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Psalms of the Early Buddhists I: Psalms of the Sisters

Poems of the first Buddhist nuns — a courtesan grown old, a wife freed from her kitchen — remembered as their own words, not the Buddha's.

by Gautama Buddha68 passages held

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Original title
Therīgāthā
Original language
Pali

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Overview

A woman known only as Sumaṅgala's mother gives thanks in verse for her freedom: from the kitchen and its pots, and from a husband who ranked her below the sunshades he sat weaving. Her poem is one of seventy-three in the Therīgāthā, "the verses of the elder nuns", attributed to women of the first Buddhist order of nuns. They are not the Buddha's words. The community handed them down as the voices of his first women followers, and they speak in the first person about what each had been and what she left behind. Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, the Buddha's aunt and foster-mother, whom the tradition makes the first nun, gives thanks for an end to sorrow. Ambapālī, who had been a courtesan, sets her hair, her eyes and her skin in old age against their beauty in youth, stanza by stanza, each closing on the refrain that the truth-speaker's word holds. Subhā, in her poem, is stopped on a forest path by a man who praises her eyes; she tears one out and hands it to him. Almost every poem lands on the same claim: craving has cooled, the mind is free, and nibbāna, the end of suffering, has been reached in this life. The poems were handed down orally and written down in Pāli in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Caroline Rhys Davids translated them for the Pali Text Society in 1909 as Psalms of the Sisters, in English verse that still says thee and thou. The collection is often called the earliest known body of women's literature in India, and perhaps anywhere; Bernard Faure, a historian of Buddhism, points out that nothing proves the women composed the verses ascribed to them.

Key concepts

What do the nuns mean by being 'cool'?

Being cool means the fever of craving has gone out. It is the nuns' commonest word for nibbāna reached in this life: 'Cool am I now, I know nibbāna's peace', Uttarā says, after disciplining act, speech and thought until craving and its root are overcome. The image is of a fire that has stopped burning, not of a person who has stopped feeling.

What is the nibbāna of the lamp in Paṭācārā's verse?

It is the image in which Paṭācārā's mind is freed. After watching water trickle down the slope as she bathes her feet, she goes to her cell, sits watching a lamp, and pulls the wick down into the oil with a pin. As the flame goes out, she says, 'Lo, the nibbāna of the little lamp! Emancipation dawns, my heart is free.' The word nibbāna literally means such a going out.

Why does a woman's nature not hinder her, according to Somā?

Because the goal is reached by a mind, not by a sex. When Māra says the sages' ground is too hard for a woman's 'two-finger' wit, Somā asks what womanhood could matter to one whose heart is firmly set, who moves forward in knowledge on the path, and whose insight comprehends the Norm. The question is whether craving is gone, and that question is the same for everyone.

What is the hidden shaft drawn from the mothers' hearts?

It is grief for a dead child, lodged so deep that the mother no longer feels it as a wound, only as poison through her life. Ubbirī says it of the Buddha and Paṭācārā's five hundred mothers say it of Paṭācārā: the hidden shaft has been drawn out. What draws it is a question, whence did your son come and where has he gone, by one way come and by another gone, so why weep?

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Free of Three Crooked Things

Many of the women came to the order from kitchens, marriages and loss. What does their freedom, sung in the first person, show of the Buddha's promise that release can be reached in this very life?

Muttā is free of three crooked things, the quern, the mortar and her crookbacked husband, and then, she adds, of rebirth and death. Sumaṅgala's mother is free of kitchen drudgery and of a husband who ranked her below his sunshades. Poem after poem closes on one line: cool am I now, I know nibbāna's peace. When Māra taunts Somā that a woman's two-finger wit cannot reach the goal, she answers that a woman's nature hinders no one whose heart is set and whose insight sees the Norm.

  • liberation
  • renunciation
  • marriage
  • nibbana
  • awakening
  • refuge
  • monastic life
  • insight

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The Body in Time

Beauty was the currency many of these women had lived by. Their verses ask what becomes of it, and of the desire it drew, once it is looked at honestly.

