Session 1: Buddhism and Action—On Violence and Peace

Voices of freedom: friendship, trust and liberationin the poems of early Buddhist nuns
— Buddhism in the Twenty-first Century —Sarah ShawI

F one were to ask any reasonably well educated person the date of theearliest anthology of female spiritual poems in the world, I doubt ifmany would cite those of the early Buddhist tradition. The poems of theTher¥gåthå, however, deserve to be recognised as important pieces ofworld literature, and as evidence that female poetic composition,slightly later than Sappho, but still two to three centuries before the birthof Christ, was, in this tradition, rich, eloquent and highly personal anddifferentiated. 1 The 522 gāthā, sometimes translated as ‘songs’,
companions to the 1276 verses of the monks, are a mix of
autobiographical, dialogue-based, narrative, prescriptive and sometimes
simply appreciative utterances concerning awakening: how it was found,perceived and described by some of the Buddha’s earliest practitioners.
While this paper will address one or two issues connected to authorship,
which is necessarily debated elsewhere for complex reasons, this will
only be as an adjunct to a discussion about the literary preoccupations ofwhat appears to be the earliest multi-authored collection of female
poetry, of highly heterogenous texts, all unified by the simple Pali gåthå
form used in the parallel collection, the poems of the monks.2 I would
like to demonstrate, through just a few examples, that the stamp of afemale sa∫gha, with its own emergent identity, informs these verses, andthat the sometimes lyrical, though more often terse and even epigrammatic, outpourings on the achievement of awakening, provide us with aglimpse into a sense of how a female community, dedicated to practiceand teaching, worked in practice and coped with the apparent dangers
and risks of their chosen way of life.
As Charles Hallisey points out (Hallisey 2015: viii), perhaps the main
8

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

9interest of these poems lies in their ‘news’ as poetry: they really feel as
if they were composed today. That they also show us so much about theway women worked as a community, and found liberation in the Buddha’s dispensation, is a polyphonous pleasure at the heart of a collectionthat deserves to be more widely recognised. As we shall see, key elements to this success are the immediacy and personal engagement of thelanguage, a sense of friendship and trust in the teaching and teachers,
and the craft with which the basic form of Påli formal verse is linked tothe expression of feeling and relief the nuns experience in their new
found life and in awakening itself. The overriding feature of the poems,
however, is the way they suggest a sense of belonging: that the nuns belong where they are, and that the order offers them the security andpeace of mind to live amongst one another, and in the world, in friendship, without fear of harm. For those unfamiliar with the subject matter,the poems are eloquently and sensitively explored in Hallisey’s introduction, essential reading for anyone interested in this field, to be readalongside K.R. Norman’s comprehensive philological study, Poems of
Early Buddhist Nuns. I am also taking the canonical, rather than thecommentarial, supposition that the poems are, as the titles suggest,
authored by the nuns themselves, with the possible exception of verses
assigned in an early rubric to others (Muttå, Th¥ 2 and Nandå, Th¥ 19–20), an anomalous feature that reinforces our taking the authorship of
the others as genuinely that of the early nuns.3

The first poem

A sense of belonging: a personal name, the second person, and happiness

Let us start with the first text in this collection. As I have argued elsewhere, the first text in Påli canonical literature is crucial in establishing
the tone, pace and feeling quality of the collection as a whole, and thisseems the case here too, in ways that are unusual and mark out somefeatures of the collection that inform the particular nature of the nuns’
verses.4
Sleep happily, little ther¥, clad in the garment which you have made;for your desire is stilled, like dried-up vegetables in a pot.
(Norman 2007 II:1)
1. Sukhaµ supåhi, ther¥ke katvå co¬ena pårutå
Upasanto hi te rågo sukkha∂åkaµ va kumbhiyaµ10voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

