The nun Sumangalamata wrote that she was free, gloriously free from her three crooked things: the mortar, the pestle, and her crooked husband
One of Buddhism's earliest surviving women's voices describes celibate monastic life not as a sacrifice but as an escape from a marriage she names, specifically, as crooked.
The Therigatha, a collection of verses attributed to early Buddhist nuns and among the oldest surviving anthologies of women's writing in any tradition, preserves a poem by the nun Sumangalamata celebrating her freedom from lay life. She names three "crooked things" she has left behind — the mortar, the pestle, and her husband, whom she calls crooked in the same breath as the household tools of grinding labor. The parallel is pointed: mortar and pestle stand for the repetitive domestic work expected of a wife, and placing her husband in the same list frames marriage itself as another form of grinding, unglamorous labor rather than a romantic ideal. Ordination gave Sumangalamata release from all three at once, and the verse's tone is not wistful but plainly, unambiguously joyful about the exchange.
freed from the three crooked things: the mortar, the pestle, and my crooked husband
The Therigatha is unusual among ancient religious literature for preserving women's own first-person voices about renunciation, rather than descriptions of women written by men.
Therigatha
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- What the celibate traditions say about loneliness
Sumangalamata names three crooked things she is free of: the mortar, the pestle, and her husband, placed in the same list as the tools of grinding labour. The verse is not wistful, and it is a corrective to the whole essay — the loneliest arrangement in this record is sometimes a marriage.