The Brethren of the Theragatha

The Thera-gāthā, the “Verses of the Elder Monks”, is the Pali canon’s collection of poems by early Buddhist monks, in the Khuddaka Nikāya, the companion of the Therī-gāthā of the nuns. Each psalm is traditionally ascribed to a named thera, from chief disciples such as Sāriputta, Moggallāna and Ānanda to a fisherman, a barber, a potter and a former brigand, and a few are given to groups of friends. The attributions are traditional, and the date and authorship of the verses remain uncertain.

The translation is Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids’s Psalms of the Brethren, the second volume of Psalms of the Early Buddhists, published in 1913 for the Pali Text Society. It numbers 264 psalms in twenty-one cantos, arranged by length from single verses to the seventy-one verses of Vangisa. The archive gives the verses only; the commentary’s origin-stories, Rhys Davids’s notes and her introductions are omitted.