The Therigatha: Poems of the First Awakened Nuns

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 26 June 2026 · Updated 13 September 2026

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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 the Therigatha 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.

One word in the title repays a pause. Therī is the feminine of thera, and translators render it both ways: “elder” in the older English versions and on Access to Insight, “senior” in Bhikkhu Sujato’s, which is titled Verses of the Senior Nuns. The Murty Classical Library edition describes the women whose poems these are as “some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements.”

The Therigatha and the Theragatha

The Therīgāthā has a twin, and the two books were built on one plan. The Theragāthā, “Verses of the Elder Monks,” is the eighth book of the Khuddaka Nikāya and the Therīgāthā the ninth. The monks’ book is by far the larger — 264 poems in 1,291 stanzas across 21 chapters, against the nuns’ 73 poems in 522 stanzas across 16 (Access to Insight’s counts; editions differ a little on stanza totals).

Both are arranged by “ascending size,” in Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s phrase — not by theme, date or importance. The first chapter holds the poems of a single stanza and each book climbs from there, which is why the Therīgāthā opens with a few lines apiece and ends with poems of many stanzas; its longest runs to seventy-five. Ṭhānissaro, who has translated from both, marks what each collection preserves that the other does not: the Therīgāthā is “the earliest extant text depicting women’s spiritual experiences,” while the Theragāthā carries “the earliest extant descriptions extolling the beauties, not of domesticated nature, but of nature where it’s wild.”

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), to whom the commentaries give a story among the most harrowing in all Buddhist literature — husband, children, parents and brother lost in one cascade of disasters, madness, and the long way back to sanity and then to awakening. The canon tells that story too, but under another nun’s name, as the section below sets out. 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, part of whose long poem on her own ageing body is quoted below. Beside these famous figures are ordinary women like Muttā (Thig 1.11), whose single-stanza verse rejoices at being freed from the mortar, the pestle and her husband — and, in the same breath, from birth and death; we quote it whole on women in Buddhism. Liberation, the Therīgāthā insists, is for queens and courtesans and kitchen-bound wives alike.

The poems themselves

No summary of the Therīgāthā is a substitute for it, because the whole point of the book is that these women are audible. Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation is dedicated to the public domain, so they can be heard here at length rather than described. Below are five of them, from five corners of the collection — Sumaṅgala’s mother’s poem entire, the other four in excerpt, each linked to the whole. What is worth noticing is how little they sound like one another.

The elder, summing up. Mahāpajāpatī’s poem (Thig 6.6) opens in homage and then names all four of the four noble truths in four lines — suffering understood, craving dried up, the path developed, cessation realised — the way a senior teacher might state a case.

The housewife, laughing. A whole register of the book is comic and domestic, and it belongs to women who had been nobody in particular. The speaker of Thig 2.3 is one of them; the collection records her not under a name of her own but as Sumaṅgala’s mother.

Her opening is nearly the opening of Muttā’s poem — the same “well freed,” the same mortar and pestle, two different nuns. Whatever else the Therīgāthā is, it is not a folder of private compositions: a formula could do duty for more than one woman, which is what you would expect of poetry carried for centuries by memory.

The meditator, at the exact moment. Paṭācārā’s poem (Thig 5.10) does something no doctrinal summary can. It reports awakening as a small domestic event: a nun who has kept the training and got nowhere, washing her feet, watching the water run downhill, going to bed, and putting out the lamp.

The beauty, telling the truth about her body. Ambapālī’s poem (Thig 13.1) works down the body stanza by stanza — hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, ear-lobes, teeth, singing voice, neck, arms, hands, breasts, body, thighs, calves, feet — setting what each once was against what age has made of it, and closing all nineteen stanzas on one unvarying refrain. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, who renders that line “The Truth-speaker’s word doesn’t change” where Sujato has “the word of the truthful one is confirmed,” points out what it does: “This refrain, which itself doesn’t change, has a calming effect.” It is impermanence taught from the inside.

The water-carrier, winning an argument. Puṇṇikā (Thig 12.1) had been a water-carrier in a household, and her poem opens by remembering plunging into cold water “afraid of my masters’ beatings.” She meets a brahmin performing ritual ablutions to wash away his misdeeds, and takes the theology apart.

By the end of the poem the brahmin has granted that he was on the wrong path, offered her his ablution cloth — which she refuses — and gone for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha. A woman who carried water for a household out-argues a member of the priestly class, and the text sets it down without comment.

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.

Where the life stories come from

Here is the thing most retellings leave out. The verses themselves are usually terse and say almost nothing about the speaker’s life. The life stories readers know — Paṭācārā identified as the woman who lost husband, children and parents in a single night, Kisā Gotamī and the mustard seed — come not from the Therīgāthā but from a commentary on it: the Paramatthadīpanī, “Elucidation of the Ultimate Meaning,” by Dhammapāla of Kañcipura.

And the canon does not always agree with the commentary about whose story is whose. The cascade of bereavements is in the Therīgāthā — but it is spoken there by Kisāgotamī, at Thig 10.1, not by Paṭācārā.

