Khuddaka Nikaya - Therigatha ( Psalms of the Sisters ) Appendix
APPENDIX
VERSES ATTRIBUTED TO SISTERS IN THE BHIKKHUNĪ-SAŊYUTTA OF THE SAŊYUTTA-NIKĀYA
1. Āḷavikā. 454
THUS have I heard. The Exalted One was once staying at Sāvatthī, in the Jeta
Grove, the park of Anāthapiṇḍika. Now Āḷavikā the Bhikkhunī dressed herself
early and, taking bowl and robe, entered Sāvatthī for food. And when she had
gone about Sāvatthī for it, had broken her fast and returned, she entered the
Dark Wood, seeking solitude.
Then Māra the Evil One, desiring to arouse fear, wavering, and dread in her,
desiring to make her desist from being alone, went up to her, and addressed her
in a verse:
'Ne'er shalt thou find escape while in the world.
What profiteth thee then thy loneliness?
Take the good things of life while yet thou may'st,
Repentance else too late awaiteth thee.'
Then Āḷavikā thought: 'Who now is this, human or non-human, that speaketh this
verse? Sure 'tis Māra the Evil One speaketh it, desirous to arouse in me fear,
wavering and dread, desirous to make me desist from my solitude.' And Bhikkhunī
Āḷavikā, knowing that 'twas he, replied with a verse:
'There is escape while in the world, and I
Have well attained thereto by insight won.
Thou evil limb of loafing! 455 'tis not thine
To know that bourne, or how it may be reached.
Like spears and jav'lins are the joys of sense,
That pierce and rend the mortal frames of us.
These that thou callest "the good things of life,"
Good of that ilk to me is nothing worth.'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Āḷavikā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
2. Somā. 456
. . . . . 457 Now Somā . . . . . entered the Dark Wood for siesta, and, plunging
into its depths, sat down at the root of a certain tree for siesta.
Then Māra the Evil One, desiring to arouse fear, wavering, and dread in her,
desiring to make her desist from concentrated thought, went up to her, and
addressed her in a verse:
'That vantage-ground the sages may attain is hard
To reach. With her two-finger consciousness
That is no woman competent to gain!'
Then Somā thought . . . . . 'Sure 'tis Māra!'. . . . and replied with verses:
'What should the woman's nature do to them 458
Whose hearts are firmly set, who ever move
With growing knowledge onward in the Path?
What can that signify to one in whom
Insight doth truly comprehend the Norm?
To one for whom the question doth arise:
Am I a woman in these matters, or
Am I a man, or what not am I, then?
To such an one is Māra fit to talk!'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Somā knows me,' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
3. Gotamī. 459
. . . . . Now the Lean Gotamid . . . . . entered the Dark Wood for siesta, and,
plunging into its depths, sat down at the root of a certain tree for siesta.
Then Māra . . . . . went up to her, and addressed her in a verse:
'How now? Dost sit alone with tearful face
As mother stricken by the loss of child?
Thou who hast plunged into the woods alone,
Is it a man that thou hast come to seek?'
Then the Lean Gotamid thought . . . . . 'Sure 'tis Māra!' . . . . . and replied
with verses:
'Ay, ever am I she whose child is lost! 460
And for the seeking, there are men at hand.
I do not grieve, I am not shedding tears,
And as for thee, good sir, I fear thee not.
Slain everywhere is love of worldly joys,
And the thick gloom of ignorance is rent in twain.
Defeating all the army of the power of death,
I here abide purged of the poison-drugs.' 461
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Gotamī knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
4. Vijayā. 462
. . . . . Now Bhikkhunī Vijayā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain tree
for siesta.
Then Māra . . . . . addressed her in a verse: 463
'A maiden thou and beautiful–and I
So young a lad! Now where to fivefold art 464
Of sounds melodious we may list, O come,
Lady, and let us take our fill of joy!'
Then Bhikkhunī Vijayā thought . . . . . 'Sure 'tis Māra!' . . . . . and . . . .
. replied with verses:
'Sights, sounds and tastes and smells and things to touch,
Wherein the mind delights, I leave them all
To thee, Māra; for such no mind have I!
This body vile, this brittle, crumbling thing,
Doth touch me only with distress and shame.
Craving for joys of sense is rooted out.
They who have come to worlds of form, and they
Who dwell where form is not, and that perfect
Attainment which is peace 465 –from all,
From everywhere, the darkness is dispelled.'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Vijayā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
5. Uppalavaṇṇā.
. . . . . Now, Bhikkhunī Uppalavaṇṇā . . . . . entered the Dark Wood for siesta,
and, plunging into its depths, halted at the root of a certain sāla-tree in full
blossom.
Then Māra . . . . . addressed her in a verse:
'Thou that art come where over thee crownèd with blossom
[Waveth] the sāl-tree, Sister, and standest alone in the shade of it,
No one like thee could hither come rival to beauty as thine is!
Fearest thou not, O foolish maiden, the wiles of seducers?' 466
Then Bhikkhunī Uppalavaṇṇā thought . . . . . 'Sure 'tis Māra!' . . . . . and . .
. . . replied with verses:
'Were there an hundred thousand seducers e'en such as thou art,
Ne'er would I tremble affrighted thereat, or turn a hair of me.
Māra, I fear not thee, all lonely though I be standing.
Here though I stand, I vanish, or enter into thy body.
See! 'twixt thine eyelashes hide, standing where thou canst not see me.
For all my mind is wholly self-controlled,
And the Four Paths to Potency are thoroughly learnt.
Yea, I am free from all the Bonds there be.
In sooth, good sir, no fear have I of thee!'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Uppalavaṇṇā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
6. Cālā. 467
. . . . . Now, Bhikkhunī Cālā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain tree
for siesta.
Then Māra the Evil One went up to her, and spoke thus to her: 'Wherein, O
Sister, dost thou find no pleasure?'
'In birth, 468 good sir, I find no pleasure.'
'Why findest thou no pleasure in birth? Once born, one enjoys the pleasures of a
life of sense. Who hath put this into thy mind–"Find no pleasure in
birth"–Sister?'
'Once born, we die. Once born, we see life's Ills–
The bonds, the torments, and the life cut off. 469
The Buddha hath revealed the Norm to us–
How we may get beyond the power of birth,
How we may put an end to every Ill.
'Tis He hath guided me into the True.
They who have come to worlds of Form, and they
Who in those worlds abide where Form is not,
An they know not how they may end it all,
Are goers, all of them, again to birth. 470
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Cālā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
7. Upacālā. 471
. . . . . Now, Bhikkhunī Upacālā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain
tree for siesta.
Then Māra the Evil One, desiring to arouse fear . . . . . to make her desist
from concentrated thought, went up to her, and spoke thus to her:
'Where, Sister, dost thou wish to rise again?'
'Nowhere, good sir, I wish to rise again.'
'Now, think upon the Three-and-Thirty gods,
And on the gods who rule in realm of Shades,
On those who reign in Heaven of Bliss, and on
Those higher deities who live where life
Yet flows by way of sense and of desire–
Think, and thither aspire with longing heart,
The bliss of each in turn shall then be thine.'
Upacālā.
Ay, think upon the Three-and-Thirty gods,
And on the gods who rule in realm of Shades,
On those who reign in Heaven of Bliss, and on
Those higher deities who live where life
Yet flows by way of sense and of desire!
They all are bound by bonds of sense-desire,
Hence come they evermore 'neath Māra's sway.
On fire is all the world, is wrapt in smoke. 472
Ablaze is all the world, the heav'ns do quake!
But that which quaketh not, influctuate, 473
Untrodden by the average worldling's feet,
Where Māra cometh not nor hath way-gate–
There doth my heart abide in blest retreat.' 474
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Upacālā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
8. Sīsupacālā. 475
. . . . . Now, Bhikkhunī Sīsupacālā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain
tree for siesta.
Then Māra the Evil One went up to her, and spoke to her thus: 'Of whose
shibboleth, Sister, dost thou approve?' 'I approve of no one's shibboleth, good
sir.'
'Why now and whereto art thou seen thus garbed
And shaven like a nun, yet dost not join
Ascetics of some sort and shibboleth?
What, futile and infatuate, is thy quest?'
''Tis they that are without, caught in the net
Of the vain shibboleths in which they trust–
Their's is the doctrine I cannot approve.
'Tis they that lack acquaintance with the Norm.
'Lo! in the princely Sākiya clan is born
A Buddha peerless 'mong the sons of men,
Who all hath overcome, before whose face
Māra doth flee away, who everywhere
Unconquered stands, He that is wholly freed
And fetterless, the Seer who seeth all,
For whom all karma is destroyed, who in
The perishing of every germ that birth
Once more engenders, is at liberty.
This the Exalted One, my Master and my Lord:
His doctrine, His the word that I approve.'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Sīsupacālā knows me! . . . . .
9. Selā. 476
. . . . . Now, Bhikkhunī Selā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain tree
for siesta.
Then Māra . . . . . went up to her, and addressed her with a verse:
'Who was't that made this human puppet's form?
Where, tell me, is the human doll's artificer?
Whence hath the human puppet come to be?
Where, tell me, shall it cease and pass away?'
Then Bhikkhunī Selā thought . . . . . ' Sure 'tis Māra!' . . . . . and . . . . .
replied with verses:
'Neither self-made the puppet is, nor yet
By other is this evil fashionèd.
By reason of a cause it came to be;
By rupture of a cause, it dies away.
Like to a given seed sown in the field,
Which, when it lighteth on the taste of earth
And moisture likewise–by these twain doth grow,
So the five aggregates, the elements,
And the six spheres of sense–even all these–
By reason of a cause they came to be;
By rupture of a cause they die away.'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Selā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
10. Vajirā.
. . . . . Now Bhikkhunī Vajirā . . . . . sat down at the root of a certain tree
for siesta.
Then Māra . . . . . went up to her, and addressed her with a verse:
'Who hath this being 477 fashioned? Where is
The maker of this being? Whence hath it sprung?
Where doth this being cease and pass away?'
Then Bhikkhunī Vajirā thought . . . . . 'Sure 'tis Māra!' . . . . . and replied
with a verse:
'"Being"? Why dost thou harp upon that word?
'Mong false opinions, Māra, art thou strayed.
This a mere bundle of formations is.
Therefrom no "being" mayest thou obtain.
For e'en as, when the factors are arranged,
The product by the word "chariot" is known,
So doth our usage covenant to say–
"A being"–when the aggregates are there.
''Tis simply Ill that riseth, simply Ill
That doth persist, and then fadeth away.
Nought beside Ill it is that doth become;
Nought else but Ill it is doth pass away.'
Then Māra, thinking, 'Bhikkhunī Vajirā knows me!' vanished thence, sad and
dejected.
Here endeth the Bhikkhunī Series.
The Yakkha-Saŋyutta, or Fairy Series in the same Nikāya, gives the summons
uttered by the indignant tree-fairy to the people of Rājagaha in Sukkā's little
poem (Ps. xxxiv.). The lines are exactly the same, except that 'wayfarer' is
panthagū instead of addhagū.