It is short, but in one verse reveals a great deal about a collection
compiled in the R. g Vedic manner of ‘ones’, ‘twos’, ‘threes’ and so on. It
is in the standard ßloka form, found in many monks’ poems too, so isclearly placed and validated within the same genre and type of inspired
utterance as theirs. While the style and metres used by the nuns suggest
more a consonance with, rather than a difference from, the monks’ verses of the companion volume, the fact that the ther¥ is personally addressed, a feature of several of the poems of the nuns, where nuns areoften named in the second person. It is not, however, a characteristic of
those of the monks, and lends immediately a personal and human touch
to the whole collection. Her cloth is ‘made’ by herself (katvå co¬enapårutå), as all monks’ and nuns’ robes were then; this suggests that her
enterprise in freeing herself from defilements was a crafted undertaking,undertaken by the authoress herself, a small but important detail at atime when female liberation was not thought possible by some. A lookat the Påli also brings out some more features: that ‘dried up’ in‘sukkha’ is a word play with sukham, happy/happily, in the first word, so
communicating liberation as a very positive process, produced by the‘cooking’, literally here, the ‘stilling’ or ‘made peaceful’ (upasanto),
with which the meditative process is described.
But it is the fact that the first word in the whole anthology should indeed be ‘happy/happily’ which seems so crucial to the success of thepoem as setting the tone of the nuns’ verses. The word sukha, specifically associated in the Abhidhamma with the khandha of feeling (DhS
984), has associations with comfort in Sanskrit and Påli, and ease; it isapplied at all stages of the Buddhist path, from the happiness of keepings¥la and practising generosity, to the jhåna factors, where it predominates in the third jhåna (fourth in the Abhidhamma system), the state ofliving in loving-kindness, and the heaven realms (A I 96; A II 69; D I
70–76; A V 342; It 67).
It is frequently applied also to the monastic life (eg. Dh 379). So
blessings at each stage of the nuns’ life are suggested and evoked by one
simple word. This was a time when itinerant nuns would clearly havebeen a novelty, though Jainism does appear to have introduced a nuns’
order that predates the Buddhist; the Vinaya records the dangers of
attacks, difficulties and problems for women travelling and sleeping
out on their own (eg. Vin IV 228, 229, 316; Sanghådisesa rule no. 3). An
appeal to a sense that this is a happy and indeed a safe life within theorder would have seemed essential. Indeed the verb which sukhaµqualifies is a surprising one. A follower of the Buddha, the awakened
one, would, one assumes, be associated with ‘waking up’ rather than

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

11

‘sleeping’. The surprise of the ‘sleep happily’, as an opener to the collection, with its almost Upani∑adic emphasis on the night rather than the
day as significant (BU 4.3.8ff; Olivelle 1996: 59–63), gives however, fora collection of female poems, a powerful and economic means of communicating a sense of the real safety of the order of the nuns: it is a wayof life where, for women, even sleep itself, when she is at her most
exposed, is without fear.
A comparison with the magnificent first poem of the monks’ verses,
by SubhËti, emphasises the complementarity of tone that characterises
the two collections:
My hut is roofed, pleasant (sukhå), draught-free; rain, sky[-deva], asyou please;
my mind is well concentrated, released; I remain zealous; rain, sky[-deva].
(Norman 2007: I 1)
1. Channå me ku†ikå sukhå nivåtå, vassa deva yathåsukhaµcittaµ me susamåhitaµ vimuttaµ åtåp¥ viharåmi, vassa devå’ti.