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, introducing those verses, writes that the canonical poem under Kisā Gotamī’s name tells “a different story, which is identical to the story that the Commentary attributes to Patacara,” and that why the commentary reassigns it “is hard to tell.” Paṭācārā’s own five stanzas tell no such story — no bereavement, no family lost. They are about a lamp. We make the same point, from the other side, on Buddhist parables and on Kisā Gotamī.

Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids, who translated the whole collection into English for the Pali Text Society in 1909, puts Dhammapāla’s work in “the fifth or sixth century a.d.,” about the time of Buddhaghosa, and the writing-down of the verses themselves at “about 80 b.c.” That interval measures when the stories were first written down, not when they were invented: Dhammapāla, she says, “wrote down in Pali the unwritten expository material constituting the then extant three Attha-katha’s on the Psalms” — the exposition was already in circulation, unwritten, before he fixed it. His commentary was edited for the Pali Text Society by E. Müller and printed in 1893; Rhys Davids’ 1909 translation, Psalms of the Sisters, carried its life-history of each Sister across into English alongside the verses — “here and there abridged and condensed,” as she says — which is how the two arrived joined at the hip.

None of that makes the stories worthless: a story can teach truly whether or not it is canonical. It does mean saying which is which.

Some of these women are corroborated elsewhere in the canon, and Ambapālī is the clearest case — her life as a courtesan is not a commentarial embellishment at all. She appears in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16), in a section Bhikkhu Sujato heads “Ambapālī the Courtesan,” not as a penitent but as a woman with money and nerve, who secures the Buddha for a meal and then declines to sell the invitation to the young Licchavi nobles of Vesālī.

Are these really the women’s own voices?

This is the question the collection invites, and the honest answer has layers. The tradition attributes each poem to a named therī, and the collection is presented by modern scholarship as among the oldest surviving literature by women anywhere — the Murty Classical Library edition, translated by Charles Hallisey, opens with exactly that claim, calling the Therīgāthā “one of the oldest surviving literatures by women, composed more than two millennia ago.” What no one can do is verify the authorship of an individual poem.

The cautions are worth stating plainly rather than glossing. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, introducing the two collections, writes: “Just who composed these poems, and put so much art into them, is a matter of conjecture. There is also no way of knowing who compiled them in their present form or when.” He gives reasons for thinking parts of both books late: one Theragāthā poem, Thag 10:2, is attributed to King Asoka’s younger brother, “who postdated the Buddha by a century or two,” and both books sit in the Khuddaka after the Vimānavatthu and Petavatthu, compositions “generally regarded as late.”

He also reports a scholarly proposal that the two collections were compiled “as part of the movement to provide early Buddhism with dramatic stage pieces,” and he thinks the form of many of the poems bears it out. One piece of his evidence is easy to press into the opposite service, so it is worth being exact about it: three Therīgāthā poems — Thig 7:2, 7:3 and 8 — have parallels in the Bhikkhunī Saṁyutta (SN 5), the short discourses in which named nuns answer Māra in verse, which we cover on women in Buddhism. Ṭhānissaro cites those parallels not as corroboration but as support for the stage theory, because each Therīgāthā version differs from its parallel in being “introduced with a stanza that would serve well as a dramatic introduction on stage.” His conclusion is that both books “should be read with caution and care,” and that the Dhamma in them “has to be checked against more reliable sources.”

Where that leaves a reader is worth putting carefully. The Therīgāthā is not a set of signed autobiographies, and reading it as one goes past the evidence. Neither is there any basis for the opposite claim, that men simply wrote women’s voices for them. What can be said without strain is Ṭhānissaro’s own formulation, which he offers alongside the cautions: it is “the earliest extant text depicting women’s spiritual experiences.”

Why the Therigatha 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.

Where to read the Therigatha

All 73 poems are available in English, and two complete translations are free to read online. Four routes are worth knowing:

• Bhikkhu Sujato, Verses of the Senior Nuns — complete, on SuttaCentral, first published in 2019 and released under CC0, a public-domain dedication. That licence is why the poems can be quoted at length on this page.
• Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Therīgāthā | Poems of the Elder Nuns — free at dhammatalks.org, and a selection rather than the whole book: “an anthology consisting of 34 poems from the Therīgāthā.” His introduction to the two collections reads them as poetry — Indian rasa theory, the “lamp” figure peculiar to Indian verse — and it is where the authorship cautions quoted above come from.
• C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Sisters — the complete Therīgāthā in English, published for the Pali Text Society in 1909 and long out of copyright; scanned at the Internet Archive, and printed with the commentary’s life-history of each Sister alongside the verses.
• Charles Hallisey, Poems of the First Buddhist Women: A Translation of the Therigatha — the Murty Classical Library of India edition, published by Harvard University Press in hardcover and paperback.

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 female Buddhist figures; for the canon it belongs to, see the Pali Canon and the verses of the Dhammapada.)