In the following Sutta presumably the same devoted spirit proclaims the praises
both of Sukkā and of a lay-disciple who supplied the eloquent Therī with food:
'O surely plenteous merit hath he wrought,
That layman wise, who Sukkā's wants supplied–
Sukkā's, who from all bonds is wholly free!' 478
454 Cf. Selā's Psalm, xxxv. She was the daughter of the King of Āḷavī.
455 Pamatto.
456 See Ps. xxxvi., comparing the vastly more interesting reply given here.
457 Where dotted lines occur, here and below, the reading is as for Āḷavikā.
458 Not 'to us,' as in the Psalm.
459 Cf. Ps. lxiii. In the case of elisions, read as for Somā.
460 By 'ever'–accantaŋ, lit. exceedingly, endlessly–it is conceivable that she
alludes, not to her own too common case, as a mother bereaved of a son, but
either to endless past bereavements, or to the fact that, as Arahant, she had
cut herself off from age-long possibilities of being often again in similar
circumstances. Cf., e.g., Ps. xxxiii.
461 Āsavas.
462 Vijayā, to whom Ps lvii. is ascribed, is apparently a different person.
463 Cf. Khemā's Psalm (lii.)
464 Five sorts of musical instruments are supposed to be implied in this
idiomatic phrase–ātataŋ, vitataŋ, ātata-vitataŋ, ghanaŋ, susiraŋ.
465 I have ventured to bridge over the hiatus, in what Professor Windisch
calls the 'loose construction' of this gāthā, by the insertion of 'from all,
from. . . .' For what may have been the original, and is the more logical,
ending, see Cālā's verses below. As the gāthā in Pali stands here, it seems to
mean: '"I see life steadily, and see it whole." Trouble me not with your
foolish little solicitations to sensual joys.'
466 Where the text differs from that of Psalm lxiv. may be seen by the
following: Therigāthā. Saŋyutta.
Supupphitaggaŋ upagamma padāpaŋ ekā tuvaŋ tiṭṭhasi rukkhamūle
Supupphitaggaŋ upagamma bhikkhuni ekā tuvaŋ tiṭṭhasi sālamūle
Na cāpi te dutiyo atthi; koci na tvaŋ bāle bhāyasi dhuttakānaŋ. Na
c'atthi te dutiyā vaṇṇadhātu idhāgatā tādisikā bhaveyyuŋ.
Bāle na tvaŋ bhāyasi dhuttakānaŋ.
On choice of reading in the preceding line, see the Psalm in question, n.
467 Pronounced Chālā. Cf. Ps. lix., lx. The latter
Psalm–Upacālā's–incorporates most of what is here attributed to her sister.
468 I.e., in the fact or phenomenon of 'being born over and over again.'
469 Literally, meaning the punishments of criminals, but standing for the ills
of life in general. Cf. Ps. lxx., verse 345; lxxiii., verse 505.
470 Cf. last note to Vijayā's verses above.
471 In the Psalms, her Psalm is put into the mouth of her sister, Sīsupacālā.
472 Padhūpito, in the corresponding Psalm paridīpito.
473 Sanyutta. Therigāthā.
Akampitaŋ acalitaŋ aputthujana-sevitaŋ Akampitaŋ atuliyaŋ
aputhujjana-sevitaŋ
Agati yattha Mārassa tattha me nirato mano. Buddho dhammaŋ me desesi
tattha me nirato mano.
474 Lit., Thereto is my heart (or mind) devoted.
475 In the Psalms she is made to utter her sister Cālā's Psalm.
476 The Psalm ascribed to Selā (xxxv., p. 144) is, in this Appendix, put into
the mouth of Āḷavikā, which, in the Commentary, is Selā's patronymic.
477 Satto, a concrete living entity, not the abstract idea.
478 Cf. Ps. xlvi. 111.
Showing posts with label Therigatha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Therigatha. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Khuddaka Nikaya - Therigatha Commentator's Introduction
Khuddaka Nikaya - Therigatha ( Psalms of the Sisters ) The Commentator's Introduction
THE COMMENTATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Honour to that Exalted One, Arahant, Very Buddha!
NOW is the occasion come for commenting on the meaning of the psalms of the
Sisters. The exposition of their several poems will be made easier and more
intelligible, if I first relate the circumstances under which the Bhikkhunīs in
the beginning came to leave the world and obtain admission into the Order. Of
this, therefore, I will give an account in outline.
When the Lord of the world had combined the Eight Factors–humanity and the rest
of Buddhahood–when, having made his great resolve at the feet of the Buddha
Dīpankără,63 and mastering equally all the Thirty Perfections, according to the
prophecy of the Four-and-Twenty Buddha in succession concerning him, he had
reached the climax in his progress towards wisdom, knowledge of the world and
Buddhahood, then he took rebirth in the Realms of Bliss (Tusita). And there,
when he had lived the span of life among the ten thousand gods of the Cosmic
Circles, he thereupon assented to the request of those gods to be reborn as a
man that he might become a Buddha, according to their words:
'The time is now at hand when Thou,
Great Hero, shouldst as man be born.
Bearing both gods and men across,
Do Thou reveal th' Ambrosial Way!'
So he made the Five Great Considerations, and then, in the house of King
Suddhodana, of the princely clan of the Sākiyas, did he, mindful and
self-possessed, enter a mother's womb; then, mindful and self-possessed, did he
there ten months abide; then, mindful and self-possessed, did he thence emerge
and come to birth in the Lumbinī Grove.
Reared by divers nurses, surrounded ever in luxury by a great retinue, he grew
up in due course, dwelling in one of three mansions, amid divers bands of
nautch-women, and enjoying honours like a god. Then, anguish being stirred in
him at sight of an aged man, a diseased man, and a dead man, he, from the
maturity of his insight, saw the danger in the life of the senses and the profit
in renouncing it. Mounting his horse Kanthaka, and with Channa as his companion,
at midnight, through the gate set open by spirits, he went forth on the Great
Renunciation. During the remainder of that night he traversed three kingdoms,
and, coming to the bank of the river Anomā, and taking the outward marks of an
Arahant, brought to him by the Brahmā-god Ghaṭīkāra, he left the world.
Thereupon, as though he were already an Elder with the eight requisites, 64
comely in appearance and of graceful deportment, he came in due course to
Rājagaha, and there going round for alms, he ate his meal in the cave of Mount
Paṇḍava. There the King of Magadha offered him his kingdom. But he, refusing it,
went to Bhaggava's hermitage and learnt his system; thence to Āḷāra and Uddaka
and learnt their systems. Finding all that inadequate, he proceeded to Uruvelā,
and there for six years practised austerities. Then, discerning that this
brought no penetration of the Ariyan Norm, he said, 'This is not the Path to
Enlightenment,' and, taking solid food, he in a few days recovered strength. So,
on full-moon day in the month of May, he ate the choice food given by Sujātā, 65
and, casting the golden dish upstream into the river, he, full of his resolve,
'To-day will I become a Buddha!' ascended at eventide the Bo-tree seat–his
praises sung by Kāla, king of the Nāgas–and there, in a quakeless spot 66 facing
the eastern world, seated him cross-legged and indomitable. There, fixing his
will in four respects, he vanquished the power of Māra ere the sun went down. In
the first watch of the night he recalled his former lives; in the middle watch
he purified the eye celestial; in the last watch he sounded the depth of the
knowledge of the Causal Law. And, grasping in direct and reverse order the
formula of causal relation, he developed insight, and reached that perfect
enlightenment reached by all Buddhas but shared by no one else. There then
abiding seven days in the Fruition which has Nibbana as its object, and, in the
same manner, abiding yet other seven days on the Bo-tree seat, he partook of
sweet food beneath the Rājāyatana tree.67 Then, again, seated beneath the
Goatherds' Banyan, he reflected on the depth of the essence of the Norm. 68 And
his mind was disinclined for effort till he was entreated by Great Brahmā; but
then he gazed upon the world with the Buddha-Eye, and, seeing all the diverse
range of faculties in all beings, he promised Great Brahmā that he would teach
the Norm. Meditating, 'Where, now, shall I first teach the Norm?' he discerned
that Āḷāra and Uddaka had passed away; but then he thought, 'Very helpful to me
were the Five who were attending on me when I broke off from my ascetic
struggles. What if I were first to preach to them?' So, in the full moon of
July, he went from the Great Bo-tree toward Benāres. And when he had travelled
eighteen leagues, he met halfway the recluse Upaka 69 and conversed with him;
and so on to Isipatana, where he convinced the Five by means of the Discourse
called Turning the Wheel of the Norm, 70 beginning:
'There are two extremes, O bhikkhus, which the man who has given up the world
ought not to follow' . . .
thus giving them, beginning with Aññakondañña, together with eighteen myriads of
Brahma-gods, a draught of Truth-ambrosia. Then on the first day of the next
fortnight he established also Elder Bhaddaji in the path of the Stream-winners;
on the second day, Elder Vappa; on the third day, Elder Mahānāma; on the fourth,
Elder Assaji; and on the fifth day, by preaching the sermon of the Mark of
No-Soul, he established them all in Arahantship. Thereafter he brought over many
folk into the Ariyan fold 71 –to wit, the fifty-five youths led by Yasa, the
thirty Bhaddavaggiyans in the Cotton-tree Grove, and the thousand former
ascetics on the ridge of Gayā-Head. And when he had established eleven myriads,
with Bimbisāra at their head, in the fruit of Entering the Stream (conversion),
and one myriad in the Three Refuges, he accepted the gift of the Bamboo Grove,
and there abode. Now, when Sāriputta and Moggallāna, brought into the First Path
through Assaji, had taken leave of Sañjaya (their teacher), had joined the
Buddha with their respective followings, and had realized the topmost Fruition,
he set them, who had attained the perfection of discipleship, over all his
disciples. Then, going at the entreaty of Elder Kāḷudāyi to Kapilavatthu, he
subdued the proud stubbornness of his kinsmen by the Twin Miracle, 72 and
establishing his father in the Path of No-Return, and Great Pajāpatī 73 in the
Fruition of Entering the Stream, and causing the princes Nanda and Rāhula 74 to
renounce the world, he went back to Rājagaha.
Now it came thereafter to pass, while the Master was staying at the Hall of the
Gabled House near Vesālī, that King Suddhodhana attained Arahantship while under
the white canopy, 75 and then passed away. Then in Great Pajāpatī arose the
thought of renouncing the world. Then there came to her the wives of those five
hundred young nobles who had renounced the world on hearing, on the bank of the
Rohinī river, the 'Discourse concerning Strife and Dissension,' and they told
her, saying: 'We will all renounce the world to follow the Master.' And they
wished that she should lead them to him. Now Great Pajāpatī had once already
asked the Master for admission to his Order, and had not won his consent;
wherefore she now bade her hairdresser cut off her hair, and donning the yellow
robes, she took all those Sākiya ladies with her to Vesālī, and there entreating
Him of the Tenfold Power through Elder Ānanda, she gained his permission to
leave the world and enter the Order by accepting the Eight Rules. 76 And the
others, also, were all ordained at the same time.
This, in brief, is the story. What is here said has been handed down at greater
length here and there in the Pali Canon.
