Introduction

INTRODUCTION The Therīgāthā is an anthology of poems by and about the first Buddhist women. These women were therīs, “senior ones,” among ordained Buddhist women, and they bore that epithet because of their religious achievements. The therīs in the Therīgāthā are enlightened women and most of the poems (gāthā) in the anthology are the songs of their ex- periences. Dhammapala, the sixth-century Buddhist com- mentator on the Therīgāthā, calls the therīs’ poems udāna, “inspired utterances,” and by doing so, he associated the Therīgāthā with a venerable Buddhist speech genre. For Dhammapala, the characteristic mark of “the utterance” would be “one or more verses consisting of knowledge about some situation accompanied by the euphoria that is felt there, for an udāna is proclaimed by way of a composition of verses and caused to rise up through joy and euphoria.”1 As salt just seems to go with food, the adjective “first” and the Therīgāthā seem to go together. It is easy to see why. It is an anthology of poems composed by some of the first Buddhists; while the poems are clearly nowhere near as old as the poetry of the Ṛg Veda, for example, they are still some of the first poetry of India; the Therīgāthā’s poems are some of the first poems by women in India; this is the first collection of women’s literature in the world. As such statements suggest, to use the adjective “first” is to point to something key to the value that these poems have for us. We often try vii INTRODUCTION to draw out that value by turning our attention to the religious, literary, and social contexts in which the poems were composed and then try to see the Therīgāthā as expressions of those contexts. It is important, however, to ask when we think of the poems as “first” in these different ways, whether we may be inadvertantly predetermining how we approach the work. While reading and appreciating the Therīgāthā for being the first of so many things is no doubt appropriate, we also want to ask ourselves if seeing the Therīgāthā in this way also predisposes us to read the poems mainly for their historical information and whether this might come at the expense of their expressive, imaginative, and emotional content, as well as their aesthetic achievements. Reading the Therīgāthā as Poetry The Therīgāthā is not merely a collection of historical evidence of the needs, aspirations, and achievements of some of the first Buddhist women. It is an anthology of poems. They vary in quality, to be sure, but some of them deserve not only the adjective “first” in a historical sense; they also deserve to be called “great” because they are great literature. They are literature in the way that Ezra Pound meant when he said, “Literature is news that STAYS news.”2 Some of the Therīgāthā do seem to be news that has stayed news, and that is part of why they are able to delight us today and why sometimes they are also able to change how we see ourselves. The Therīgāthā enable us to see things that we have not seen viii INTRODUCTION before and to imagine things that we have not dreamed of before. We experience a surprising pleasure from the clarity and truth of the epiphanies the poems can trigger. Perhaps more importantly the poems give us a chance to be free from ourselves and from our usual places in the world—at least imaginatively—and to glimpse a different potential for ourselves. In our day-to-day lives, we may assume all too often—and dread all too often—that tomorrow will be just like today. In the pleasures that literature affords us, we may see immediately that tomorrow does not have to be like today. Such immediacy makes free.3 The poems in the Therīgāthā are about that freedom. They are udānas about the joy of being free, and they hold out the promise, in the pleasure that they give, of being the occasion for making us free, too. How a literary text from more than two millennia ago can give us pleasure, can speak to us about ourselves and about our world in astonishingly fresh and insightful ways, is not easy to explain, but there is no doubt that the poems of the Therīgāthā have proved capable of doing so. Moreover, there is no doubt that they are capable of giving pleasure in translation. This was probably the case throughout the long history of the Therīgāthā. The imprint of linguistic difference and translation seems intrinsic, especially in the difficulties and peculiarities that many of the verses present. Individual poems were composed over a considerable period of time, perhaps centuries; according to Buddhist tradition, they date from the time of the Buddha himself, while according ix INTRODUCTION to modern historical methods, some date as late as the end of the third century B.C.E.4 The poems as we receive them are in Pali, the scholarly and religious language distinctive to the Theravadin Buddhist traditions that are now found in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia; in the first millennium, however, Theravada Buddhism was quite prominent in south India as well. It seems very likely that these verses have been “translated” from what- ever their original versions may have been in any number of ancient Indian vernaculars and then reworked as Pali evolved. The “translation” of the poems in the Therīgāthā into Pali was key to their wide circulation. The anthology has continued to work its magic in modern translations, including into German by Karl Eugen Neumann in 1899, into Bangla by Bijay Chandra Majumdar in 1905, and into Sinhala by the novelist Martin Wickramainghe.5 For Wickramasinghe, the road to pleasure, so basic to receiving the deeper meanings of the Therīgāthā, would open up for a reader who took the time “to remember that these verses must be read with a sensibility that is guided by the poetry itself.”6 What does a “sensibility guided by poetry itself” look like, and how might it be brought to bear when reading the Therīgāthā? Taking the first verse from the poem of Ambapali as a case study can help us see the kind of richness and pleasure that comes when we take the Therīgāthā seriously as poetry: The hairs on my head were once curly, black, like the color of bees, x INTRODUCTION now because of old age they are like jute. It’s just as the Buddha, speaker of truth, said, nothing different than that.7 If we read primarily for information, we could justifiably say that this poem is about the central Buddhist teaching on impermanence. In Buddhist thought, impermanence is one of the three marks (tilakkhaṇa) of the world, along with suffering (dukkha) and the lack of an enduring essence (anattā): everything in this world, including our bodies, disappoints us and causes us to suffer because everything changes in ways we do not want; everything changes because everything in the world is impermanent (anicca); and everything is impermanent because everything in the world lacks an enduring essence that would allow it to persist without changing. The lack of an enduring essence is particularly important to note with respect to persons, since humans are commonly prone to think otherwise, even going so far to think that we are defined by our souls. All of this is important to know, but to leave it at that is to reduce the poem to ideas that we expect a piece of Buddhist writing to teach. Reading with a sensibility guided by poetry itself encour- ages us to explore how the verse also brings a quite different image into view. To prepare ourselves to be able to see that image, we should first remind ourselves that poetry thrives, as T. S. Eliot said, on the “contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life xi INTRODUCTION of verse.”8 This contrast “which is the very life of verse,” the tension between expected pattern and delightful surprise in actual instance, is encountered at different levels of signifi- cance in Ambapali’s poem. It is encountered quite concretely in the use of the same meter, which may have originated in folk songs and is called rathoddhatā, throughout the poem.9 The prominence of meter in classical Indian poetry meant that there was always a tension over how to use language set in predictable patterns of meter in ways that it can evade monotony in individual poems. Only when there was “this unperceived evasion of monotony” could a poem be a source of surprise and pleasure for a reader, rather than a mere occasion to admire the sterile cleverness of a poet.10 It is not possible to say definitively just what expectations or associations may have been set in motion for an audience at this early point in the literary history of India. Even so, it is worth noting that rathoddhatā was often used for descriptions of surrounding circumstances, such as springtime and moonrise, that were thought to support and enhance themes of attraction and love. The overt theme of impermanence as seen in what aging does to a body that is central to Ambapali’s poem is something of a surprise, then, and certainly does not resonate easily with surrounding circumstances conventionally perceived as straightforwardly attractive and encourag- ing one to look ahead in anticipation to what is to come. That such later associations with the rathoddhatā meter do seem quite appropriate to bring to Ambapali’s poem is reinforced by the overall structure of the poem itself, which follows a pattern also quite common in later Indian poetry in which descriptions of a woman’s beauty conventionally start from xii INTRODUCTION the head and proceed downward in the same sequence that Ambapali uses to describe her own body.11 To say that her black hair was “the color of bees” not only describes hair color.

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