The Therigatha: Poems of the First Awakened Nuns

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-26

The Therīgāthā — “Verses of the Elder Nuns” — is a small book with an enormous claim on our attention: it is a collection of poems by the first generations of awakened Buddhist women, preserved in the Pali Canon, in which they describe their own liberation in their own voices. It is among the earliest known anthologies of women’s literature composed anywhere in India, and it is the living proof behind the Buddhist affirmation that women can awaken.

What it is

The Therīgāthā sits in the Khuddaka Nikāya, the “minor collection” of the Sutta Piṭaka, as the companion to the monks’ verses, the Theragāthā. It gathers 73 poems, arranged in 16 chapters by length — about 522 stanzas in all (some editions count nearer 494). Each is attributed to a therī, a senior awakened nun, and many are framed as her “song of awakening,” spoken at or after the moment of liberation.

What gives the collection its force is its plainness. These are not abstract doctrinal treatises but first-person testimony — concrete, frank, and frequently joyful — about real lives transformed.

The women who speak

The voices come from every level of ancient Indian society, which is part of the point.

There is Mahāpajāpatī (the Buddha’s foster-mother and first nun, Thig 6.6), speaking as one who has finished the task. There are Khemā, a former queen declared foremost in wisdom, and Dhammadinnā, foremost among the nuns who teach. There is Paṭācārā (Thig 5.10), whose story is among the most harrowing in all Buddhist literature — she lost her husband, both children, her parents, and her brother in a cascade of disasters, was driven mad by grief, and found her way, through the Buddha’s compassion, back to sanity and then to awakening. There is Kisā Gotamī, sent to find a mustard seed from a house untouched by death.

And there is Ambapālī (Thig 13.1), once the most celebrated courtesan of Vesālī, whose poem catalogues, line by unflinching line, the decay of the beautiful body she once traded on — her dark hair, her bright eyes, her fine teeth — as a meditation on impermanence written from the inside. Beside these famous figures are ordinary women like Muttā (Thig 1.11), whose short verse simply rejoices that she is free at last from the things that bound her ordinary life — freed, as she puts it, from three “crooked” things: the kitchen mortar, the pestle, and a crooked husband. Liberation, the Therīgāthā insists, is for queens and courtesans and kitchen-bound wives alike.

The themes

For all its variety, the collection returns to a few notes. One is release from domestic burden — several nuns name, with startling directness, the freedom of stepping out of cycles of childbirth, drudgery, and dependence. Another is the honest reckoning with the body and with aging, nowhere sharper than in Ambapālī’s poem. A third is grief transformed — Paṭācārā and Kisā Gotamī both come to the path through unbearable loss. And running under all of them is the steady major key of freedom attained: again and again the poems end not in longing but in arrival — the work done, the burden down, the mind cool and clear.

Why it matters

The Therīgāthā matters for two reasons that reinforce each other. As history, it is an astonishing survival — women’s spiritual voices preserved from more than two millennia ago, when almost no women’s writing survives from anywhere. As teaching, it is the most direct possible answer to the question of whether women can reach the heights of the path: not an argument but a chorus of witnesses, each saying, in effect, I did, and here is what it was like.

It is, in the end, the book that turns the Buddha’s affirmation of women into something you can hear. (Read more in our overview of women in Buddhism; for the canon it belongs to, see the Pali Canon and the verses of the Dhammapada; unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)