Here too, being happy is a feature, though the word is less emphaticallyplaced. But the ßloka, unusually in opacchandasaka metre, is in mixed
first person and the imperative: the rain god is commanded to do just as
he pleases too (yathåsukhaµ). The tone is triumphant, with the monk aheroic figure, defiant in the face of rain and any adversities life may
bring him; his hut is his own and the rain deva is addressed with courage: he too can be as happy as he likes! So this verse, of comparable
style, and even some of the same language, is nicely quite different intone from the ‘crafting’ and peaceful ‘cooking’ associated with the freedom of the nun.
Although the complex subject of authorship is not the subject of thispaper, of particular interest in the evocation of feeling in the nuns’
verses is the frequent use not only of the first person, more prevalent inthese poems than in the Theragåthå, but also of the second person, usedfrequently in Th¥ by means of a vocative address to the titular name ofthe poem. This usage is rarely found in the Th and is peculiar to thiscollection (Hallisey xl and von Hinüber 1996: 52).5 There are many suchdifferences of emphasis in the collections that cannot be considered
here; for instance, the use of a formal ‘should’ in the third person, foundoften in the monks’ verses, is not found at all in the nuns’.6 Should wetake this as evidence that the nuns did not compose these first poems

12voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

themselves? The self-addressed second person should be seen, however,as a deliberate poetic style. All the ‘voices’ used in both the collections,which include a plural first person, a single first person, a second person
imperative to an imagined hearer, the third person and the ‘should’ form
used as an enjoinder, have literary counterparts throughout the history ofworld poetry. So in this collection, the second-person self-address, afeature of so many verses (eg. Th¥ 1–10, 16, 19, 35), acts as a crucial
element in deepening the sense of warm personal engagement and intimacy found in several of these first, single verses, setting the tone of theindividual and idiosyncratic paths these women follow. We simply do
not have comparables from that time to the monks’ and nuns’ poems, tofind out if this was unusual then, a lack that is itself perhaps a measureof some innovatory style in the poems.
Counterparts to this style, however, in world literary forms suggestthat in these poems too it is employed with the clear poetic intent thatcharacterise its usage elsewhere. James H. Hirsh (2003) and Ulrich
Busse (2002) demonstrate that the device of address in the second person to oneself is embedded in European early modern lyric poetry andtheatrical speech-making, where the speaker is alone, and where feelingis strong. In Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (eg. ll 191–204), an extended soliloquy by the victim on her plight, the distress of Lucrece’s
threnody is voiced by her use of the first person for her public, ‘speaking
self’ and the second for her more personal, innermost thoughts (Hirsh
190-193).
While I am not aware of any research on this subject in Indic literatures, the usage is of course also frequent in some of Shakespeare’s most
famous soliloquies, by male and female characters, where the more intimate form ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ acts also as an emotional intensifier, to alone character, at a time of great feeling: ‘Awake thou coward majesty!
Thou sleepest!’ (Richard II, Act III, 2: 83–4). As Hirsh points out, citing
further examples (Henry VI, Part 3, III 1:13–17, Richard III Act V, 3:13–17), highly affective connotations are associated in each case with thedevice. The use of a vocative self-address is also frequent in classicalGreek and Latin literature (Blundell 1980: 65–82), again often associated with an ‘emotive force’ that strengthens the immediacy and power ofthe sentiments expressed (Blundell 1980: 74). Simple experience canperhaps be cited here as validation of the use of the self-addressed second person and vocative, as something some of us employ at times ofheightened feeling, in both negative and positive senses; many people
would say on completing something tricky: ‘Well done x, you’ve done
it!’ It is a measure of the literary craft of this collection, which so clearlyvoices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

13

captures the natural voice of the women involved within the stable conventions of Påli formal verse-making, that the profundity of the exalted
state is communicated by such a sense of the ‘now-ness’ of great joy
and feeling of release the women describe. All of the first verses of thiscollection, addressed to single named females, do have a sense of the idiosyncratic, the personal, and the particular, so crucial in establishing theimmediacy of the individual and her own struggle within the collection.

