Sacred Energy

The Therigatha preserves the verses of enlightened nuns who found in the celibate life a freedom no household ever gave them

These are among the very few surviving texts anywhere in the ancient world composed by women themselves about their own religious experience, which is part of what makes their testimony about celibate freedom historically distinctive.

The Therigatha, Verses of the Elder Nuns, is a text within the Pali canon's Khuddaka Nikaya containing roughly 500 verses attributed to some seventy-three enlightened bhikkhunis, composed or compiled in the centuries after the Buddha's death and traditionally dated among the oldest extant literature by women anywhere in the world. The nuns whose verses survive came from strikingly varied backgrounds, former courtesans, a former slave, women from wealthy households, at least one former queen, and their poems describe the circumstances, often painful, that led them to monastic life, followed by their account of the freedom celibate renunciation opened up. Unlike texts written about women's spiritual experience by outside observers, the Therigatha's first-person voice lets these nuns describe in their own terms exactly what household life had cost them and what monastic celibacy specifically freed them from, a household's labor, an abusive marriage, grief, poverty, or social contempt, depending on the individual poem. Scholars have noted how directly these verses speak across two millennia precisely because their claims about freedom are concrete rather than abstract.

Charles Hallisey's 2015 translation of the Therigatha brought renewed scholarly and popular attention to the text as one of the oldest surviving bodies of literature by women.

Therigatha