Quotes from The First Buddhist Women

The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentaries on the Therigatha 

by Susan Murcott

Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, 1991          199 pages 

The First Buddhist Women is a study of the Therigatha, a collection of seventy-three poems in the canon of the earliest Buddhist literature. Theri means “women elders,” or “women who have grown old in knowledge,” and gatha means “verse,” “stanza,” or “song.” Hence the Therigatha are the poems of the wise women of early Buddhism. The Therigatha was passed on orally for six centuries before being committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C.E. in the literary language of Pali. 

This book is a record, for Western readers, of a major religious tradition in women’s spirituality, based on the equality of women and men in the realm of the spirit and women’s ability to assume spiritual authority in the secular context.

The following poem is from a woman author named Sakula who "was singled out by Gautama as foremost among the nuns possessing the psychic power of the 'eye of heaven,' the ability to see into all worlds, near and far. Many poems of the  Therigatha highlight one Buddhist concept or another, but Sakula’s poem is an important one in that it incorporates a number of key ideas.”

When I lived in a house
I heard a monk’s words
and saw in those words
nirvana
the unchanging state.

I am the one
who left the son and daughter,
money and grain,
cut off my hair,
and set out into homelessness.

Under training
on the straight way,
desire and hatred fell away,
along with the obsessions
of the mind
that combine with them.

After my ordination,
I remembered
I had been born before.
The eye of heaven became clear.

The elements of body and mind
I saw as other,
born from a cause,
subject to decay.
I have given up the obsessions
of the mind.
I am quenched and cool. (pp. 64-65)

-- quotes submitted by Barbara G.

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