthā is less a single
monastic order governed by a single rule (vinaya) than a collocation of
smaller groups of women bound together by shared experiences and
relationships of care and intimacy with each other, as is expressed in a verse
of Rohini’s poem:
 Those who have gone forth
are from various families and from various regions
and still they are friendly with each other—
that is the reason why
ascetics are so dear to me.28
This valuing of relationships may explain the placement of Therika’s verse
as the first poem insofar as Therika’s name itself suggests the significance of
women living together in mutual care and intimacy. The importance of female
charismatic teachers is also obvious throughout the Therīgāthā, while the
monastic codes found in the canonical Vinaya are not highlighted at all. This
is clearly an idealized perception of social realities, but it is no less keen.
The world of the ordained women in the Therīgāthā is one of sexual
equality, in stark contrast to the social inequalities between men and woman
in lay life. It is a keen insistence on the possibility of freedom for women as
well as for men.
This is especially obvious in the celebration of attainment with the
declaration of “knowing the three things that most don’t know.” This is
tevijjā in Pali, the ability to know one’s past lives, the ability to know where
and why other beings are reborn, and the ability to know that one’s own
moral corruptions—“all that holds one back”—have been eliminated. To
know the three things that most do not know is to know that one is enlightened
and that one will not be reborn. The notion of tevijjā in early Buddhism
explicitly triggers association with ideas in Brahmanical Hinduism about
trayī vidyā, knowledge of the three Vedas. When the therīs declare that they
know the three things that most do not know, they are not only making a joyful
affirmation of the attainment, they are rejecting Brahmanical assumptions that
no woman of any caste was capable of attaining “the three knowledges.”29
The attention given to social realities may be one factor for the wide appeal
of the Therīgāthā for modern readers. The poems include endless varieties
of social suffering endured by women, of course, but also those endured by
the poor, as in the following poem by Chanda in which it is clear that she
decides to ordain as a Buddhist nun not out of any spiritual aspiration but as
a way of getting food:
In the past, I was poor, a widow, without children,
 without friends or relatives, I did not get food or clothing.
Taking a bowl and stick, I went begging from family to family,
I wandered for seven years, tormented by cold and heat.
Then I saw a nun as she was receiving food and drink.
Approaching her, I said, “Make me go forth to homelessness.”
And she was sympathetic to me and Patachara made me go forth,
she gave me advice and pointed me toward the highest goal.
I listened to her words and I put into action her advice.
That excellent woman’s advice was not empty,
I know the three things that most don’t know,
nothing fouls my heart.30
We can see in poems like Chanda’s not only individual displays of
compassion in worlds of injustice but also the sensibility about evident
wrongness that the world is this way. Apart from the later and more
doctrinal-inflected poem of Isidasi, we generally do not see in the
Therīgāthā any explanations of the social suffering that befalls women and
the poor as due to the karmic fruits of previous actions on their part. On the
contrary, the poems of the Therīgāthā often make us sympathize with the
undeserved suffering of women, and this quality was surely part of why the
Therīgāthā had the appeal that it did for modern Indian social reformers, like
Rahul Sankrityayan, and for Dalits in the twentieth century who were drawn
to Buddhism as an alternative vision of society, offering the possibility of
self-determination despite oppressive social contexts.31
The modern reception of the poems in the Therīgāthā encourages us to
read these poems not only to learn about the distant past but also because
they can speak to us about the present and about the future.

Note on Translation and Acknowledgments

In this edition, I have generally followed Dhammapala’s understanding of
individual verses and likewise identified the different voices and included
his identifications in the translations themselves. In some cases, I have made
explicit in English what is only implicit in Pali, especially where there is a
pun on the therī’s name and the verse indicates that her name is literally
appropriate for her.
This work would not be were it not for three people. The initial idea that a
new translation of the Therīgāthā should be included in the Murty Classical
Library of India was Sheldon Pollock’s, and I thank him once again for all
that he did to make that possible. I am also grateful to Heather Hughes and
Emily Silk, of Harvard University Press, for all their efforts in the
preparation of this new edition.
This work is dedicated to the memory of my teachers, John Ross Carter
(1938–2020) and Frank E. Reynolds (1930–2019).
NOTES
1 Masefield 1994: 2–3, translation slightly adapted.
2 Pound 1960: 29.
3 The comments in this sentence and the one before closely follow Hardy 1994: 224–225, 227.
4 There is no single method or type of criteria that allows us to date the individual poems of the
Therīgāthā with certainty, and scholars have tried to use doctrinal, metrical, and linguistic criteria to
establish relative dating for individual poems in the anthology. For example, it has been argued that the
poems of Isidasi and Sumedha are among the latest in the collection on the basis of their doctrinal
contents. Sometimes the various methods used for dating are not only inconclusive but yield results that
are contradictory in the details. Still, as Norman says, when all the results are put together, “we may …
conclude that all the evidence supports the view that the verses collected together in the [Therīgāthā]
were uttered over a period of about 300 years, from the end of the 6th century to the end of the 3rd
century B.C.” (Norman 2007: xxxi.) See also von Hinüber 1996: 53; and Lienhard 1975.
5 Neumann and Majumdar both used Pischel’s 1883 edition of the Therīgāthā for their translations.
This pioneering work was published by the Pali Text Society in England, but it is widely seen as an
unsatisfactory edition today. (See Norman 2007: xxxvii and Warder 1967: 1.) What the translations of
Neumann, Majumdar, and Caroline Rhys Davids indicate is that even an unsatisfactory edition of the
Therīgāthā is capable of giving access to key aspects of the text, including its pleasures as literature.
6 Wickramasinghe 1992: 207. Translation by Liyanage Amarakeerthi and Charles Hallisey.
7 Verse 252.
8 Eliot, “On Poetry and Poets,” quoted in Pollock 1977: 11.
9 Warder 1967: 103.
10 See Pollock 1977: 14. It is, of course, quite another issue if it is assumed that the use of meter is
to facilitate memorization and the oral transmission of texts, as is still frequently assumed in studies of
early Buddhist texts.
11 See Lienhard 1975.
12 Carter and Palihawadana 2000: xxvi.
13 Horner 1963: xiii–xiv.
14 Horner 1963: xv. The Sarvāstivādins were another school of early Indian Buddhism, associated
particularly with northwest India; on their canon, only parts of which survive and most only in their
Chinese translations, see Willemen, Dessein, and Cox 1998: 60–92.
15 Collett 2013.
16 See Bodhi 2000: 221–230.
 17 These are noted in the endnotes to the edition here.
18 Von Hinüber 1996: 53; see also Lienhard 1975.
19 See verses 6, 8, and 9.
20 Verse 479.
21 See S Verse 420; Bodhi 2000: 1843–1852.
22 Verses 43, 69, 103.
23 Verse 101.
24 Verse 4.
25 See Collins 1982 and Hamilton 2000.
26 There is one set of such poems that begins with Patachara and a group of five hundred students
of Patachara, all of whom had children who died; right after the verses of Patachara’s five hundred
students is the poem by Vasetthi, another woman who had lost a child; and farther away, there are the
poems of Ubbiri and Kisagotami, whose children had also died.
27 Verse 285.
28 We see this, for example, with Patachara and her different groups of students. Dhammapala often
highlights this in his commentary, mentioning, for example, just how many of the therīs were the
students of Mahapajapati Gotami, the stepmother of the Buddha, as well as other affective affinities
among women, such as being together in the harem of the future Buddha before he renounced or two
nuns who each renounced out of the grief felt after the death of a common friend.
29 Verses 122–126.
30 Wijayaratna 2010: 140–141.
31 This is part of the modern Indian reception of the Therīgāthā in Hindi translations, as for
example, Upadhyaya 1950.
 POEMS WITH ONE VERSE