Thus ordained, Great Pajāpatī came before the Master, and, saluting him, stood
on one side. Then he taught her the Norm. She, taking up under him the system of
exercise, attained to Arahantship. The other five hundred Bhikkhunīs attained it
at the end of Nandaka's sermon.77 Now the Order of Bhikkhunīs being thus well
established, and multiplying in divers villages, towns, country districts, and
royal residences, dames, daughters-in-law and maidens of the clans, hearing of
the great enlightenment of the Buddha, of the very truth of the Norm, of the
excellent practices of the Order, were mightily pleased with the system, and,
dreading the round of rebirth, they sought permission of husband, parents, and
kin, and taking the system to their bosom, renounced the world. So renouncing
and living virtuously, they received instruction from the Master and the Elders,
and with toil and effort soon realized Arahantship. And the psalms which they
uttered from time to time, in bursts of enthusiasm and otherwise, were
afterwards by the Recensionists included in the Rehearsal, and arranged together
in eleven cantos. They are called the Verses of the Elder Women (Therī-gāthā),
and they are divided into cantos of single verses, two verses, and so on, as
follows:
63 One of the twenty-four Buddhas of later Buddhism. Early Buddhism reckoned
only seven. For this and the following episodes in greater detail, cf. Rhys
Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 12 ſ. 27, 28; 60, 61; 87; 92.
64 Loc. cit., 87.
65 Ibid., 92 ſſ.
66 Loc. cit., 96.
67 =King's-stead Tree.
68 See Translator's Preface.
69 See his story in Ps. lxviii.
70 Translated by Rhys Davids in Buddhist Suttas, S.B.E. xi., pp. 146 ſſ.
71 Lit., territory–i.e., the 'true faith.' Cf. Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 113.
72 Cf. Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 123 ſ.
73 The sister and co-wife of the Buddha's mother. See Ps. lv.
74 His half-brother (son of Pajāpatī), and his own son.
75 I.e., as King and layman, without renouncing the world.
76 For the oldest acoount of this, see Rhys Davids and Oldenberg, Vinaya
Texts, iii., 320 ſ.
77 Majjhima Nikāya, iii., pp. 270 ſſ.
THE COMMENTATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Honour to that Exalted One, Arahant, Very Buddha!
NOW is the occasion come for commenting on the meaning of the psalms of the
Sisters. The exposition of their several poems will be made easier and more
intelligible, if I first relate the circumstances under which the Bhikkhunīs in
the beginning came to leave the world and obtain admission into the Order. Of
this, therefore, I will give an account in outline.
When the Lord of the world had combined the Eight Factors–humanity and the rest
of Buddhahood–when, having made his great resolve at the feet of the Buddha
Dīpankără,63 and mastering equally all the Thirty Perfections, according to the
prophecy of the Four-and-Twenty Buddha in succession concerning him, he had
reached the climax in his progress towards wisdom, knowledge of the world and
Buddhahood, then he took rebirth in the Realms of Bliss (Tusita). And there,
when he had lived the span of life among the ten thousand gods of the Cosmic
Circles, he thereupon assented to the request of those gods to be reborn as a
man that he might become a Buddha, according to their words:
'The time is now at hand when Thou,
Great Hero, shouldst as man be born.
Bearing both gods and men across,
Do Thou reveal th' Ambrosial Way!'
So he made the Five Great Considerations, and then, in the house of King
Suddhodana, of the princely clan of the Sākiyas, did he, mindful and
self-possessed, enter a mother's womb; then, mindful and self-possessed, did he
there ten months abide; then, mindful and self-possessed, did he thence emerge
and come to birth in the Lumbinī Grove.
Reared by divers nurses, surrounded ever in luxury by a great retinue, he grew
up in due course, dwelling in one of three mansions, amid divers bands of
nautch-women, and enjoying honours like a god. Then, anguish being stirred in
him at sight of an aged man, a diseased man, and a dead man, he, from the
maturity of his insight, saw the danger in the life of the senses and the profit
in renouncing it. Mounting his horse Kanthaka, and with Channa as his companion,
at midnight, through the gate set open by spirits, he went forth on the Great
Renunciation. During the remainder of that night he traversed three kingdoms,
and, coming to the bank of the river Anomā, and taking the outward marks of an
Arahant, brought to him by the Brahmā-god Ghaṭīkāra, he left the world.
Thereupon, as though he were already an Elder with the eight requisites, 64
comely in appearance and of graceful deportment, he came in due course to
Rājagaha, and there going round for alms, he ate his meal in the cave of Mount
Paṇḍava. There the King of Magadha offered him his kingdom. But he, refusing it,
went to Bhaggava's hermitage and learnt his system; thence to Āḷāra and Uddaka
and learnt their systems. Finding all that inadequate, he proceeded to Uruvelā,
and there for six years practised austerities. Then, discerning that this
brought no penetration of the Ariyan Norm, he said, 'This is not the Path to
Enlightenment,' and, taking solid food, he in a few days recovered strength. So,
on full-moon day in the month of May, he ate the choice food given by Sujātā, 65
and, casting the golden dish upstream into the river, he, full of his resolve,
'To-day will I become a Buddha!' ascended at eventide the Bo-tree seat–his
praises sung by Kāla, king of the Nāgas–and there, in a quakeless spot 66 facing
the eastern world, seated him cross-legged and indomitable. There, fixing his
will in four respects, he vanquished the power of Māra ere the sun went down. In
the first watch of the night he recalled his former lives; in the middle watch
he purified the eye celestial; in the last watch he sounded the depth of the
knowledge of the Causal Law. And, grasping in direct and reverse order the
formula of causal relation, he developed insight, and reached that perfect
enlightenment reached by all Buddhas but shared by no one else. There then
abiding seven days in the Fruition which has Nibbana as its object, and, in the
same manner, abiding yet other seven days on the Bo-tree seat, he partook of
sweet food beneath the Rājāyatana tree.67 Then, again, seated beneath the
Goatherds' Banyan, he reflected on the depth of the essence of the Norm. 68 And
his mind was disinclined for effort till he was entreated by Great Brahmā; but
then he gazed upon the world with the Buddha-Eye, and, seeing all the diverse
range of faculties in all beings, he promised Great Brahmā that he would teach
the Norm. Meditating, 'Where, now, shall I first teach the Norm?' he discerned
that Āḷāra and Uddaka had passed away; but then he thought, 'Very helpful to me
were the Five who were attending on me when I broke off from my ascetic
struggles. What if I were first to preach to them?' So, in the full moon of
July, he went from the Great Bo-tree toward Benāres. And when he had travelled
eighteen leagues, he met halfway the recluse Upaka 69 and conversed with him;
and so on to Isipatana, where he convinced the Five by means of the Discourse
called Turning the Wheel of the Norm, 70 beginning:
'There are two extremes, O bhikkhus, which the man who has given up the world
ought not to follow' . . .
thus giving them, beginning with Aññakondañña, together with eighteen myriads of
Brahma-gods, a draught of Truth-ambrosia. Then on the first day of the next
fortnight he established also Elder Bhaddaji in the path of the Stream-winners;
on the second day, Elder Vappa; on the third day, Elder Mahānāma; on the fourth,
Elder Assaji; and on the fifth day, by preaching the sermon of the Mark of
No-Soul, he established them all in Arahantship. Thereafter he brought over many
folk into the Ariyan fold 71 –to wit, the fifty-five youths led by Yasa, the
thirty Bhaddavaggiyans in the Cotton-tree Grove, and the thousand former
ascetics on the ridge of Gayā-Head. And when he had established eleven myriads,
with Bimbisāra at their head, in the fruit of Entering the Stream (conversion),
and one myriad in the Three Refuges, he accepted the gift of the Bamboo Grove,
and there abode. Now, when Sāriputta and Moggallāna, brought into the First Path
through Assaji, had taken leave of Sañjaya (their teacher), had joined the
Buddha with their respective followings, and had realized the topmost Fruition,
he set them, who had attained the perfection of discipleship, over all his
disciples. Then, going at the entreaty of Elder Kāḷudāyi to Kapilavatthu, he
subdued the proud stubbornness of his kinsmen by the Twin Miracle, 72 and
establishing his father in the Path of No-Return, and Great Pajāpatī 73 in the
Fruition of Entering the Stream, and causing the princes Nanda and Rāhula 74 to
renounce the world, he went back to Rājagaha.
Now it came thereafter to pass, while the Master was staying at the Hall of the
Gabled House near Vesālī, that King Suddhodhana attained Arahantship while under
the white canopy, 75 and then passed away. Then in Great Pajāpatī arose the
thought of renouncing the world. Then there came to her the wives of those five
hundred young nobles who had renounced the world on hearing, on the bank of the
Rohinī river, the 'Discourse concerning Strife and Dissension,' and they told
her, saying: 'We will all renounce the world to follow the Master.' And they
wished that she should lead them to him. Now Great Pajāpatī had once already
asked the Master for admission to his Order, and had not won his consent;
wherefore she now bade her hairdresser cut off her hair, and donning the yellow
robes, she took all those Sākiya ladies with her to Vesālī, and there entreating
Him of the Tenfold Power through Elder Ānanda, she gained his permission to
leave the world and enter the Order by accepting the Eight Rules. 76 And the
others, also, were all ordained at the same time.
This, in brief, is the story. What is here said has been handed down at greater
length here and there in the Pali Canon.
Thus ordained, Great Pajāpatī came before the Master, and, saluting him, stood
on one side. Then he taught her the Norm. She, taking up under him the system of
exercise, attained to Arahantship. The other five hundred Bhikkhunīs attained it
at the end of Nandaka's sermon.77 Now the Order of Bhikkhunīs being thus well
established, and multiplying in divers villages, towns, country districts, and
royal residences, dames, daughters-in-law and maidens of the clans, hearing of
the great enlightenment of the Buddha, of the very truth of the Norm, of the
excellent practices of the Order, were mightily pleased with the system, and,
dreading the round of rebirth, they sought permission of husband, parents, and
kin, and taking the system to their bosom, renounced the world. So renouncing
and living virtuously, they received instruction from the Master and the Elders,
and with toil and effort soon realized Arahantship. And the psalms which they
uttered from time to time, in bursts of enthusiasm and otherwise, were
afterwards by the Recensionists included in the Rehearsal, and arranged together
in eleven cantos. They are called the Verses of the Elder Women (Therī-gāthā),
and they are divided into cantos of single verses, two verses, and so on, as
follows:
63 One of the twenty-four Buddhas of later Buddhism. Early Buddhism reckoned
only seven. For this and the following episodes in greater detail, cf. Rhys
Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 12 ſ. 27, 28; 60, 61; 87; 92.
64 Loc. cit., 87.
65 Ibid., 92 ſſ.
66 Loc. cit., 96.
67 =King's-stead Tree.
68 See Translator's Preface.
69 See his story in Ps. lxviii.
70 Translated by Rhys Davids in Buddhist Suttas, S.B.E. xi., pp. 146 ſſ.
71 Lit., territory–i.e., the 'true faith.' Cf. Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 113.
72 Cf. Buddhist Birth Stories, p. 123 ſ.
73 The sister and co-wife of the Buddha's mother. See Ps. lv.
74 His half-brother (son of Pajāpatī), and his own son.
75 I.e., as King and layman, without renouncing the world.
76 For the oldest acoount of this, see Rhys Davids and Oldenberg, Vinaya
Texts, iii., 320 ſ.
77 Majjhima Nikāya, iii., pp. 270 ſſ.
Khuddaka Nikaya - Therigatha Introduction
Khuddaka Nikaya - Therigatha ( Psalms of the Sisters ) Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I
BOOK titles are necessarily brief. In their brevity they seem to claim too much
and to specify not enough. Here and now let the title of this little volume be
modified by the ampler designation: Verses attributed, in the tradition of the
Pali Canon, to certain eminent Sisters (Therī-Bhikkhunīs) of the Buddhist Order,
and forming the second and smaller portion of the work entitled
Thera-therī-gāthā–i.e. verses of the Elders, Brethren and Sisters.
