Therīgāthā: Ancient Buddhist Poems by Women | Voices of the First Nuns (6th–2nd Century BCE)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00][Music] are poems by women who became buddhist monks they embody the voices and wisdom of women who lived between the late 6th and the 3rd centuries before the common era and reflect the timelessness of human emotions noted bali scholar professor charles halsey is joined by the venerable samita and they explain these beautiful poems to us i'm charles hallison i teach at harvard divinity school in cambridge massachusetts and i am the translator of the teregata the poems of the first buddhist women what i teach about at harvard divinity school is about the cultural and religious history of buddhism in sri lanka i did my masters at harvard unity school in 2018 now i am volunteering as a buddhist minister for kinetic administration center in usa buddhism is a religious movement a cultural movement a civilizational movement that began in northern india a few centuries before the beginning of the common era and then found a way of spreading across asia or to the west to what we now associate with iran and central asia to the east to tibet china and japan and to the south and southeast to sri lanka and to southeast asia in countries like burma thailand laos and it once was found in indonesia as well as a religious movement it is something that is cosmopolitan and it has always thrived on translation as its greatest messages across different cultural boundaries so in some ways we can say that what buddhism represents is a very utopian vision of human possibility and also it accomplished a kind of civilizational presence across asia the tarikata are the poems that the first buddhist women who are all ordained that they voice that they sang in celebration of their own enlightenment so that there's ways in which we can using the language of william blake that the the terrigata are songs of experience and that they are say celebrations of accomplishment of celebrations of human freedom of freedom from constraints that the women found themselves living under in society but also the constraints of just the general human problems and so in many ways that they are songs of happiness and that part of the reading of them is that they want to share the happiness with others uh about what what they have done uh and what they now experience and how they see the world and one of the great accomplishments of the terrigata is that their ability to speak across the miles and across the centuries in which we have a sense of the happiness of these uh buddhist nuns so about what what it is that they now want to share with us we can see in the tariganta other features other texts in the poly canon early buddhist literature that they are very accomplished works in terms of creating aesthetic or literary emotional effects so it's people that they know how to use language to say more than what the meaning of the words do to have effects on people to transform them and to raise suggestions of other possibilities that or things that invite us into different ways of living over the long history of buddhism in asia you have you know buddhists have been some of the great like literary poets or authors their fabulous storytellers so we can think of ashwagosha's life of the buddha buddha charita as one of the first sanskrit kavias in the history of sanskrit literature not as a religious language as invaders but as a literary language and ashwagosha gives like a good reason for why religion and literature go together in which he says that when you write poetry it's like mixing uh medicine with honey that it makes it easier for the patient to swallow the medicine and that you don't resist the medicine so this is one of the reasons why i think that literary culture has always been part of religious culture and buddhism in india and sri lanka and across the asia [Music] we don't actually know what language the original territory were written in and probably they were written in more than one local language in northern india at the time at some point they were translated into pali so you could say in the probably in the first centuries of the common era or or maybe even the last century just before the coming year they're translated into this translocal language of poly so that people in different regions would be able to understand what the poems were but we know that their translations because even by the time of the commentator dhammapala in the 6th century he's struggling with some of the meanings of the words or the syntax and the sentences in which that it's not what you would expect in power that they're slightly different and so you have a sense of the something of their spoken quality they're they're kind of the vividness and exchanges and that is behind the translations that they are uh so there's a kind of curiosity that the terry gods exists in the world as as a translation what we have are translations of texts that we no longer have anymore but this is a kind of testimony to that their you know their message their sweet message has always been circulating in translations so it's kind of appropriate that the terekata are translated to single and into english there's translations in the 20th century and to bengali into hindi and many other indian languages as well people are going to find different kinds of theme one of the great themes that i think you see in the territory are like the celebration of friendship and that how the relationships between the women helps them to survive at the bears kinds of sufferings the traumas that they are enduring one of the other great themes i would say the human theme of this is that there are celebrations of freedom of the possibility of tomorrow being different than what today is other people rightly will want to read the terry galton not