Ambapālī, once a courtesan, sets her body in youth against her body in age, stanza by stanza: curls glossy as a bee's down, now like hempen cloth, and each stanza ends on the same refrain, such and not otherwise runs the word of the Soothsayer. Subhā, stopped on a forest path by a man who praises her eyes, calls the eye a little ball lodged in a hollow, tears one out and hands it to him. The lesson is not hatred of the body, but freedom from what others want of it.

  • body
  • beauty
  • aging
  • sensual desire
  • impermanence
  • attachment
  • craving
  • defilements

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Mothers in Grief

Several of these women lost children, husbands and parents in turn. Their verses ask how such grief ends without being denied.

Ubbirī wails in a burial ground for her daughter Jīvā, and is asked which of the thousands of Jīvās burned there she mourns. The shaft in her heart is drawn out. Kisāgotamī recalls a husband dead in the jungle, two baby sons lost and her parents and brother burning on one pyre, under the Buddha's word that woman's lot is woeful. Isidāsī, sent away by three husbands in turn, finds the cause in deeds of a former life. Grief here ends in insight, not in comfort.

  • grief
  • suffering
  • rebirth
  • karma
  • insight
  • ignorance
  • attachment

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Within this work

passages held
68
distinct concepts
104
by passages held, corpus-wide
#590

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “liberation” and “rebirth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 73 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
liberationrebirth10
liberationrenunciation9
renunciationsensual desire8
cravingliberation7
rebirthrenunciation7
renunciationsuffering7
sensual desiresuffering7
bodyimpermanence6
impermanencerenunciation6
liberationsensual desire6
rebirthsuffering6
cravingrenunciation5
liberationsuffering5
bodyrenunciation4
impermanenceliberation4
impermanencerebirth4
bodysensual desire3
cravingrebirth3
rebirthsensual desire3
bodyliberation2
cravingimpermanence2
cravingsuffering2
impermanencesensual desire2
impermanencesuffering2
bodycraving1
bodyrebirth1
cravingsensual desire1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1892 Buddhistische Anthologie

    A book assembled by its translator, not a book of the canon, and the start of a sequence: Neumann went on to translate the Dhammapada in 1893 and the verses of the monks and nuns in 1899.

     DE
  2. Dialogues of the Buddha (Dīgha Nikāya)

    Of the five collections of the Buddha's discourses in the Pāli Canon, this one comes first and holds the longest pieces. Many of them stage an encounter: a brahmin, a king or a rival ascetic arrives with a question.

     EN
  3. Psalms of the Early Buddhists I: Psalms of the Sisters (Therīgāthā) you are here EN
  4. Psalms of the Early Buddhists II: Psalms of the Brethren (Theragāthā)

    Twenty-one chapters ordered by the length of each poem, from single verses up to Vaṅgīsa's seventy-one, ascribed to the Buddha's first monks.

     EN
  5. Sutta-Nipāta

    An anthology rather than a single discourse: five chapters of verse and verse-dialogue, gathered into the miscellaneous fifth collection of the canon.

     DEEN
  6. The Book of the Kindred Sayings (Saṃyutta Nikāya)

    Built by topic rather than by length, unlike the two collections before it: here causation, the aggregates of a person and the six senses each receive a book of their own.

     PIEN
  7. The Dhammapada (Dhammapada)

    The best known of the canon's verse anthologies, filed with the miscellaneous fifth collection. Many of its verses recur elsewhere in the canon, and several early schools kept their own version.

     EN
  8. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya)

    Where the Dīgha stages debates, this collection shows the Buddha at work as a teacher, with monks, householders and ascetics. Neumann's version, the first complete one in a European language, keeps the German spelling of the 1890s, with forms such as giebt and Gleichniss.

     DE
  9. The Udāna: Inspired Utterances of the Buddha (Udāna)

    Prose scenes, each with its verse: a mixed form among the books of the miscellaneous fifth collection, where the Dhammapada and the Theragāthā are verse alone.

     DE
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