No one, not even, I imagine, a pious Buddhist, believes that these verses
contain the ipsissima verba of those members of the Order to whom they are
ascribed, or that these notable adherents conversed in Pali ślokas. We shall
never get at the quantum of historic fact that there may be in the tradition,
nor even know how many of the Elders here named ever really existed. Nor does it
very much matter. The historical fact that we here have and hold is the record,
that just the sentiments and the aspirations, which are expressed in this work,
have been for so many centuries, and by a very considerable communion of
followers, attributed to saintly men and women co-operating in the building up
of certain ideals; and also that the logia should, as such, have been
incorporated in a literature so long preserved, cherished, and revered as 'holy
writ.' The registration of such views; the reverence accorded to such views;
these are for the history of human ideas the really precious truths, however
legendary or lost the genuine sources may have become.
The poems or verses so preserved to us are included in the Fifth Group of the
second of the Three Pitakas (the Sutta-Pitaka) in the Pali Canon–the Group
entitled Short: Khud'dăkă-Nikāya–and ranged after the Four Nikāyas often quoted
in the following pages: Dīgha, Majjhima, Saŋyutt'a, Angutt'ără. The poems were
edited with scholarly excellence in 1883 for the Pali Text Society,1 then in the
third year of its existence. Professor H. Oldenberg, now of Göttingen, was
responsible for the verses of the Theras, or Elder Brethren. The late Professor
R. Pischel, of Berlin, edited those of the Therīs, or Elder Women. The
Brethren's Gāthās number 264, those of the Sisters, 73. Those of the Brethren
come first. Bhikkhus formed the great majority in the Order, and, in standing
and position, ranked senior to the Bhikkhunīs. The prior appearance of a
translation of the latter part of the book is due, not to a wish to improve upon
the ancient order, but to an accidental circumstance in the supply of materials.
I refer to the Commentary on the Thera-therī-gāthā, and will turn aside to deal
with it.
The gāthās, or stanzas, edited as above described, stand, as for nearly twenty
centuries they have stood in the palm-leaf MSS. of the Sutta-Pitaka–that is to
say, without any accompanying Commentary. In an Appendix, however, to his
edition of the Therī-gāthā, Professor Pischel gave numerous extracts from
Dhammapāla's Commentary on those verses. Ten years later this Commentary on the
Therī-gāthā, together with its copious extracts from the Apadāna–the Vitæ
Sanctorum of the Buddhist Canon–was published by the Pali Text Society in
Professor Edward Müller's edition. 2 But, for some reason or other, the MSS. of
the preceding portion of Dhammapāla's Commentary 3 –that on the Thera-gāthā–are
not so numerous, or at least not so easily obtained as is the Commentary on the
Sisters' verses, or the other parts of the work. At present I have heard of but
one copy in Europe, now lent to the India Office on my behalf by the Royal
Library of Copenhagen, and that is neither a good nor a complete copy. My wants
have now been better supplied by a copy purchased in Burma through the kind
exertions of Professor Charles Duroiselle, of Rangoon College–a copy that he was
able to procure without arranging for a special copy to be made at a Wihāra
library. Had it not been for the lamentable deadlock of the long-promised
Siamese printed edition of the Commentaries, a translation of the Brethren's
verses might have preceded this volume.
This indeed has been the case in Dr. K. E. Neumann's vivid and vigorous, if at
times somewhat free, translation of the Thera-therī-gāthā, into German verse. 4
He translated without the aid of any commentary on the Brothers' verses (a task
bristling with difficulties), and with a 'thorough scepticism' as to the value
of the commentarial chronicle about the Sisters. And in view of the shortness of
life and the length of literatures, there is no doubt much to justify immediate
translation of what we have, instead of waiting, to enrich and improve our work,
for materials that we have not yet. To what extent such materials as I wait for
do enrich and improve, the educated reader of past, present, and future
translations must judge. If he is not acquainted with the tradition of the
Buddhist Commentary, here it is in outline.
Whatever be the story of the Canon's evolution, while it had oral being only, it
stands recorded that the Pali Canon was committed to writing in 80 B. C. Down to
and after this date, the Attha-kathā, or 'talk about the contents, meaning, or
purpose' of the work in question, was a matter of traditional convention, which
individual expounding Bhikkhus or Bhikkhunīs might tell in more or less their
own words. And when the Attha-kathā was about a Gāthā, the two together formed
an Akkhāna (Sanskrit=Ākhyāna), a record or story in mixed prose and verse. The
great work of the Jātaka or Birth-stories 5 is a notable instance of this.
About 80 B. C., then, the Psalms 6 were committed to writing. But in the fifth
or sixth century A. D., either before or just after Buddhaghosa had flourished,
and written his great commentaries on the prose works of the Vinaya and Sutta
Pitakas, Dhammapāla of Kāñcipura (now Conjevaram, Madras Presidency), wrote down
in Pali 7 the unwritten expository material constituting the then extant three
Attha-katha's 8 on the Psalms, and incorporated it into his commentary on three
other books of the Canon, naming the whole 'Paramattha-dīpanī,' or Elucidation
of the Ultimate Meaning. He not only gives the ākhyāna in each Psalm, but adds a
paraphrase, in the Pali of his day, of the more archaic idiom in which the
gāthās were compiled, as well as the Apadāna citations alluded to above.9
All this, if read in a properly critical spirit, and with mindfulness of the
effect of transmission and the long-time intervals on exegetists not versed in
the canons of evidence and historical criticism, is of considerable help, both
to the text editor, and to the translator, and to the reader. Professor Pischel
has recorded, magnanimously modest, the help he derived from Dhammapāla, help of
which his distinguished colleague and co-editor was, for nearly one-half of his
editorial work, deprived for the reason already stated. To myself the Commentary
has been indispensable. Without accepting in blind faith the accuracy of the
synonyms or equipollent phrases supplied in its exegesis, I have, in many
ambiguous terms, been determined by the ruling of the Commentator, as
representing the most ancient orthodox tradition. Again, it will be seen that
the gāthās often record different episodes in one and the same career, or the
utterances of different persons whose identity has at times to be guessed at.
Now, the Commentator's explanations of episode and speaker are, it is true,
legends woven out of legends. In the first place, of the seventy-one Sisters 10
to whom poems are attributed, we only meet with twenty in other works of the
Pali Canon. The poems of half as many again are repeated in the Apadāna, but the
names of the putative compilers do not always agree. A similar want of agreement
between name and poem appears in the Saŋyutta version of certain of the Psalms
given here in an Appendix. Hence it is only for a very limited section of the
Psalms that we can, with any fraction of confidence, associate a given gāthā
with a putative poetess for whom something approaching historical personality
may be claimed. This does not, of course, warrant the conclusion that the
majority of Sisters named as authors of gāthās, but of whom nothing is elsewhere
recorded, never existed. But the fact that, in the Therī-gāthā and Saŋyutta
Nikāya versions of certain gāthās, there is a discrepancy in five out of ten
poems between poem and assigned author,11 shows us that, if the verses were
carefully preserved, the identity of the authors had, for the preservers,
something of a Shakespearian or Homeric indefiniteness. And the fact, again,
that in seventeen of the poems the Therīgāthā assigns one author's name, the
Apadāna another, increases our want of confidence.
To this legendary status of the Therīs, as historical realities, we have to add
the accumulated growth round their names of legend and myth revealed in the
commentarial chronicle. For this growth Dhammapāla must not be held responsible.
Its rate of progress had been much quicker. The canonical Apadāna, in its
metrical tales of thirty-three of the Therīs, reveals their pre-natal legend
already full grown. Besides, Dhammapāla drew his materials from three older
Commentaries, as he himself admits. Now, even if we so stretch our less copious
imagination as to concede to a few highly-gifted persons, just 'then' and
'there,' the supernormal power of visualizing that which they judged to be their
own antecedent personalities in previous lives, there is no record whatever of
Therīs, who claimed so to remember, recounting these reminiscences to their
contemporaries. To this rule of reticence in divulging there are two marked
exceptions. These are the last two poems, those of Isidāsī and Sumedhā, poems
which, more than all the rest, suggest later literary craft, and, like the last
few, bear the impress, not of traditional sayings handed down, but of deliberate
literary creation.
Even apart from the, to us, mythological traditions attaching to each Sister,
the record of her final rebirth does not always show signs that the scenes where
she moved were, for the chronicler or for his authorities, choses vues. In one
story we find the classic Gijjha-kūti, or Vulture's Peak, above Rājagaha, moved,
apparently, to Sāvatthī. At Sāvatthī, too, is the Buddha found, while he is said
to be preaching on the banks of the Nerañjarā in Magadha. And there are more
such little 'faults,' geologically speaking.
But when all of that ilk is said and considered, the Western reader may still
judge it well that the Psalms have been here presented along with, not in
isolation from, their ancient if less venerable chronicle. All who are capable
of a historical sympathy–of an appreciation, that is, of ideas as evolving in
time–will be glad to see somewhat of the age-long traditions in which these rare
and remarkable utterances have been set and fostered in so venerable a
literature as that of the Pali manuscripts. Strangers to Christianity would have
no conception of how profoundly the traditions grouped about the persons of the
Virgin Mother and the Magdalene have permeated its history, who only knew the
pale etchings of these women in the Gospels. Enshrined in the casket of legends
constructed by the loving piety of centuries, these little poems of the Therīs
take life and breath and colour. Whether the verses in search of an owner have
perchance missed their way, whether, indeed, in some of the first few stanzas a
name may not have been created to fit the words, still may we see, in this
dream-pageant of Sisters of the antique world conjured up for us by the
chronicler, the reiterated testimony to high quest, to devoted heart, to
indomitable resolve.
The last-named feature, that of the Resolve and its persistent efficacy
throughout rebirths, is of special interest. It is not characteristic of the
earlier doctrine, but in Mahāyānist Buddhism, we find it taken up and
elaborated, from the Hīnayānism of the Nidānakathā, 12 and of our Commentator
into the Praṇidhāna's, or aspirations of persistent effect, formed when, in any
human being, the bodhicitta (or heart of intelligence) awakes and transforms him
into a nascent Bodhisatva.
But leaving the Commentary and reverting to the gāthās, it is very possible–nay,
probable–that in all but the poems of a single śloka, and in some of two or
three ślokas, later work of compilation may have been wrought on brief runes
landed down from the beginning as the utterances of contemporaries of the
founders of Buddhism. Another important and ancient canonical work–the Sutta
Nipāta–would appear to have been thus threaded together. 13 It is not, of
course, claimed that the Sisters, or any other notable Buddhists, spoke, however
briefly, in blank verse; but it is held that, in early literatures, spoken
utterances are ever the earliest records to be put in metrical form. And the
Pali of practically all the Therī-gāthā is of ancient type. Moreover, under
social conditions such as prevailed where and when Buddhism took its rise, that
is to say, where there was considerable intellectual activity, but where writing
was not used to register its products, there would be a tendency to convert with
little delay all utterances deemed worth memorializing into metrical form.