as literary documents or as human documents but as buddhist documents and they're going to see in their lessons on human accomplishment in terms of buddhist teachings about what nirvana is about the ability to escape from the workings of karma there's other things that people will read in them that you have you know part of the the reception of the tarikata in the 20th century by scholars like rahul sakuragina in india is that their great themes is about social injustice and the ability to overcome social injustice other people read the poems as documents about the experiences of women and which oftentimes 20th century women kind of recognize themselves and what the women are talking about as their own social experiences and their own religious experience [Music] well the organization according to the number of verses is the way that the terekata are found in the poly camera so this is the traditional way of organizing the anthology so probably what had happened is that these individual poems were created at different times and places by different women and they were remembered by different people and at some point in the history of the buddhist world they were collected together and they were collected then in what we could just say a very uh arbitrary way of putting things together uh in a certain way you see this happening in other texts as well the quran is organized in a similar kind of arbitrary way that after the first verse the first asura is the longest one and then they're organized around length and so on but when i began to read the poems together and also to follow the commentary on the terigata which was written by a great buddhist commentator from south india dharmapala when i began to see that he saw is that the different the arrangement of the poems was not arbitrary that actually women homes were put next to each other because they were friends in their lives and so that there was this other kind of hidden relationship underneath the organization of friendship and shared experience that was a happy discovery to find them as the poems get longer we might say that they become more buddhist in their doctrinal issues and so some of them are of the longer poems or very dramatic narrative so encounters between women sometimes molesters sometimes family members who are trying to resist them the shorter poems are oftentimes that have people that are less well-known the kind of the human emotion that's in them they come to the surface more as a monk i have to like you know give them a talk so i have my own temple so every full moon day there are a lot of you know people coming to observe the precepts we call eight precepts on that day so many of them are you know women so one day i thought okay so i'm gonna you know select this as you know that day's topic so it was wonderful like everyone liked it very much you know especially the women they you know at the end of the preaching they normally you know say sadhu in order to participate in that day they were like crying some of them because i felt that that's their need that's their kind of you know aspiration so i started to love it more and more and i used it like you know many times after that [Music] for me actually so it is you know you can sound kind of you know educated and well-learned if you can remember things from the suttas so so it's the same thing with you know even any other surface not only with terri gata so if you know a phrase or expression kind of you know striking me so i tend to remember that so then i use it while i'm you know giving dhamma talks okay so it's also i believe that like you know making the buddha alive once you preach like to use you know what he exactly said kind of so that's the kind of you know inspiration so in you know teddy gathers like rohini and subhas it's very nice when they are chanted so then i wanted to like remember all of them i can just add one thing to what venerable sumita just said in the accounts of what happened after the buddha died and his followers his disciples collected together to recite what they remembered of him teaching the leader of the monk who called them all together one of the thoughts in his mind is that when people recited what they would have taught the way that venus amita was just reciting that the buddha would not be a teacher in the past in the past wasn't it me who carried an aesthetic staff now i am a deer hunter unable to get out of this foul mud and reach the other shore because of desire this is one of the more unusual so the poem is actually a mini narrative that's in the form of a dialogue that much of it is an argument between uh chapa and her husband and so what venerable samita just recited was the first verse of the dialogue and which is the husband who was speaking in which he says that in the past i was an ascetic and once i came to be your husband i ended up being having a what we might say a kind of low occupation or one that is not good for you karmically because he's a hunter and he's just saying that he is really unhappy and that if he stays in his marriage with her he won't be able to accomplish the aspirations that he has there's a way in which uh the unhappiness of the marriage is kind of portrayed in a very vivid way in which the husband is complaining that once they had a child together that the white wife chopper neglects him and so that he uh feeling that what's the point of me staying here and wants to leave then choppa is really horrified by his plans and first tries to persuade him not to go and then insults him about what he is doing but he still ends up going away one of the things that as a historian there's all kinds of interesting features in them there's all kinds of things that are really quite striking about kind of social history of the lives of all kinds of people there's very rich people very [Music] privileged people