Friendship and Trust
The next poem I would like to explore is a simple one, but demonstrates
a great deal about the way the female community must have helped andsupported one another at that time. The woman Candå, in measuredßlokas, tells in the first person the experiences of a woman who, likeothers in the collection, was forced into penury by the death of her
husband (Th¥ 122–6).
Formerly I fared ill, a widow, without children. Without friends andrelations I did not obtain food or clothing.
Taking a bowl and stick, begging from family to family, and being
burned by cold and heat, I wandered for seven years.
But then I saw a bhikkhun¥ who had obtained food and drink, andapproaching her I said, “Send me forth into the houseless state.”
And Pa†åcårå, in pity, sent me forth; then she exhorted me and urged me
towards the highest goal.
I heard her utterance and took her advice. The noble lady’s exhortation
was not in vain; I have the triple knowledge; I am without åsavas [corruptions].
(Norman 2007: 15–16)
122. Duggatåhaµ pure åsiµ vidhavå ca aputtikå
Vinå mittehi ñåt¥hi bhattaco¬assa nådhigaµ.
123. Pattaµ daˆ∂añ ca gaˆhitvå bhikkhamånå kulå kulaµS¥tuˆhena ca ∂ayhantå satta vassåni cåri ’haµ124. Bhikkhuniµ puna disvåna annapånassa låbhini_
Upasa∫kamma avocaµ pabbajiµ anagåriyaµ.
125. Så ca maµ anukampåya pabbåjesi Pa†åcårå
Tato maµ ovaditvåna paramatthe niyojayi.
126. Tassåhaµ vacanaµ sutvå akåsiµ anusåsaniµ
Amogho ayyåya ovådo tevijjå ’mhi anåsavå ti.

14

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

It does not take much imagination to sense that Candå is probably
motivated largely by hunger, loneliness and weariness with exposure to
the elements in her taking of the monastic vows. She sees a nun receiving food, when perhaps she has none. Drawn by the fact that the woman
is sympathetic, and acts ‘in pity’ (anukampåya), a word associated withcompassion for the sufferings of others, she asks Pa†åcårå, a nun who
has also known grief and the loss of children, to ordain her (Th¥ 112–116); she also gives her teaching. And now, awakened, the nun simply
says that she is now free of the corruptions; all she has done is taken thekindly nun’s advice, and has found the ’the triple knowledge’ (tevijjå),the Buddhist version of the three knowledges of the Brahmins: the ability to recollect one’s past lives, the ability to discern where and for what
reason other beings are reborn in different states, and the knowledge ofthe corruptions. Here she is openly stating a freedom that the Brahmins
thought impossible for women, deemed incapable of understanding
their three knowledges (Hallisey 2015: xxx; Wijayaratna 2010: 140–1;
Gombrich 2006: 62–64). The word to describe the teacher’s compassion
is elsewhere used more commonly for the Buddha (Th¥ 148, 155,
Yamazaki and Ousaka 1998: 4). Here it is another woman who befriends
and helps the lady: this closeness and description of simple friendlinessas having such crucial, life-changing importance is central to theTher¥gåthå.
Indeed a sense of interaction, friendship and dialogue suffuses theverses of the nuns. Many of the nuns’ verses address, involve dialogue
with, or reference to, other people; an implied listener, perhaps a closefamily member is also often suggested. These presences, whom we feelbehind the verses and the speakers, may be the prompt for their going
forth, their encourager when they have joined the order, or even a challenger and adversary. So this is sometimes a negative presence,
when Subhå, for instance, recounts her story of repelling a seducer(366–399) or Isidås¥ recounts a sad history of an unhappy marriage (Th¥
400–447). More commonly when the nuns speak to or about others, itis those to whom they are grateful, or feel familial ties, and fromwhom they have had some help, as Vaddhå, for instance, hasreceived from her kindly mother, who teaches her and encourages
her in her going forth (Th¥ 204–212). Another poem, associated withan unknown nun, describes the nun going to another, who ‘inspired
trust’ or was ‘fit to be trusted by me’ (saddhåyikå: Th¥ 69; Norman
2007 II: 130); the nun then teaches her so that she finds liberation.