Some of these metrical memorial utterances appear as the common property of
several Sisters.14 Once composed, it is quite conceivable that certain Sisters
may have made frequent use of them in teaching and preaching. They may thus have
become more associated with the memoirs of those Sisters than with the tradition
attaching to others, whether the Sisters in question actually composed them or
not. And where two or more detached stanzas were handed down, thus linked to the
memory and tradition of one name, some member or members of the Sangha–man or
woman, or both–of literary gifts may have welded them together, more or less,
when the Canon was being arranged and becoming a closed work. An excellent
instance of such a collection of detached gāthās, where no organic welding has
been attempted, is that of Uppalavaṇṇā (Ps. lxiv.). Here are four episodes
grouped about a name that occurs more frequently in Pali romance than any other
woman's name.15 The Therī is held up by the Buddha, according to Saŋyutta
Nikāya, ii. 236, linked with another Therī, Khemā (Ps. lii.), as the standard
and limit of what a woman in holy orders ought to be. But in the Vinaya, a
Bhikkhunī, Uppalavaṇṇā, is thrice quoted in a connection that reveals her twice
as an instance of a woman attractive to the other sex, and once as a student of
weak memory. Another name, too, that of Ummādantī (enchantress), is mixed up
with her legend. Hence the great Therī of supernormal power is as difficult to
identify as our own St. George, and it is not strange that her gāthā should be
composite.
The gāthā of Kisāgotamī (Ps. lxiii.) is another interesting case of possibly
later work of welding. Here the tragedy of Sister Paṭācārā's life, no mention of
which is made in the brief poem bearing her name (Ps. xlvii.), is woven into the
Psalm called after Kisā-gotamī. And the fine summary of woman's 'woeful lot' is
preceded by another brief episode on kalyāṇamittatā, or friendship with the good
and lovable (κaλoκάγaθoί). It is very probable from inspection of the poem (and
chronicle), that of two poems attributed to Paṭācārā, one recounting her
sufferings, given in the Apadāna and quoted in the Commentary, has been lost, or
merged with that of Kisā-gotamī. It is also probable that the latter, if it
introduces a gāthā already existing alluding to Paṭācārā, is of later date than
this gāthā.
When we come to the last seven poems we find, not larger congeries of
fragmentary sayings, but only homogeneous structure. The type approaches that of
the ballad 16 or the incipient drama, or is a consecutive symmetrical monologue
(Ambapālī, lxvi.). None of the putative authors, save Ambapālī, is an historical
personage. And her poem is a type-lyric, not a personal document. It may have
been composed by anyone of poetic gifts, and concerning ageing beauty in the
abstract. Here, then, there is no question of sparse verses welded together and
collectively ascribed to an age-dimmed, but very possibly genuine, personage.
Either the Sisters in question composed these longer effusions, or they did not.
According to Pischel, 17 'we have reason to suppose that' the ballads of Cāpā
and Sundarī (Ps. lxviii, lxix.) 'are very old compositions,' because 'they bear
the stamp of the oldest Indian ākhyāna as described by Professor Oldenberg.'18
But in the case of the last two Psalms, there are features pointing to different
and possibly later conditions attending their compilation. Isidāsī's poem, for
one who comes to it steeped in the phraseology of the preceding Psalms, strikes
a strangely varied, almost a discordant note. The scene is Patna, a city rising
on the decline of the Kosalan and Magadhese capitals, let alone that of Kāsī
(Benāres). The wretched girl's plea to join the Order of Bhikkhunīs might be
that of a Jain, so Jainistic is her aspiration. 19 The name of her sponsor
Bhikkhunī–Jinadattā–which does not occur elsewhere in the Canon, is possibly
significant. In the opening stanzas the work of editorial hands, as if dealing
with less familiar material, is frankly admitted by Dhammapāla. Sumedhā's
aspirations, on the other hand, have the older orthodox ring, even though often
clad in different phraseology. But her harangues, differing in their copious
flow from the severe and reticent terseness of the majority of poems, are
sermons preached from a Bible: 'Remember,' she cries, 'this parable and remember
that!' 20 as if the Nikāyas had already crystallized into shape. And where, in
either Psalm, is the all-pervading influence of 'the Master' as a living
presence?
How far editors of the earlier and authors of the later poems were identical, we
shall never know. The canonical books are all, with one exception, 21 of too
early a date to be claimed by any one author. 'They were the result rather of
communistic than of individual effort.' 22 There is sufficient variety of style
in all the longer poems, even though some of these are more mutually alike than
others, for more than one author. As to the authors' sex, the genuine artist in
words can give expression, with sympathy and verisimilitude, to the heart of man
or woman. There seems, for all that, no sufficient warrant for Dr. Neumann's
assumption that the poems of the Sisters, let alone those of the Brothers, 'must
have been shaped by . . . a man.' 23 Not often since the patriarchal age set in
has woman succeeded in so breaking through her barriers as to set on lasting
record the expression of herself and of things as they appeared to her. But to
assume that, because this happened seldom, therefore, this collection of
documents, though ascribed to her, 24 are necessarily not by her, is to carry
over far the truth: 'He that hath, to him shall be given, and she that hath not,
from her shall be taken even that which she hath!' I make no counter-assumption
that gifted Therīs had a hand in the compilation of the Brothers' Psalms. I
would only ask English readers to await the appearance of those, and note the
interesting differences in idiom, sentiment and tone between them and the
Sisters' Psalms. Even the 'common stock' of refrains is different, the only
exceptions being that of
kataŋ Buddhassa sāsanaŋ,
tisso vijjā anuppattā,
and
n'atthi 'dāni punabbhavo. 25
II
However, it lies with future historians of the Pali Canon as a whole to deal
with these baffling questions. By whomsoever compiled, the contents of the
Psalms are profoundly and perennially interesting as expressions of the
religious mind, universal and unconquerable; a mind which is so intensely alive,
because, to quote R. L. Stevenson, 'it knows what it prefers, instead of humbly
saying Amen! to what the world tells it it ought to prefer.' Even in the shorter
gāthās we may eliminate the common stock of refrains, and yet discern, in each
residuum, a distinctly and pathetically individual note, telling its own story
of a supreme 'conjuncture' seized, of Nibbana (in its later Sanskrit form,
Nirvāṇā) or Arahantship won.
More interesting, to the social historian, than the peace they hymned is the
account of the various motives that drove women, when Buddhism had arisen, from
the world to embrace the an-agāriyā or homeless life. These motives are as
diverse as those revealed in the records of Christian monasticism. Across time
and space a common humanity is manifest. In some cases it is the drawing power
of the Dhamma, preached by the Buddha, or by a senior disciple of either sex,
which brings about the crisis. The mental upheaval or commotion (saŋvega)
produced in the hearer is occasioned, not so much by a 'sense of sin,' as by the
flash of insight into universal impermanence in all things human and divine, and
by the prospect of being reborn, world without end, in the infinite chain of
life, ever renewing itself in the resultants of its own acts.
In other cases it is the vis a tergo of goading circumstance that impels the
woman to break out of the groove. Escape, deliverance, freedom from suffering
mental, moral, domestic, social–from some situation that has become
intolerable–is hymned in the verses and explained in the Commentary. The
bereaved mother, the childless widow, are emancipated from grief and contumely;
the Magdalen from remorse, the wife of raja or rich man from the satiety and
emptiness of an idle life of luxury, the poor man's wife from care and drudgery,
the young girl from the humiliation of being handed over to the suitor who bids
highest, the thoughtful woman from the ban imposed upon her intellectual
development by convention and tradition. It is a suggestive point that the
percentage of Sisters' Psalms, in which the goal achieved is envisaged as
Emancipation, Liberty won–about 23 per cent.–is considerably greater than the
corresponding proportion in the Psalms by the Brethren (13 per cent.). In most
cases, the male singer had had the disposal of his life in his own hands to a
greater extent than was the case with each woman. I do not so misread the poems
as to conclude that the liberty they hymned was merely a shaking off the
trammels of the 'House-life.' As a novelist of to-day sagaciously puts it: 'Only
the selfish and the useless are ever free.' 26 'CITTAŊ vimucci me!'–it was the
freed mind, the release from sense, superstition, craving, and the round of
rebirth that made them break forth into singing. All other escape was but the
anagārūpanissaya, 27 the indispensable conditions of the final release.
Nevertheless, these little women of old were every whit as human as we, and I am
convinced that the glory of saintship was for them, and at first–when they
hymned it–no white light, but prismatic through the circumstances and
temperament of each. Thus, those who had had most ado in breaking away from the
world were most likely to sing:
'O free indeed! O gloriously free am I!'28
and to climb alone and sit on rocky peak, where the keener air smote on their
brow and the world grew wide beneath, while they mused on this good thing that
had come to them:
'So sit I here
Upon the rock. And o'er my spirit sweeps
The breath of LIBERTY!' 29
To gain this free mobility, pace the deeper liberty, they, like their later
Christian sisters, had laid down all social position, all domestic success; they
had lost their world. But in exchange they had won the status of an individual
in place of being adjuncts, however much admired, fostered, and sheltered they
might, as such, have been. 'With shaven head, wrapt in their robe'–a dress
indistinguishable, it would seem, from the swathing toga and swathed
under-garments of the male religieux–the Sister was free to come and go, to dive
alone into the depths of the wood, or climb aloft.
Moreover, to free mobility she could wed the other austere joy of being
recognized, at least by her brother 'Arahants,' as a rational being, without
reference to sex. As such she breathed the spiritual atmosphere, she shared the
intellectual communion of that religious aristocracy called in the Pitakas,
Ariyas, with whom she claimed that power of 'seeing all things as they really
are' (i.e., have come to be, sabbaŋ yathābhūtaŋ disvā), which the Buddhist
called being Awake (buddho).
'How should the woman's nature hinder Us–
us Ariyas?' says Somā:
'What can that signify to one in whom
Insight doth truly comprehend the Norm?
To one for whom the question doth arise:
Am I a woman in such matters, or
Am I a, man? or what not am I, then?–
To such an one is Māra fit to talk!'
It is true that the Bhikkhunīs were, technically, appointed juniors in
perpetuity to the Bhikkhus. It is equally clear that, by intellectual and moral
eminence, a Therī might claim equality with the highest of the fraternity. In
the Psalms an instance occurs, in xxxvii., where Bhaddā associates herself in
spiritual attainment with the great Kassapa, successor, as head of the Order, to
the Founder himself.
Not less touching than the sacrifices made for their dual liberty by rebels of
the hearth are the few brief utterances of women who saw the land of freedom,
but who repressed their longing to 'go forth,' even for many years, so long as
duties to those depending on them kept them at home. To these the late-won
liberty comes more as a haven of rest, and the poem a welcome spoken to her by
the Master himself:
'Happily rest, thou venerable dame,
Rest thee . . . knowing Nibbana's peace.' 30
It is worthy of passing note that these hindrances are chronicled as having been
duties owed to husband, parent, or master, but never to children. If the
mother's need is so great that she wrenches herself away from her children,
either it is recorded that the child is handed over to grandparents, or the fact
of the sacrifice is merely stated:
'Home have I left, for I have left my world!
Child have I left, and all my cherished herds.' 31
Whatever the mother's feelings may have been in such cases–and there are but one
or two of them occurring in the book–the custom of the sons continuing to live
with their parents after marriage seems to have been so prevalent that the
children would not have been left unmothered. In nearly every case of a matron
leaving the world, either no children are mentioned, or they are provided for,
or grown up, or Death is mothering them.