there's very poor people people of all kinds of occupations that are represented in the polls in some ways that's testimony to the openness of the buddhist monastic order to people from all kinds of backgrounds but there's really quite interesting things where we say we can see a slight glimpse of social life at the time people who are interested in the history of early buddhism they're also really quite remarkable documents and that what we see if we began with the literature on monastic life uh we wouldn't expect the kinds of lives that women are displaying in the tarikata in the monastic life the rules for women are different than the rules for men there's real inequalities between male monastics and female monastics so a hierarchy between them but in the tarikata what we see is a radical equality between men and women in the monastic order and that the women are leading lives community lives of great independence from men they're not being the supervision or dominance of men in any way and much of the poems we don't see any presence of men except in the past tense this is what i've left behind so that in itself is really quite striking what may be my favorite poem in the teregata is the song of chanda in which she talks about how she was rescued from a life-living destitute on the street by the kindness of a great buddhist buddhist patachara so i will read it but first the venerable summit i will sing it in paulie [Music] [Music] 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 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 i think that is a knowledge of like recalling your past lives you know buddha you know had this knowledge to see people you know where people go after the dead like to you know recognize where they are born and the ah so i think uh that is the device but i think the brahmana tradition has their own david so this is the buddhist interpretation of their job so the the vigil in sanskrit would be tribe so someone who knows three vedas and so there's a kind of shadow suggestion here when she's she like other of the nuns are saying i know the three things that most don't know within a brahmanical context those three things would be things that women can never know and so that there is a kind of celebration of i know things that men say i can't know and so that's part of the [Music] character of the poem as well as having a kind of buddhism doctrinal point of being able to know one's own previous lives and the previous lives of other people and also to know and be free from the moral corruptions that all of us are born with this is one of the beautiful parts of the poem in which there's something of a pun that's happening here because in the context of the poem she is homeless she's living on the streets but the phrase going forth to homelessness the idiom within pauli for becoming ordained and so that one of the pleasures of the poem is that it's clear that chanda when she sees this non-collecting food from his arms that she basically looks at her and says she has a better scam than i do so she always gets like food in ways that i can't rely on it so she's asking her teach me how you always get fool but there's a way in which she doesn't know what she's asking for and patachara kind of takes her as she is and leads her to another space in which looking back she can see oh that patachar rescued her from this life on the street and she didn't rebuke her or anything she was doing but just invited her into this other way of life so there's a turning point when chanda says oh make me for make me go forth into homelessness in which we can see reading the poem that she doesn't know what she's asking for and that only looking back that she can see that patachar saw some other future possibility that chanda wasn't able to see herself one of the things that i love about the poem is that i feel it's a kind of answer to the question what makes life possible and what we see is that oh the kindness of strangers uh the gifts that people give to us when they see us in our needs is one of the things that makes life possible and that's what chanda is celebrating that she begins that she's a widow she has no children her relatives have abandoned her and she is struggling on the street many people still do today and that the kindness of strangers is what makes life possible uh for chanda to turn into something else and what she thought she was going to be the presence of patachara in military gods is one of the more interesting like features is very well known her story is very well known in the buddhist world and it's a story of great tragedy that it's a very long story it's very complicated at the core of it is that through a series of disasters patachara's husband her two children and her whole family are killed and she becomes mentally ill because of the suffering that has befallen her and it's the buddha who is able to puncture through her kind of traumatic grief uh and and turn it to another future what we see in the patachar in the tarikata is that patachara has become the leader of a community of women who have had their children die and have ordained as a way of addressing the suffering so patachara is this kind of leader of a community of women that are bound together by the shared misfortune of having children die and so the the [Music] death of children is one of the worst things that can befall anyone myself sometimes i think about it that is such a human tragedy that we don't even have a word for the people who have had this happen to them in english we have words for people who've had say a partner a spouse die a widow or a widower we have words for children who have had parents die orphans but we have no word for parents who have had children die and it's as if it's such a horrible like human fate that we refuse even to name what it is and so that's what is really quite