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

15

Ambapālı̄

Smile-producing wisdom and liberation

Finally, I would like to deal with the way liberation is presented in thepoems. There are some distinctive features of the nuns’ verses in thisregard as opposed to those of the monks: that the nuns display less interest in natural imagery, for instance and that the nuns choose to see
impermanence and decay in their own, rather than in another’s body
(Blackstone 2013: 83–9; Murcott 1991). Where monks often find awakening from viewing corpses of others, the nuns tend to do so by viewing
the very imperfect state of their own. So the poem I would like to focus
on is one that also does this, but in a highly creative way. It is
Ambapål¥’s famous lines on her own liberation (Th¥ 252–270), in thefirst person, composed by an author who, perhaps as a result of her
background as a courtesan, appears to have mastered the conventions
both of poetic expression and of liberation, and found an extraordinarily
ingenious and powerful means of expressing this in a way that perhaps
only a woman practitioner could achieve. Her chosen metre is
ratthodhatå, a style that later becomes associated with courtly poetry,
and, given her theme and her profession, perhaps, as Hallisey notes, had
this link too (Hallisey 2015: xvi). Working her way teasingly down her
own body, from her once beautiful hair to her toes, she contrasts its
great lustrous beauty in the past with its present decided lack of appeal:
My hair was black, like the colour of bees, with curly ends;
because of old age it is like bark fibres of hemp; not false is the utterance of the speaker of truth.
Covered with flowers my head was fragrant
like a perfumed box: now because of old age it smells like dog’s fur.
not false is the utterance of the speaker of truth.
(Norman 2007: II 32)
252. Kå¬akå bhamaravaˆˆasådiså vellitaggå mama muddhajå ahuµ
Te jaråya såˆavåkasadiså sacccavådivacanaµ anaññathå.
253. VåsitØ va suribhikaraˆ∂ako pupphapËraµ mama uttama∫gabhu
Taµ jaråya sasalomagandhikaµ saccavådivacanaµ anaññathå.

Working playfully through her eyebrows, eyes, her teeth, her breast,
hands, body, thighs and calves in this way, she ends up at her feet, wrinkled and full of calluses where once they were soft like cotton (Th¥ 269).
Finally, she sums it up:

16

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

Such was this body; now it is decrepit, the abode of many pains; an oldhouse, with its plaster fallen off; not false is the utterance of the speakerof truth.
(Norman 2007: II 33)
270. ediso ahu ayaµ samussayo jajjaro bahudukkhånaµ ålayo
so ’palepapatito jarågharo saccavådivacanaµ anaññathå.

As Hallisey notes, it is a highly skilled artistic achievement (Hallisey
2015: xiv–xix). I cannot add much to Hallisey’s analysis in his introduction, but there seem to me to be two points that could usefully be madethat show us its poetic craft. The first is a sense of the middle way, arising from the moving point of equipoise between the description of thebeauties of the earlier state, and the appalling condition of the present
one. Neither is rejected; both have validity in their own worlds. It is the
stance that can view the paradox of both the young and the old withequanimity that is the result. Closely connected to this—a point which I
am not aware others have noted about any poems in this collection—is
that, said in the right circumstances, it is just very funny. I found this out
by accident when reading it to an adult education class composed mostly of often glamorous elderly women, with little background knowledgeof Buddhism. To my shock, as I was trying to be serious, they all started
smiling or laughing in recognition. As they said afterwards, it was justlike the conversations one would have when changing at a spa or swimming pool with friends. Clearly one cannot with confidence attribute humour to an ancient poem, but it did make me think. The poem works sowell precisely because its sense of the middle way derives from thatknife edge between beauty and ugliness, attraction and disgust: it captures, in highly skilled verse-making, not only the conventions of courtly
eulogy, but also the rhythms and stresses of women’s laughing chatamongst themselves, at any time. That it is so poised and controlled inits expression of the finely tuned balance between desire and repulsion
seems to me an extraordinary achievement, and one which makes this,and other poems in the collection, in different ways, so full of life now.
This cannot be a full study of the relationship between these poems
and those of the nuns, but it is worthy of note that poems in the
Theragåthå do not explore poverty, the loss of one’s looks or the way
one’s own body deteriorates, in quite this way, nor is the sense of interaction, friendship and trust so evident between members of the order.
The poems of the monks do contain far more in the way of observationof the natural world and doctrinal explanation, where the nuns tend to-voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