For if Freedom drew, not less did Sorrow drive.
'Woeful is woman's lot! hath He declared–
Tamer and Driver of the hearts of men;'
and there are many erstwhile broken-hearted women who, in these verses, tell of
how they had found consolation. One noteworthy point is that, not only is there
not the faintest suggestion of suttee, there is no case even of the widow so
greatly mourning the loss of her husband as one beloved that she seeks comfort
at the Master's feet. Where her 'lord' 32 leaves her to enter the religious
life, she follows in emulation, and enters it with the Bhikkhunīs; but if she be
widowed, she mourns either her impoverished lot, or she is, as it happens,
mourning for a child, or for kinsfolk, at the same time. It is 'Rachel weeping
for her children because they are not' that constitutes, far more than does the
bereaved daughter, sister, wife, or widow, as such, the type of Mulier Dolorosa–
'Cuius animam gementem
Contristantem et dolentem
Pertransivit gladius'–
to whom life in the Order came chiefly as comfort and support in mortal anguish.
The 'Light of Asia' has familiarized the West with the episode, narrated in our
Commentary, of Kisāgotamī–the Frail Gotamid33–who, cheating her distracted mind,
sought medicine for the little child she bore about, dead, on her hip. The poem
ascribed to her is one of the most striking of the series. Released from all her
sorrows by insight gained through communion in the Order 'with noble souls,' and
chiefly through the object-lesson given her by the noblest of them all, she
strikes in her verses a broader note. Into the echoes of her own grief she
weaves the chords of the sufferings of her sex, and more especially the terrible
experiences of her great colleague the Sister Paṭācārā,34 as if to illustrate
the teaching of him who had comforted her, namely, that 'there hath no trouble
overtaken you save such as is commen to men.'
The Gotamid's swift acceptance of this stoic consolation may call up in contrast
how a Western poet, with insight into human nature, spurns such comfort for the
wounded heart while its anguish is yet raw:
'And common was the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.'35
But it should not be forgotten that Kisāgotamī, distraught though she was, is
represented as being, in her spiritual evolution, at the very threshold of the
Dawn, far nearer to saintship than the young Tennyson, mourning his friend,
claimed to be. It is because he 'saw the promise in her,' that the Master judged
her ready for the test he administered.
This method of consolation receives two developments in the poems. The former is
essentially the agnostic position, and is the theme of Paṭācārā's own poem of
consolation: 'So great a mystery was the little life now gone, both as to its
coming and its going, that it never was yours–your property–to have or to mourn
over. The great laws of the universe are not worked by you. Be quiet–und füge
dich.' Thus are many mothers said to have been effectually comforted. Again we
may feel sceptical, even scornful; but are we sure we have gauged the workings
of all human hearts and every touch to which they will respond? Moreover, again,
these were mothers ripe for salvation.
The other development alluded to is peculiarly Indian: 'No trouble hath
overtaken you, save such as hath already overtaken you many and many a time in
the infinite number of your past spans of life. Why, then, fall ever back on
these helpless tears that never have availed aught? Cut at the source whence all
these myriad bereavements have come.'36
Now, apart from their interest as a contribution to the history of women under
Monasticism, the most salient object-lesson given by East to West in these
Psalms is just this characteristic perspective taken of what we call 'life.' We
have heard it said here that life is a moment between two eternities. But, as a
normal attitude of thought, we wipe out the first eternity, and retain the
moment and the forward view. In the religious language of the Buddhists–to speak
only of this phase of thought–the word life, jīvita, hardly occurs. That which
we call life is for them but one anga, one segment or stage, in bhava, or being
(becoming) Their religious psychology, in the post-Asokan period, adopted the
term bhavanga to mean just that moment (one out of an infinite number of
moments) between the eternities, considered more especially as conscious, or
potentially conscious, life, much as our psychology has adopted the less
indigenous word continuum. 37 And accordingly, when these weeping mothers are
reminded that times without number have they stood wringing their hands for the
lost burden of sweetness unspeakable–ay, even there, at Sāvatthī itself, even
here, in that charnel-field, even for a girlie called Jīvā ('living,' 'Viva')
too,–even for many Jīvās–why then, for them at least, whose spiritual growth was
just about to show the ripened fruit, all the intolerable uniqueness of this
last bereavement fell away. No more could they say, 'Behold and see if there be
any sorrow like unto my sorrow.' . . . The little moment of their bhava and of
the child's bhava became merged into the past eternity. And the one thing
needful rose up: How to merge the future eternity into the moment:
'. . . had better live no longer than one Day,
So she behold, within That Day, That Path!'
Not without reason may the Western mind of to-morrow object that this attitude
too much resembles the hopeless outlook of the slum-cottage mother of to-day.
She will remark of her dozen Jīvās: 'Ah, well, you must have your lot!' and
also, 'As I ought to know, having buried nine!' To-morrow, it may be, living
under physical conditions less horrible than at present, and with some training
of the understanding, she will rise up and regulate both her 'lot' and let the
lot live to bury her. Yet will one child here and there be torn by death from
her. And the uniqueness will be the more intolerable then–or will she have heard
of Ubbirī?
Thus, anyway, did the Buddha and his elect Sisters seek to comfort Rachel,
administering no celestial balm, but educing from the tottering, anguished soul
its inner resources, its latent self-reliance, its cramped faculty of spiritual
vision. The Christian Bhikkhunī exhorted her sisters to
'Patere nunc aspera.
Nunc sis Crucis socia,'
because they could expect to be
'Regni consors postea.' 38
The Indian sister was bidden: 'Come to thyself!' and confessed herself victor
over pain and sorrow:
'In that I now can grasp and understand
The base on which my miseries were built.' 39
But she is never led to look forward to bliss in terms of time, positive or
negative. If Death be conquered, it is not through the winning, in Arahantship,
of eternal living, but because, when Death comes, his eternally recurring
visitation ceases. It may be that in harping in highest exultation how they had
won to, and touched, the Path Ambrosial–the Amataŋ Padaŋ40–Nibbana, they implied
some state inconceivable to thought, inexpressible by language, while the one
and the other are limited to concepts and terms of life; and yet a state which,
while not in time or space, positively constitutes the sequel of the glorious
and blissful days of this life's residuum. Nevertheless, their verses do not
seem to betray anything that can be construed as a consciousness that hidden
glories, more wonderful than the brief span of 'cool' and calm they now know as
Arahants, are awaiting them. There is nothing pointing to an Avyākata–an
unrevealed mystery–concerning which 'we would, and if we could,' sing something.
It may be with them as with one who, after long toil and much peril, reaches
home, and is content with that for the day, whatever life may yet give or ask
for on the morrow. They have won up out of the Maelstrom of Saŋsāra, they have
'crossed over,' they have won to something ineffable, that now is, but is not to
be described in terms of space or after-time; and resting, they sing. We will
leave it at that.
In practically every case the breaking out of the groove of habit and convention
was proximately caused by a personal influence–magnetic, inspiring,
persuasive–that of a ransomed sister or brother, or of the greatest Brother of
them all. But herein we note a sharp contrast between these Indian Marys and
their Christian sisters. Where He, the Central Figure, intervenes, and gratitude
is blent with adoration, the little poem reveals no word of quasi-amorous
self-surrender to the person or image of the Belovèd, such as characterizes not
a little of that Christian literature for which the Song of Solomon–'I am my
beloved's and my beloved is mine'–was a sacred archetype. The 'rex virgineus,
sponsus dulcissimus,' who, in Abbess Herrad's psalm, 'prepares the bridal' and
'receives in his embrace,' belongs to a tradition naturally evolving around a
youthful Saviour. 41 The utmost length a Therī presumes to go in relating
herself to her Teacher, is to claim spiritual fatherhood in Him, whom she
perhaps first saw late in his long life (some of the Theras, the Brethren, use
the same language). Thus Sundarī:
'Thou art Buddha! thou art Master! and thine,
Thy daughter am I, issue of thy mouth.'42
and, again, Uttamā:
'Buddha's daughter I,
Born of his mouth, his blessed word, I stand!'
And Uppalavaṇṇā:
'Thou who presumest to lie in wait for a child of the Buddha.'43
While for Kisāgotamī, her great physician enters her Psalm regarded, though not
directly so addressed, more as a kind and noble friend (kalyāna-mitta).
In this connection, it should be noted, that, in Buddhist hagiology, there is no
premium placed on the state of virginity as such. The Founder himself was a
husband and father, and the most eminent Sisters were, three-fourths of them,
matrons, not virgins.44
It is also worthy of passing remark, that of the four notorious Magdalens who
found peace and purity in the Order of Bhikkhunīs–Aḍḍhakāsī, Vimalā, Abhaya's
Mother, and Ambapālī–not one expresses any deep feeling of personal attachment
to the Teacher. Had they been of such a temperament, it is probable their past
life might have proved impossible for them.45
Not a less interesting circumstance is it, when the rescued soul's devotion
fastens itself upon a woman saviour, as is shown notably in the loyalty
professed for Paṭācārā, the Great Pajāpatī, Dhammadinnā and Uppalavaṇṇā. 46 The
last two have individual acknowledgments paid them, but the first-named–a
veritable Mater Consolatrix–is hailed by a school of Bhikkhunīs as their
sovereign Lady
'Like unto Sakka o'er the Thrice Ten Gods.'
Hers is the system or sāsana that they obey; the Master himself is not for them
in the foreground of their cult.
From whatever motive and through whatever agency the Sisters had found their way
into the Order, it is clear that with the change a new and varied life opened up
for them. We see in the verses the expression of energies and emotions newly
awakened or diverted into new channels. Even where the poems breathe rest and
peace, their tone is exalted and hedonistic, telling of
'exceeding store
Of joy and an impassioned quietude.'47
Even in the verses of those women who have sought refuge in the Order from
overwhelming misery or disgust, there is little or no expression of the obtained
relief in terms of that quiescence and apathy and mortified vitality so readily
imputed to the religious ideals of the East. Life under the Vinaya was one of
both active and contemplative discipline. The emancipation won implied
'space'–okāsa–opportunity, that is, for developing, regulating, and
concentrating both thought and deed:
'La douce liberté cherchant la douce loi.'48
Under its régime the Bhikkhunī became the pupil of some Therī. She led the
simple life, and discharged the ministering duties of a novice. And by
prescribed exercises and daily lessons she worked out for herself, if the
promise was in her, her own salvation, qualifying to become a teacher and leader
in her turn. There was to be no forgetting by her of what she had left and
escaped from. Not only was she to turn and mark those past struggles, but, as
her insight grew, there was to come to her, if she was of the calibre of these
Therīs, memories of former lives, revealing the inevitable working of the law of
Kamma (karma), or the conservation of the effect of action. The vision might
have its terrors, but it was all part of her Peace–for had she not made an
end49–an end which all her days meant:
'. . . peace on earth.
Not peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
There in white languors to decline and cease;
But peace whose names are also Rapture, Power,
Clear sight and Love: for these are parts of Peace.'50
Such are a few of the salient features in these little cameos of thought, carved
by, or for, these notable women of long ago. It would take too long here to
analyze, not only the motives that brought them into the Order, but the various
aspects, peace and the rest, under which they viewed that adept state called
'Arahatta,' which they all are affirmed to have won, and the assurance of which
is termed AÑÑĀ (lit., ad-sciens). I will only touch on one avenue opened up for
the adept woman, that has ever been sought by her in whatever communion she
graduated. For all her inspired musings under the hilly skies or the cool shade,
the Therī's life was not wholly one of introspective reverie, free or regulated.
