One nun wrote that free at last, free at last, she was free from the pestle, free from her shameless husband
Mutta's poem names her former oppressions with startling specificity — a grinding tool and a husband, not abstract worldliness — which is exactly why her declaration of freedom lands as concrete testimony rather than pious formula.
Mutta's verse in the Therigatha is one of the collection's shortest and most quoted, and traditional commentary identifies her as a woman of low social status whose daily life before ordination was structured around grinding labor with a mortar and pestle and a marriage she describes as degrading. Her verse celebrates liberation in strikingly physical, unromantic terms, freedom specifically from the pestle, the mortar, and the husband she names as crooked or shameless, rather than freedom described in abstract doctrinal language about craving or rebirth. This concreteness is part of what scholars find significant about the Therigatha as a genre: Mutta is not claiming celibate monastic life freed her from sexuality in some general philosophical sense, but from a specific, named, daily grind of domestic and marital labor that had defined her entire existence. Her verse stands as one of the clearest statements in this whole collection that for at least some women in the ancient world, celibate renunciation was experienced not as loss but as the first real freedom of their lives.
Free from the pestle, free from my shameless husband, free from my three crooked things — free!
Translations of Mutta's verse vary between scholars, but all preserve its central contrast between household grinding labor and monastic freedom.
Therigatha