moving and very emotional in the territory of this core of women that are their poems are all grouped together that they are basically still surviving in the pages of the terrigata as a little community in which they are inviting and reaching out to other people sharing what happened to them and how they overcame it and one other woman that shares a long poem that is very beautiful is rohini and in many ways rohini's father asked her what is it that you like about aesthetics about ordained women she gives a long account on what she likes about it she says she saw these acidic women and she wanted to be with them and liked them and that's what led her on when she spoke that way eventually uh she persuaded her fathers which at first he was against her ordaining after he listened to what she said but what she saw in them he said oh you're right then you should go and live with them as well anonymous [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] who and then the last thing that i find really quite fascinating is in terms of meditation what we see women quite often talking about are kind of informal meditation topics that they see something in everyday life and then they began to draw conclusions from it and they are not standard meditation topics at all it's simply people finding lessons to meditate on from everyday life and so it's a vision of buddhist mental cultivation that's far more expansive than the handworks of meditation that we're now you know quite used to so we see people kind of creating new meditations me [Music] [Music] hurling fields with plows sowing seeds in the ground taking care of wives and children young men find wealth so why have i not experienced freedom when i am virtuous and i do what the teacher taught when i am not lazy and i am calm while washing my feet i made the water useful in another way by concentrating on it and moved from the higher ground down then i held back my mind as one would do with a thorough red horse and i took a lamp and went into the hut first i looked at the bed and i sat on the couch i used a needle to pull out the lamp's wick just as the lamp went out my mind was free what do you have in the core of this poem of potter charms is this meditation topic where she says i was washing my feet and i made the water useful in another way this is referring to the story of what the tragedies that befalled befell katachar and that her husband died her children died and then her parents and other relatives died and in the story about this what she's referring to in this verse is that she's watching what often happens of how water moves on its own across dry ground before it's absorbed by it into the ground and so she sees that some water goes a short distance some goes longer and some goes even longer than that and she uses that as a way of understanding what happened to her children that they only lived for a short time and then her husband who lived for a longer time and then her parents who lived even longer and which she understood that their deaths were not something that she was responsible for by her own actions but instead it was because of their own karma that was determining when their deaths would occur and in the reflection on that so where she's asking the question what is my responsibility and what is not my responsibility some are inside occurrence and then freedom occurs and the last verse this is a place where you see the literary qualities of the poems so that what is translated just as the lamp went out the word for going out is nirvana nibano so that there is a double meaning here the lamp literally went out but she attains freedom and the sense of what nirvana is is it literally means that something went out and so that what you have is the double meaning is that she is taking the wick with the needle out of the lamp and it burns out but she's talking about her existential state of attaining freedom other thing that i love about this poem is her again a informal meditation topic thinking about farmers who are plowing planting seeds having harvest selling things taking care of their families in which she says so they do things and they get the results that they're hoping for and she then says but i'm not getting the results that i i'm hoping for what what is happening here and that honestly which she says why have i not experienced freedom when i'm virtuous and i do what the teacher taught what i love about it is the honesty of showing that doubt and self-criticism is part of the religious life it's not something that religious people don't have doubts but actually the doubts are part of the religious life and that in the moment of her expressing doubt this other possibility presents itself when she is just washing her feet you could say in discouragement and then something moves she says the water is moving on its own and that's this is what's happening in the world itself that things are happening by forces that are beyond whatever i think i know that's going on in the world 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 the speaker of truth said nothing different than that one of the beautiful things that about this verse that i learned from the great sri lankan novelist of the 20th century martin luther singha who translated this poem into singular in the 1950s is that he recognized that most people who know about buddhist teachings uh would read this nepali's poem as being about the sadness that comes from or the fact of impermanence in the world and so that what uh people would understand um to be saying is that when i was younger my hair looked like this and now the attractiveness of my hair when i was young is gone now because of the feature of impermanence rick masinger gives another interpretation that he says that it's not only about impermanence that what uh uncle paulie is saying i was beautiful when i was