17

wards the autobiographical and the personal. This seems to me to arise
from a kind of complementarity: as I hope to have shown, we can genuinely ‘hear’ these early women speaking, and can feel their sense of
having found their place, and their happiness, in the order of nuns. I also
have not examined the issue of authorship of the poems, which has been
contested by some. But it seems important to say that while there arecertainly literary productions composed by men that give voice to a female sensibility that will accord with all women—the characters of Noh
drama for instance, or those in Shakespeare’s plays spring to mind—it isa stretch of our credulity to think that men would have felt it necessary
to compose them, however warmly our opinion of early monks may befostered by such a supposition. Certainly women would not have had a
Vedic education, but nor would the low-caste barber Upåli, for instance,
whose verses in the Majjhimanikåya are never challenged on thosegrounds (M I 385–7). In China and Japan, it appears that in some, if by
no means all, historical periods the education and community provided
by the monastic orders prompted literacy and hence verse-writing inprobably otherwise illiterate nuns (Gross 2001; Kaminishi 2006: 117ff;
Meeks 2010: 250 ff; Schuster 1985: 98). In an early Indian, non-literate
culture, where oral transmission then, as now, probably featured as central to female culture, and where contact with chant, careful transmission of text and recitation would have been essential in monastic life in
the centuries immediately after the Buddha’s death, the notion that nuns
could have composed their own verses, just as low-caste men in the
Theragåthå would have composed theirs, seems reasonable to me. Moreresearch is needed on this subject; but as it is, whatever the authorshipof these poems, they provide moving, expressive and, occasionally,
idiosyncratic evidence of female struggle and fulfilment.
At the beginning of this paper I cited the first word ‘happy’ as the key
to the collection as a whole, and in communicating a sense that the nuns,
as one of the four assemblies said to be followers of all Buddhas, belonged where they were and doing what they were doing. It is also frequently used to describe awakening and the eradication of suffering(A III 354–5; Th¥ 182, 205), the ‘happy ground’ found throughout
the path and at its attainment (sukhabhËmiyaµ: DhS 984). The
Buddha could not offer protection from all the risks of the monastic
life for nuns, though the Vinaya rules suggest he offered manysafeguards to their security and freedom, but he could offer his happy
path and this, his final goal. It is the stamp of this, and that the nuns
have found a taste of all three ele-ments of the Triple Gem, that thecollection as a whole leaves us. It is, apparently, important to feel an
indefinable sense that one belongs to18

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

give one the confidence to work for awakening: the Buddha was challenged by Måra on this very point on the night of the enlightenment, as
his last great attack. When Måra says he has no right to sit in that placeand strive for the goal, Gotama calls the earth to witness to prove thatthat indeed is where he should be sitting, doing what he is (Ja I 77–9). It
is his last routing of his great opponent before the awakening. A sensethat despite all opposition, there is a welcome and a sense of belonging,so musically and beautifully expressed in these poems, is also what thecollection has to offer for the community-building and re-establishmentof an accepted order of nuns. This must be surely be a necessity for all
Buddhist schools in the twenty-first century if they are to remain truly
Buddhist.
Abbreviations (Pali Text Society texts)
A = A∫guttaranikåya
D = D¥ghanikåya
Dh = Dhammapada
DhS = Dhammasa∫gani
It = ItivuttakaJa = Jåtakatthavaˆˆanå
M = Majjhimanikåya
Th = Theragåthå
Th¥ = Ther¥gåthå
Vin = Vinaya
Notes
The verses are attributed by K.R.Norman to the period from the mid-sixth to the
mid-second century BCE. It may be surprising to some that the range includes the
pre-Buddhist period; some of the verses are suggested to be of earlier date originally.
The authors, of course, may have still used them. Professor Jon Stallworthy of Oxford
University, once noted the frequency with which he would write poems he thought wereoriginal, only to find that someone else had written almost identical lines that he hadread and forgotten (in ‘Memory, Mother of the Muses’, 28th October, 2013, President’s
Seminar, Wolfson College, Oxford).
2
See, for instance, Norman 2007 II: xix-xxxi; von Hinüber 2008, Hallisey 2015: xx–
xiv.
3This is particularly interesting in the light of the fact that Muttå’s poem is amongst
ten addressed in the second person, suggesting that the others are indeed self-authored.
Norman notes that there do seem be some later levels of the text (Norman 2007 II:
34–41).
4
See Shaw 2004.
5
Dhammapåla’s commentary, adopting a more literal reading, attributes most suchverses to the Buddha, addressing, in these cases, each woman concerned.
6See, for instance, Th 794–817, where the third person is used to describe the doctrine and practice of awakening in general terms, a tone rarely found in Th¥.
1

