Therīgāthā
The Therīgāthā, often translated as Verses of the Elder Nuns, is a Buddhist collection of short poems supposedly spoken or authored by Buddhist elder nuns. The poems belong to a later period in the development of canonical Buddhist literature, composed over centuries, with some dating to the late third century BCE.
In the Pāli Canon, the Therigatha is classified as part of the Khuddaka Nikaya, the collection of short books in the Sutta Pitaka. It consists of 73 poems organized into 16 chapters. It is the companion text to the Theragatha, verses attributed to senior monks. It is the earliest known collection of women's literature composed in India.
Authorship
The Therigatha verses predominantly represent a late stage of canonical Buddhist literature. These verses generally lack historical context, and even when they are supposedly connected to known figures from the Vinaya and the life of Gotama Buddha—such as Pajāpati, Nandā, or Ambapāli—they appear to be generic compositions that could have been written by anyone and simply attributed to these names.According to Bernard Faure, there is no evidence that these verses were actually composed by the women they are attributed to. The text was compiled, edited, and annotated by a monk named Dhammapala.
Overview of the text
The poems in Therigatha were composed orally in the Magadhi language and were passed on orally until about 80 B.C.E., when they were written down in Pali. It consists of 494 verses; while the summaries attribute these verses to 101 different nuns, only 73 identifiable speakers appear in the text. Like the Theragatha, it is organized into chapters that are loosely based on the number of verses in each poem.While each poem in the Theragatha has an identified speaker, several of the Therigatha texts are anonymous, or are connected with the story of a nun but not spoken to or by her—in one case, no nun seems to be present, but instead the verse is spoken by a woman trying to talk her husband out of becoming a monk.
More so than the Theragatha, there seems to have been uncertainty between different recensions about which verses were attributable to which nuns—some verses appear in the Apadāna attributed to different speakers. Longer poems later in the collection appear in the Arya metre, abandoned relatively early in Pali literature, but include other features indicative of later composition, including explanations of karmic connections more typical of later texts like the Petavatthu and Apadāna.
A section of the Paramathadippani, a commentary attributed to Dhammapala, provides details about the Therigatha.
Composition and Inspiration
The concept of ancient India aesthetics was based on the central premise of “savors”, eight classical emotional states known as bhāva expressed in artistic texts, each of the emotions with their own associated savors as follows: love with sensitive, humor with comic, grief with compassionate, anger with furious, energy with heroic, fear with apprehensive, disgust with horrific, and astonishment with marvelous. The intention with these savors was not to have the audience to experience them directly, but to “ them as an aesthetic experience at one remove from the emotion.”Ideally, a text would convey one dominant savor; given that it was long enough, it was expected to provide the audience with supplementary savors as well. All eight of these savors can be found within the Therīgāthā’s writings, in part due to the utilization of similies and “lamps”, “a peculiarity of poetry in Indian languages…that allows a poet to use, say, one adjective to modify two different nouns, or one verb to function in two separate sentences…In English, the closest we have to this is parallelism combined with ellipsis.”
View of the female body
The Therīgāthā as a whole was likely collected over a series of centuries; as part of the oral tradition preserved by the monks, the verses may have some semblance of the attitudes held by the early Buddhist communities, thus they may enlighten an audience to the sometimes contradictory attitudes towards the female body by the early Theravāda tradition.The Buddhist tradition's paradoxical perspective of women indicates even more complexity within the religion, as well as the organization of society. Despite being viewed as "physically and spiritually weaker, less intelligent, and more sensual than men," monks relied heavily on the generosity of laywomen to provide financial support for the Sangha; alternatively, women have been portrayed in a more positive light—on occasion, nuns have been considered to be more capable and enlightened than most monks. The fact that there are more complimentary allusions to laywomen in the text than nuns is confusing, implying some institutional prejudice against women who renounce their worldly relationships and familial responsibilities, a clash between faith and cultural expectations.
An account from the nun Subhā reveals Buddhist views of not just the female form, but of the physical form in general; while walking along the path to a mango grove, a rogue blocks her path and accosts her, attempting to seduce her with appeals to sensual desire, fear, and physical possessions, evoking emotions renunciation is intended to overcome. Ignoring her refusal, the rogue goes on to compliment her eyes, to which she removes her eye and offers it to the man, promptly causing him to beg her forgiveness. Demonstrating such utter detachment from her body frees Subhā from the unwanted advances of the rogue, as well as exemplifying the ultimate goal of detachment in Enlightenment.
