Therīgāthā

These verses generally lack historical context, and even when they are supposedly connected to known figures from the Vinaya and the life of Gotama Buddha—such as Pajāpati, Nandā, or Ambapāli—they appear to be generic compositions that could have been written by anyone and simply attributed to these names.

[3] The concept of ancient India aesthetics was based on the central premise of “savors”, eight classical emotional states known as bhāva expressed in artistic texts, each of the emotions with their own associated savors as follows: love with sensitive, humor with comic, grief with compassionate, anger with furious, energy with heroic, fear with apprehensive, disgust with horrific, and astonishment with marvelous.

All eight of these savors can be found within the Therīgāthā’s writings, in part due to the utilization of similies and “lamps”, “a peculiarity of poetry in Indian languages…that allows a poet to use, say, one adjective to modify two different nouns, or one verb to function in two separate sentences…In English, the closest we have to this is parallelism combined with ellipsis.”[8] The Therīgāthā as a whole was likely collected over a series of centuries; as part of the oral tradition preserved by the monks, the verses may have some semblance of the attitudes held by the early Buddhist communities, thus they may enlighten an audience to the sometimes contradictory attitudes towards the female body by the early Theravāda tradition.

The fact that there are more complimentary allusions to laywomen in the text than nuns is confusing, implying some institutional prejudice against women who renounce their worldly relationships and familial responsibilities, a clash between faith and cultural expectations.

An account from the nun Subhā reveals Buddhist views of not just the female form, but of the physical form in general; while walking along the path to a mango grove, a rogue blocks her path and accosts her, attempting to seduce her with appeals to sensual desire, fear, and physical possessions, evoking emotions renunciation is intended to overcome.

According to Thānissaro Bhikkhu, "Some scholars have proposed that the Therīgāthā w[as] compiled as part of the movement to provide early Buddhism with dramatic stage pieces as a way of making the teaching attractive to the masses.”[8] The style of several poems within the text support this theory; the texts read like dramatic dialogues or monologues as opposed to a realistic depiction of the events unfolding in the nuns’ lives.

Thānissaro Bhikkhu goes on to argue that the manner in which poems are introduced—“Cooled am I,” “calmed am I,” or “unbound”[8]—indicate a lack of Enlightenment, a remaining attachment to the self.

This lack of detail is understandable in a dramatic piece; oversaturation takes away from the theatricality, whereas compressed tales more effectively relay messages.

An additional collection of scriptures concerning the role and abilities of women in the early Sangha is found in the fifth division of the Samyutta Nikaya, known as the Bhikkhunī-Saṃyutta "Linked Discourses of the Nuns".

A translation by William Pruitt (1998) has been published by the Pali Text Society as Commentary on the Verses of the Theris: Therigatha-atthakatha : Paramatthadipani VI.

[12] Furthermore, there is a Theravada commentary on the Aṅguttara Nikāya which provides detailed histories of the disciples of the Buddha, including their past lives and their deeds.

They often strip away concepts like rebirth, karma, and spiritual attainments, replacing these key Buddhist doctrines with distortions derived from Buddhist modernism, the post-colonial revisionist movement originating in the 19th century, which sought to re-imagine Buddhism in the guise of rationalist philosophy and romantic humanism (a more appealing approach in the West).