The Sisters of the Therigatha

The Therī-gāthā, the “Verses of the Elder Women”, is the Pali canon’s collection of poems by the first Buddhist nuns, in the Khuddaka Nikāya. Each psalm is traditionally ascribed to a named sister, from famous disciples such as Mahā-Pajāpatī, the Buddha’s foster-mother, to courtesans, widows and a goldsmith’s daughter, and some are given to groups of sisters. 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 Sisters, the first volume of Psalms of the Early Buddhists, published in 1909 for the Pali Text Society. It numbers 73 psalms and 522 verses in sixteen cantos, arranged by length. The archive gives the verses only; the commentary’s origin-stories, Rhys Davids’s notes and her introductions are omitted.