The Order, refuge though it proved, was primarily an organization for the
propaganda of the Dhamma or 'Norm,'51 and its members were all, more or less,
wholly or at times, saviours and good shepherds of stray sheep. Instances of
this one and that 'teaching the Dhamma' will be met with in the Psalms and their
story, notably those of Paṭācārā, of Puṇṇikā the serf, of Vāsitthi, and of
Sukkā, pupil of the greater preacher, Dhammadinnā. Indeed, we find it not hard
to picture Sukkā53 pacing to and fro on the rostrum of her terrace, her audience
sitting cross-legged or otherwise, enchanted, spellbound in the dappled shade
around her, while from out of the venerable, once sacred tree, near which the
group of cells clustered, the elfin face of the Dryad–her ancient votive shrine
neglected, yet herself stirred to enthusiasm by this New Woman's eloquence–leans
out from the trunk,
'fain to quaff
That life's elixir, once gained never lost,
That welleth ever up in her sweet words,
E'en as the wayfarer welcomes the rain.'
Another Psalmist, Bhaddā Kāpilānī, is also spoken of in the Vinaya (Vin., iv.
290, 292) as a learned and honoured preacher of the Dhamma. And in the Anguttara
Nikāya we meet with another Sister, called 'The Kajangalan'– namely, of that
town–who, though no Psalmist, expounds to an inquiring congregation the very
theme, the first question concerning which baffled her notable colleague, Bhaddā
Curlyhair (Ang. Nik., v. 54 ſ.; Ps. xlvi).
The two instances–possibly versions of one and the same legend–of itinerant
women debaters,54 betray the breaking out of active intellects into less
cramped, if unprofitable channels. Organized educational work in the Order must
have proved greatly welcome to such temperaments.
It may assist readers to gain a purview of how the Therīs envisaged their summum
bonum, if I give a summary of my own analysis, together with the number of
Psalms in which each aspect is emphasized. The table is not exhaustive, and
might be supplemented, and in most cases more than one aspect appears in one and
the same poem. The End of Living or of Rebirths, e.g., forms almost a
ground-wave to be discerned in the majority of the Psalms, if not always the
surface-billow.
SALVATION, NIBBANA, OR ARAHANTSHIP VIEWED UNDER–
A. A NEGATIVE ASPECT.
(As a release, a getting rid of.)55
(a) Nibbana (the 'going-out' of greed, ill-will, and dulness) 5 (vi.,
xlvii., lxiii., lxx., lxxiii.).
(b) Freedom 17 (ii., iv., xi., xii., xvii., xxi., xxiv., xl., xliii.,
xlv.-xlvii., lii., lxiii., lxix., lxx., lxxiii.).
(c) Comfort, End to Ill 11 (xxxiii., xlix., l., li., lv., lix., lx.,
lxiii., lxviii., lxii.).
(d) End of Becoming or 'Life' 9 (xx., xxii., xxv., xxxi., xlii., xlv.,
lv., lxix., lxx.).
(e) End of Craving 10 (xxv.-xxviii., xxix., xxxiv., lii., liv., lxii.,
lxxi.).
(f) Rest 3 (i., xii., xvi.).
B. A POSITIVE ASPECT.
1. Subjectively considered.
(a) Mental illumination conceived as–
(i.) Light 12 (iii., xxiii., xxx., xxxv., xxxvi., xlviii., lvii.-lxi.,
lxiv.).
(ii.) Insight 8 (xxxvi., xxxviii., xli., xliv., liii., lx., lxiv.,
lxxi.).
(b) State of Feeling:
(i.) Happiness 5 (vi., xxi., xxxix., lvii., lxxiii.).
(ii.) Cool, calm, content ('sītibhāva,' 'nibbutā,' 'upasamo ') 12
(xiv.-xvi., xviii., xix., xxvi., xxxvii., xxxix., xli., xliv., lvi.,
lxx.).
(iii.) Peace, safety 11 (vi., viii., ix., xxix., xxx., xxxviii., xlii.,
xliv., lvii., lxii., lxxiii.).
(c) State of Will:
Self-mastery 14 (xv., xxviii.-xxx., xxxii., xxxvi., xl., xlv., xlvii.,
lvi., lvii., lix., lxi., lxiv.).
2. Objectively considered.
(a) As Truth 3 (liii., lxiii., lxvi.).
(b) As the Highest Good 1 (xlix.).
(c) As a supreme opportunity 1 (v.).
(d) As a regulated life 2 (iii., xlviii.).
(e) As communion with the Best 6 (xxxviii., xlix., lxiii., lxvii., lxix.,
lxx.).
(f) As bringing congenial work 5 (xxxiv., lxii., lxv., lxvii., lxxiii.).
56
For those who are acquainted with the way in which, in Christianity, the cult of
the Madonna and of women saints grafted itself upon, and in part sprang out of,
the widely spread cult of tribal goddesses in Europe, 57 the question will
arise: 'Can anything of the sort be traced regarding the veneration of these
women's names in the Buddhist scriptures?' But we are not here dealing with a
cult of a woman or women, hence we may scarcely expect anything of positive
value to comparative research in this field. Very faint traits of affinity here
and there may suggest themselves to the keen flair of the anthropologist. There
is, for instance, the association between Therī and tree. Beneath some tree they
are wont to sit, to stand, to preach. In the Appendix they are always said to be
found beneath, not a tree, but a certain tree:–aññatarasmiŋ rukkhamūle. Again,
while there is nothing in their names associating them with hill-shrines, as is
the case with 'berg and 'burg names of German women-saints, that the Therīs are
found, for no very apparent reason, seated on hill-tops, I have shown. Once
more, is there perhaps in the three sisters of Nālaka in Magadha–Cālā, Upacālā,
Sīsupacālā–some echo of those local triads of goddesses, or saints that are
common in German lore, and which loom, dim with antiquity, in the Semnai or
Venerable Goddesses of Greek worship, 58 and in the Trinity of the Norns or
Fates? Almost, finally, am I tempted to see significance in the form of the
refrain adopted by or for the ageing ex-courtezan's Psalm–that of Ambapālī–
'So and not otherwise runneth the rune, the word of the Soothsayer,'
i.e., literally, the Truth-speaker. 59 There is no mystic association attaching
to the word saccavādī, where it occurs elsewhere, hence I lay no weight on this
choice of a name for the Master. Nevertheless it is interesting to find these
two ancient institutions, the hetaira of the community and the Wise Woman, with
her monopoly of seeing things as they have been, are, or will be, combined in
one and the same poem.
III
In conclusion, let it be said that, while the text of the Commentary containing
the life-history of each Sister has been here and there abridged and condensed,
the verses have been translated as faithfully as lay in my power consistently
with the attempt to convey something of the poetic and religious feeling of the
metrical original. To do this for a foreign idiom and an alien and ancient
tradition, it was often necessary to expand each bead in some rosary of terms
into a phrase. E.g., the end of verse 337:
vītarāgā.
'Who also have themselves from passion freed,
visaŋyuttā
Unyoked from bondage, loosened from the world,
katakiccā
Who have accomplished their appointed task,
anāsavā
And all that drugged their hearts have purged away.'
No attempt has been made to force English into the Pali rhythms. Of these the
one that is used in nearly all the gāthās is the śloka. It is as prevalent in
Buddhist metrical diction as is the iambic five-footed line in ours. The line
just quoted may be recited to illustrate it: ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘
˘ ˘ ˘
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Vītarāgā visaŋyuttā || katakiccā anāsavā.
Where the metre varies, I have indicated the variety so far as I was able.
One of the more interesting varieties is the poem of Ambapālī, in which this
once famous Thaïs contemplates her wasted charms. The metre is approximately
that which came, in later literature, to be known as the Rathoddhatā (or
Chariot-borne) variant of the Trishṭubh:
_ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Kāḷakā bhamaravaṇṇasadisā
Jetty black like-the-colour-of-the bee
_ ˘ _ _ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Vellitaggā mama muddhajā ahuŋ.
The curling tips of the headgrowth of me were.
_ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Te jarāya sānavākasadisā
They thro' age are-like-hemp-and-bark:
_ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Saccavādivacanaŋ anaññathā.
Soothsayer's word not otherwise.
But in two or three cases I have not been able to identify the metre. 60 Studies
in Indian prosody so far have been made chiefly in much later literature, when
verses were largely made for metres. In these early rhythms, the poet may have
been less hampered by precedent and convention.
Where the English limps lamely (I pass over the lack in the translator of poetic
gift or training), this is in part due to a desire to put in no religious tropes
and figures from Western traditions. Where they have intruded, notice of the
exotic element is given. Some day the Pali gāthās will find their William
Morris, their Gilbert Murray. In this makeshift venture, I have striven to make
the translation such that the English reader, mindful as he goes of wayside
warnings in footnotes, might feel confident that the lines before him do not
omit subject-matter that is in the original, nor add subject-matter that is not.
61 At the same time, let it be readily admitted that the renderings are so far
free as to disqualify the book from serving as a 'crib' to the student. If my
gifted German predecessor in this effort could not adhere literally to the text,
the English language, with its abhorrence of compound words, its poverty in
prefixes and verbal nouns, starts him who wields it at a yet greater distance
from the Pali. To regulate the more careful reader's confidence, or want of it,
in the renderings selected, many words in the Index will be found with the Pali
originals appended.
One more word in this connection. If I have used 'Sister' in preference to
'nun,' it was not, in sooth, that the latter term, in its original connotation
of nonna, or mother, was not an adequate, and more than adequate, rendering for
Bhikkhunī. It was rather to keep my Indian recluses free from such implication
of confinement within walls and to lifelong vows as may now attach to the word
'nun.'
It needs no confession of mine to place on record the help I found, at the
initial stage of translation, in Dr. Neumann's translation of the gāthās, as
well as in Professor Windisch's prose rendering of the verses in the Appendix.
That with regard to the former, the differences in German and English metrical
idiom, combined with, here and there, difference in judgment, should have often
led me to reach the end by a different way, does not by any means obviate the
fact of the aid received. Pioneers had been step-cutting before me, and all
honour to pioneers.
'Ukkādhāro manussānaŋ
Niccaŋ apacito mayā.' 62
And as my husband, seventeen years ago, introduced me to these dear and revered
ladies–
'So me dhammaŋ adesesi therīhi suppakāsitaŋ'
–so now has he furthered and guarded my efforts with advice and criticism.
Gladly and gratefully would I record the kindness of those who have helped me in
procuring the illustrations–to wit, Mr. J. H. Marshall, Director-General of the
Archaeology Survey of India, who sent me many photographs of Rajgir,
Sahēṭh-Mahēṭh, and other places; Dr. T. Bloch, of the Indian Museum, Calcutta;
Mr. C. H. Hooper, of Messrs. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, who sent me
several forest scenes; my brother, C. W. Foley, of Calcutta, who procured for me
a selection of views about Gayā; Mrs. Arthur Schuster, who laid her large
collection of photographs, taken on her Indian travels, at my disposal; Mr. and
Mrs. Ernest B. Havell; and lastly, Mr. F. J. Payne, hon. secretary of the
Buddhist Society, G.B. and I., who has given me valuable assistance in carrying
out the work of illustration. Through their prompt and generous aid the book
might have been interleaved throughout with interesting views of the ancient
haunts of the Sisters, had it been practicable.