Therika
Spoken by the Buddha to her

Now1 that you live among therīs, Therika, 1

the name you were given as a child finally becomes you.
So sleep well, covered with cloth you have made,
your passion for sex shriveled away
like a herb dried up in a pot.

Mutta
Spoken by the Buddha to her

The2 name you are called by means freed, Mutta, 2

so be freed from what holds you back,
like the moon from the grasp of Rahu3
at the end of an eclipse.
When nothing is owed because the mind is completely free
you can relish food collected as alms.

Punna
Spoken by the Buddha to her

The4 name you are called by means full, Punna, 3

so be filled with good things, like the moon when it is full,
break through all that is dark with wisdom made full.

Tissa
Spoken by the Buddha to her
Tissa,5 train yourself strictly, don’t let 4
what can hold you back overwhelm you.
When you are free from everything that holds you back
you can live in the world
without the depravities that ooze out from within.

Another Tissa
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

Tissa,6 hold fast to good things, don’t let the moment escape. 5
Those who end up in hell cry over moments now past.

Dhira
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

The name you are called by means self-reliance, Dhira, 6

so know these for yourself:
cessation, the stilling of projections, happiness.
Attain nibbana, unsurpassed safety from all that holds you back.7

Vira
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

The name you are called by means hero, Vira, 7

it’s a good name for you because of your heroic qualities,
you are a nun who knows how to know well.8
Take care of the body, it’s your last,
just make sure it doesn’t become a vehicle for death after this.

Mitta
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

The name you are called by means friend, Mitta, 8

you became a nun out of faith,
now be someone who delights in friends,
become morally skillful
for the sake of that unsurpassed safety from all that holds you back.

Bhadra
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

The name you are called by means auspicious, Bhadra, 9

you became a nun out of faith,
now be someone who delights in auspicious things,
become morally skillful
for the sake of that unsurpassed safety from all that holds you back.

Upasama
Addressing herself, repeating what was spoken by the Buddha to her

The name you are called by means calm, Upasama, 10

you should cross the flood where death holds sway,
hard as it is to cross.
Take care of the body, it’s your last,
but make sure it doesn’t become a vehicle for death after this.

Mutta
The9 name I am called by means freed 11
and I am quite free, well-free from three crooked things,
mortar, pestle, and husband with his own crooked thing.
I am freed from birth and death,
what leads to rebirth has been rooted out.

Dhammadinna
She10 who has given rise to the wish for freedom 12
and is set on it, shall be clear in mind.
One whose heart is not caught in the pleasures of the senses,
one who is bound upstream,11 will be freed.

Visakha
Do12 what the Buddha taught, 13
there’s nothing to be sorry about after doing it.
Quick, wash the feet, sit down off to one side.

Sumana
Once13 you see as suffering 14
even the basic bits that make up everything,14
you won’t be born again,
calm is how you will live
once you discard the desire for more lives.

Uttara
Self-controlled15 with the body, 15
with speech, and with the mind,
having pulled out craving down to the root,
I have become cool, free.

Sumana who renounced in old age

Addressing herself

Sleep16 well, dear old one, 16

covered with cloth you have made,
your passion for sex has shriveled away,
you’ve become cool, free.

Dhamma
Wandering17 about for alms, 17
but weak, leaning on a stick with limbs shaking,
I fell to the ground right there,
and seeing the danger in the body, my heart was freed.

Sangha
Abandoning18 houses, going forth, 18
giving up son,19 livestock, and all that is dear,
leaving behind desire, anger, and ignorance,
discarding them all,
having pulled out craving down to the root,
I have become cool, I am free.