young and i'm beautiful now and that when we have the expectation that she says because of old age my hair is like jute that we think oh that's bad and she's saying but that's your problem that instead that we are creating these ways of seeing the world and so what we see in uh is one that the self-conscious literariness that she has the uses of meters the uses of the conventions of a genre to set up certain kinds of expectations in which having gray hair is not within the realm of beauty and then what rick singer said so there's two sensibilities that are racing each other each one trying to get ahead of the other one that is ordinary conventional and says oh you know younger people are more beautiful than older people and the other that says no there's another kind of beauty that exists in the world that transcends that and that is what nuns were trying wikileaks teach us about their experience that was different than the experience that the experiences that the rest of us have and that part of their power over the centuries is that what they wanted to share with us really is it still able to come across differences in culture differences in history and differences in languages now that you live among teres tarika the name you were given as a child finally becomes you so sleep well covered with the cloth you have made your passion for sex shriveled away like a herb dried up in a pot dhammapala the commentator on the terrigatus says that this verse is not spoken by terry and terika herself but is spoken by the buddha to her at the time of her enlightened something of a question that i puzzled over for a long time why should this be the first verse in the whole collection and in the traditional organization of the terrigata this first verse is sometimes attributed to an unknown none that we don't know the name but what dhammapala recognized is that in the terry got to like in many poems from later time periods in india like by kabir or mirabai that the poet mentions their own name in the poem and that that convention seems to be present in this poem too because uh there's a the first the name or word that can be taken as the name teddykin uh occurs in the first line and dhammapala takes it as the name of the not who is speaking what he explains is that the name when her parents gave it the meaning of terry would be someone who is firm someone who is strong but it's also the word for a nun and so then what you have is the pleasure of wrecking that the buddha is recognizing the name that your parents gave you now that you are are among them becomes you so that you had grown into the name that was given to you and there's a way then that when you take the poem in this way you can see why it's uh should be the first poem in the whole collection because you could say that we could take the the form of the word terry khan as someone who belongs to teres who belongs should be a monetary so there will be a nice translation for the whole could be something like amongst women and so that all the poems are of poems that are uttered out of experiences that occurred amongst women so what damopala provides for every one of the nuns is a brief biography of who they were and how it was that what they who they were when they were a layperson and how it was that they came to be ordained and so this kind of what we could say is setting the content is one of the the prime services of all poly commentators and so dhammapala is following the need for explaining uh you know what was the context in which this was spoken so he's the one who identifies that this verse was not spoken by terry khan herself but by the buddha to her he's the one that explains in the dialogues who's speaking to who uh and so that idea is that it helps to find the the know the biography of the nouns for understanding the verses that are here and the basic point would be is that the meaning of the poems comes from the rich imagination of the context now there may be modern historians that say oh i have my doubts about whether this is historically true or not but there's ways in which the the the story of who the nuns are make the all of the poems much richer and oftentimes it's in don paula's commentary that he identifies this nun was friends with this non it as lay people uh and that or they were they're all the connections of nonstop and in fact harry ka terika is identified as someone who was ordained by the buddha's own stepmom so that that's part of her own biography that she is close to the buddha's family in terms of her ordination lineage itself they got written down probably very early uh with the writing down of the rest of the buddhist camp in sri lanka probably around the first century before the common year and what had happened was there was a famine in sri lanka and at one point people discovered that there was only one monk who we ran with one book in the in the canon and that if he had died of the starvation then that book would have been lost so out of an attempt to prevent that possibility from happening a decision was made that instead of preserving them by oral transmission by memorization alone they would be memorized and also written down and so what we could say that that account may not be true in the historical details but is generally true and so that it by around the common era that they're being transmitted by or by being written down and that's a very important thing because at a certain point the teregata became less important in the terror model world and probably only were circulated in written forms and then people discovered them and brought them back into prominence in the 19th and the 20th century the thiri-gather poems are bound by experiences of love and loss and are as relatable today as they were a millennia ago they reflect the wisdom of the ages [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you