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

19

Bibliography
Alexander, Peter (ed). (1951) William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. London and
Glasgow: Collins (Individual works cited by name of work, act, scene and line
numbers).
Blackstone, Kathryn R. (2013) Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha. London: Routledge.
Blundell, John (1980) Menander and the Monologue. Hypomnemata untersuchungen
zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben. Heft 49. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht.
Busse, Ulrich (2002) Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-Syntactic
Variability of Second-Person Pronouns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Gombrich, Richard F. (2006) How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the
Early Teachings. London: Routledge.
Gross, Rita M (2001) ‘Women in Buddhism’ in Peter Harvey ed. Buddhism. London:
Bloomsbury, 205-234.
Hallisey, Charles trans. (2015) Ther¥gåthå: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. Murty
Classical Library of India. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
von Hinüber, Oskar (1996) A Handbook of Pali Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
von Hinüber, Oskar (2008) ‘The Foundation of the Bhikkhun¥samgha; a Contribution to
the Earliest History of Buddhism’, in Annual Report of the International ResearchInstitute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University for the Academic Year 2007,
3–29.
Hirsh, James H. (2003) Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. Madison and London: Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp/Associated University Presses.
Kaminishi, Ikumi (2006) Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Meeks, Lori Rachelle (2010) Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Ordersin Premodern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Murcott, Susan (1991) The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the
Ther¥gåthå. Berkeley, California: Parallax Press.
Norman, K.R. trans. (2007) Elders’ Verses I 2nd edition. Lancaster: Pali Text Society.
Norman, K.R. trans. (2007) Elders’ Verses II 2nd edition. Lancaster: Pali Text Society.
Olivelle, Patrick trans. (1996) Upani∑ads. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schuster, Nancy (1985) ‘Striking a balance: Women and Images of Women in early
Chinese Buddhism’, in Women, Religion, and Social Change, edited by Yvonne
Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks. Albany: State University of New York Press,
87–114.
Shaw, Sarah (2004) ‘Crossing the Wilderness: how the Buddha narrates his travels in theJåtakas’, OCBS website: http://ocbs.org/crossing-the-wilderness-how-thebuddha-narrates-his-own-travels/
Wijayaratna, Mohan (2010) Buddhist Nuns. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society.
Yamazaki, Moriichi and Ousaka, Yumi (1998) Ther¥gåthå: Påda Index and ReversePåda Index. Tokyo: ChËØ Academic Research Institute.

20

voices of freedom: poems of early buddhist nuns

Author Biography
Sarah Shaw read Greek and English at Manchester University, where she also did adoctorate in English Literature. She studied Pali with Richard Gombrich at Oxford University. She is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, a member of Wolfson
College, and a faculty member of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. She
lectures and writes on Buddhist meditation, narrative, literature and practice. She has
written several books on Buddhist Meditation and Jataka stories.