Significance
Despite small size, the Therigatha is a very significant document in the study of early Buddhism as well as the earliest-known collection of women's literature. The Therigatha contains passages reaffirming the view that women are the equal of men in terms of spiritual attainment, as well as verses that address issues of particular interest to women in ancient South Asian society.Included in the Therigatha are the verses of a mother whose child has died, a former sex worker who became a nun, a wealthy heiress who abandoned her life of pleasure and even verses by the Buddha's own aunt and stepmother, Mahapajapati Gotami.
Authenticity
Although the Therigatha is generally regarded as one of the earliest examples of text depicting women’s spiritual lives, it is believed the text may have been composed almost two centuries after Buddha’s passing. While several of the poems within the Therīgāthā are assigned an author, the matter of who exactly compiled the writings is subject to conjecture.According to Thānissaro Bhikkhu, "Some scholars have proposed that the Therīgāthā w compiled as part of the movement to provide early Buddhism with dramatic stage pieces as a way of making the teaching attractive to the masses.” The style of several poems within the text support this theory; the texts read like dramatic dialogues or monologues as opposed to a realistic depiction of the events unfolding in the nuns’ lives.
Thānissaro Bhikkhu goes on to argue that the manner in which poems are introduced—“Cooled am I,” “calmed am I,” or “unbound”—indicate a lack of Enlightenment, a remaining attachment to the self. While many of the poems relay how the authors attained Enlightenment, these processes are sparse in detail considered important in other Buddhist texts. For instance, although these texts indicate abandonment of attachment to the body as necessary to attaining Enlightenment, the lack of detail indicates this to be the mark of total Enlightenment as opposed to merely a stage in the process of awakening.
This lack of detail is understandable in a dramatic piece; oversaturation takes away from the theatricality, whereas compressed tales more effectively relay messages. Taken as a true account, however, leads to an incomplete description of Buddhism’s practice.
Translations
- Psalms of the Sisters, tr C. A. F. Rhys Davids, 1909; reprinted in Psalms of the Early Buddhists, Pali Text Society, Bristol; verse translation
- Elders' Verses, tr K. R. Norman, volume II, 1971, Pali Text Society, Bristol
- Songs of the Elder Sisters, a selection of 14 poems from the Therigatha translated into verse by Francis Booth, digital edition.
- Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, translated by Charles Hallisey, Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, hardcover, 336 pages,.
- Poems of the Elders, An Anthology from the Theragatha and Therigatha, translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
- Therigatha: Canti spirituali delle monache buddhiste con il commento Paramatthadipani di Dhammapala, traduzione di Antonella Serena Comba, Lulu, 513 pages,.
- Therīgāthā: Book of Verses of Elder Bhikkhunis, Translated by Bhikkhu Mahinda, Bilingual Pali-English Second Edition 2022, Dhamma Publishers, Roslindale, MA;.
- Therigatha: Poemas budistas de mujeres sabias translated into Spanish by Jesús Aguado
- , translated by Bhikkhu Sujato and Jessica Walton, SuttaCentral.
- D. Rossella, Buddhismo al femminile. Therīgāthā. Le Poesie spirituali delle monache. Con una introduzione alla dottrina del Buddha e la storia dell’ordine monastico delle donne, Milano, Guerini e Associati, 2019, | https://www.guerini.it/index.php/prodotto/buddhismo-al-femminile/
Online in English
- by Bhikkhu Mahinda
- by Bhikkhu Sujato
- Anthology of selected passages by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
- , London: Pali Text Society, 1909. Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids' 1909 translation of the complete Therigatha. "The 73 songs are organized by length; each is prefaced by Dhammapala's commentary of the 400s CE. The appendix gives translations of 10 songs by theri from another source, the Bhikkhuni-samyutta, apparently contemporary with the Therigatha. Note especially the second section of Rhys Davids' introduction, in which she discusses the lives and beliefs of the theri, and from which you can link to songs that deal with specific themes, e.g., freedom, peace."