The Therīgāthā, often translated as Verses of the Elder Nuns (Pāli: therī elder (feminine) + gāthā verses), 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.
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.”
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.
Related works
An additional collection of scriptures concerning the role and abilities of women in the early Sangha is found in the fifth division of the Samyutta Nikaya, known as the Bhikkhunī-Saṃyutta "Linked Discourses of the Nuns".
A number of the nuns whose verses are found in the Therigatha also have verses in the book of the Khuddaka Nikāya known as the Apadāna, often called the Biographical Stories in English. The Theri Apadāna contains verses from 40 Buddhist nuns recounting their past life deeds.
Modern works
One modern study of the text is Kathryn R. Blackstone's Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha (1998).
Vijitha Rajapakse has written an analysis of the feminist, religious and philosophical themes of the Therigatha in The Therīgāthā A Revaluation (2000).
Kyung Peggy Kim Meill has also written a study of the social background of the women in the text called Diversity in the Women of the Therīgāthā (2020).
A recent collection of original poems inspired by the Therigatha by the poet Matty Weingast has peen published by Shambhala Publications as The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns. It is described as a "contemporary and radical adaptation" in the book's back cover, and the author admits that they are "not literal translations".
At least one reviewer has described it as a "translation", even though he expresses qualms about how much of the original is obscured by the adaptation of the poet.
Buddhist monks and nuns have also provided more serious critiques of this work. The Buddhist nun Ayya Sudhamma has the described the book as misleading and as bearing only a "superficial connection" to the originals. Bhikkhu Akaliko, in an extensive review of the book, concludes that it is "a disrespectful cultural appropriation" which erases the voices of the ancient Buddhist nuns and replaces them with the voice of the author who distorts the Buddhist teachings of the original.
Vietnamese American author An Tran characterizes Weingast's translation as possibly self-serving, and a fantasy antithetical to the Buddhist world of the original: "Weingast’s poems bear little to no resemblance to the poems of the Elder Nuns. They often strip away concepts like rebirth, karma, and spiritual attainments, replacing these key Buddhist doctrines with distortions derived from Buddhist modernism, the post-colonial revisionist movement originating in the 19th century, which sought to re-imagine Buddhism in the guise of rationalist philosophy and romantic humanism (a more appealing approach in the West)."