C. A. F. RHYS DAVIDS.
ASHTON-ON-MERSEY,
July, 1909.
1 The Thera- and Therī-Gāthā: Stanzas ascribed to Elders of the Buddhist Order
of Recluses. London, 1883.
2 Paramattha-Dīpanī, Part V. London, 1893. Discussed by me at the Ninth
Congress of Orientalists, London, 1892 (Transactions, i., p. 393. London,
1893).
3 This work consists of commentaries on the canonical works, entitled Udāna,
Vimāna-vatthu, Peta-vatthu, beside the two under discussion.
4 Die Lieder der Mönche und Nonnen Gotamo Buddho's. Berlin, 1899.
5 The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births. 6 vols. Cambridge,
1895-1907.
6 Johnson defines 'psalm' as 'a holy song.' There is no indication of
'psaltery' having accompanied the recitation of canonical gāthās.
7 He rewrote in Pali what had been handed down in Sinhalese, or perhaps in
Tamil.
8 See below, p. 178: porāṇaṭṭhakathā-tayaŋ.
9 I have judged it best not to overload this volume by translating the Apadāna
verses. They are adduced to confirm the attha-kathā with the words, 'As it is
said in the Apadāna.' This work is now being edited by Mrs. Mabel Bode, Ph.D.,
for the Pali Text Society.
10 Omitting the two poems ascribed to the followers of Paṭācārā collectively,
and assuming that certain poems attributed to Sisters with the same name are
by different persons.
11 Professor Windisch concludes that these ten Psalms were taken from an old
collection of Māra legends (Māra und Buddha, 134).
12 Translated in Rhys Davids's Buddhist Birth Stories. See especially pp.
12-14.
13 Windisch, Māra und Buddha, pp. 222 ſſ.; Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, pp.
177-186.
14 Cf. verses 16, 18; 14, 20; 38, 41; 59, 62, 188, 195, 203, 235; latter part
of 112, 117, 175; 120, 173, 179, 180, etc.
15 See Professor E. Müller's Introduction, Paramatthadīpanī, xiv., xv.
16 In one of the shorter Psalms (xlviii.) the narrative form emerges:
'The Thirty Sisters heard, and swift obeyed,' etc.
17 Therīgāthā, Preface.
18 Zeitschrift der D. M. G., 37, 54 ſſ., especially pp. 77-82.
19 See verse 431 n.
20 One brief poem makes a bare allusion of this nature, verse 40 n.
21 The Kathā Vatthu, in the Abhidhamma-Pitaka, compiled by Moggaliputta Tissa
in the reign of the Emperor Asoka.
22 Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, p. 179.
23 Op. cit., Introduction.
24 We may ignore for present purposes the pious humility which ascribed
several shorter gāthās to the Buddha himself.
25 'The bidding of the Buddha is done'; 'the Threefold Lore is won'; 'rebirth
comes now no more.'
26 The Inner Shrine.
27 Ps. lxx., verse 349; cf. Ps, xi., xl.
28 Ps. xi., xxi.
29 Ps. xxiv.
30 Ps. xvi.
31 Ps. xviii.
32 Sāmī, sāmiko, pati mean equally owner, lord, husband.
33 Ps. lxiii. I.e., physically frail or lean.
34 Pronounoe c like ch in 'church.'
35 In Memoriam, vi.
36 Cf. Ps. xxxiii., Ubbirī.
37 The fact that bhavanga in this sense occurs frequently in the Commentaries,
and, earlier still, in Milinda, and in Netti-Pakaraṇa (where a bodily and a
mental continuum are distinguished, 91), but not in the Pitakas, is not wholly
without chronological significance.
38 L. Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism, p. 486.
39 Ps. li., v. 138.
40 On the term Amata, Cf. Questions of Milinda (S.B.E.), Vol. i. 236. The word
'state' in connection with it does not occur in the Psalms.
41 Eckenstein, op. cit., pp. 253, 307 ſſ, 486.
42 'Tuvaŋ Buddho tuvaŋ Satthā, tuyhaŋ dhīt amhi brahmaṇa Orasā mukhato jātā. .
. .' (Ps. lxix., verse 336).
43 Ps. xxxi.; Ps. lxxi., verse 384.
44 Anguttara Nikāya, i. 25.
45 'The loose woman and the nun . . . have this in common, that they are both
the outcome of the refusal among womankind to accept married relations on the
basis of the subjection imposed by the fatherage' (L. Eckenstein, op. cit.,
5).
46 Ps. xlviii.-l., 1viii., xxx. xxxiv., xxxviii., lxx.
47 William Watson. As I have said elsewhere, Matthew Arnold's lines in Rugby
Chapel might have been written of the Therī's:
'Ye like angels appear,
Radiant with ardour divine;
Beacons of hope ye appear;
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.'
48 V. Hugo, L'Âne.
49 Ps. lxxii.: '. . . tassa pi anto kato mayā!' Isidāsī.
'Even of that now have I made an end.'
50 W. Watson, Wordsworth's Grave. The English poet and the Buddhist spirit
here embrace. Santi or Samatha (peace, calm) is closely allied by the latter
with Vipassanā (clear sight, insight); and with all good thought is involved
also Samādhi or Jhāna (contemplative rapture), and often Pīti (emotional
rapture), the Indriya's (or Bala's, powers) and Adosa (or Mettā, love).
51 This word is in some respects a more adequate translation of Dhamma
(Sanskrit, Dharma) than Law, Truth, or Gospel. 52 By Dhamma is meant one of
the five cosmic orders or sequences of happenings in the universe. Beside the
order of action (kamma), of the physical forces (utu), of biological forces
(bīja, or germs), and of mind, there was, if one may so call it, the moral or
regenerative cosmos–dhamma-niyama–by which the living universe evolved its
Buddhas and toiled upward out of the eternal round of saŋsāra towards
salvation and the ideal. These five are severally declared in the Canon, but
were classified later. See Buddhaghosa's Commentary on Dīgha Nikāya, Sutta
xiv.
52 Rhys Davids, American Lectures, 38.
53 Ps. lxv., li., xxxiv., xii.
54 Ps. xlvi., xlii.
55 This twofold classification must, of course, not be taken absolutely. It is
merely a question of relative emphasis–e.g., B 1 (a) is equally a getting rid
of the 'Darkness' of Ignorance.
56 Sumedhā was evidently a born preacher!
57 I refer readers to the deeply interesting opening chapter in Miss
Eckenstein's book, Women under Monasticism.
58 Dr. Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to Greek Religion, pp. 239 ſſ.
59 Saccavādivacanaŋ anaññthā.
60 E.g., in Ps. lxiii. (see p. 110, n. 2); Ps. xxi.:
Sumuttike sumuttikā sādhu muttikāmhi musalassa;'
and the last poem, beginning:
'Mantāvatiyā nagare rañño Koñcassa aggamahesiyā.'
Cf. in verse 512 the curious rhythm:
˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘_ ˘ _ ˘_
'Idamajaraŋidamamaraŋidamajarāmarapadamasokaŋ.'
61 One instance of unnecessarily 'free,' not to say incorrect, rendering,
discovered too late for revision, I have amended on p. 192, slightly revising
the Pali text.
62 Sutta Nipāta, verse 336.
PSALMS OF THE SISTERS,
WITH THE
CHRONICLE FROM THE COMMENTARY BY DHAMMAPĀLA ENTITLED 'THE ELUCIDATION OF THE
HIGHEST MEANING'
INTRODUCTION
I
BOOK titles are necessarily brief. In their brevity they seem to claim too much
and to specify not enough. Here and now let the title of this little volume be
modified by the ampler designation: Verses attributed, in the tradition of the
Pali Canon, to certain eminent Sisters (Therī-Bhikkhunīs) of the Buddhist Order,
and forming the second and smaller portion of the work entitled
Thera-therī-gāthā–i.e. verses of the Elders, Brethren and Sisters.
No one, not even, I imagine, a pious Buddhist, believes that these verses
contain the ipsissima verba of those members of the Order to whom they are
ascribed, or that these notable adherents conversed in Pali ślokas. We shall
never get at the quantum of historic fact that there may be in the tradition,
nor even know how many of the Elders here named ever really existed. Nor does it
very much matter. The historical fact that we here have and hold is the record,
that just the sentiments and the aspirations, which are expressed in this work,
have been for so many centuries, and by a very considerable communion of
followers, attributed to saintly men and women co-operating in the building up
of certain ideals; and also that the logia should, as such, have been
incorporated in a literature so long preserved, cherished, and revered as 'holy
writ.' The registration of such views; the reverence accorded to such views;
these are for the history of human ideas the really precious truths, however
legendary or lost the genuine sources may have become.
The poems or verses so preserved to us are included in the Fifth Group of the
second of the Three Pitakas (the Sutta-Pitaka) in the Pali Canon–the Group
entitled Short: Khud'dăkă-Nikāya–and ranged after the Four Nikāyas often quoted
in the following pages: Dīgha, Majjhima, Saŋyutt'a, Angutt'ără. The poems were
edited with scholarly excellence in 1883 for the Pali Text Society,1 then in the
third year of its existence. Professor H. Oldenberg, now of Göttingen, was
responsible for the verses of the Theras, or Elder Brethren. The late Professor
R. Pischel, of Berlin, edited those of the Therīs, or Elder Women. The
Brethren's Gāthās number 264, those of the Sisters, 73. Those of the Brethren
come first. Bhikkhus formed the great majority in the Order, and, in standing
and position, ranked senior to the Bhikkhunīs. The prior appearance of a
translation of the latter part of the book is due, not to a wish to improve upon
the ancient order, but to an accidental circumstance in the supply of materials.
I refer to the Commentary on the Thera-therī-gāthā, and will turn aside to deal
with it.
The gāthās, or stanzas, edited as above described, stand, as for nearly twenty
centuries they have stood in the palm-leaf MSS. of the Sutta-Pitaka–that is to
say, without any accompanying Commentary. In an Appendix, however, to his
edition of the Therī-gāthā, Professor Pischel gave numerous extracts from
Dhammapāla's Commentary on those verses. Ten years later this Commentary on the
Therī-gāthā, together with its copious extracts from the Apadāna–the Vitæ
Sanctorum of the Buddhist Canon–was published by the Pali Text Society in
Professor Edward Müller's edition. 2 But, for some reason or other, the MSS. of
the preceding portion of Dhammapāla's Commentary 3 –that on the Thera-gāthā–are
not so numerous, or at least not so easily obtained as is the Commentary on the
Sisters' verses, or the other parts of the work. At present I have heard of but
one copy in Europe, now lent to the India Office on my behalf by the Royal
Library of Copenhagen, and that is neither a good nor a complete copy. My wants
have now been better supplied by a copy purchased in Burma through the kind
exertions of Professor Charles Duroiselle, of Rangoon College–a copy that he was
able to procure without arranging for a special copy to be made at a Wihāra
library. Had it not been for the lamentable deadlock of the long-promised
Siamese printed edition of the Commentaries, a translation of the Brethren's
verses might have preceded this volume.
This indeed has been the case in Dr. K. E. Neumann's vivid and vigorous, if at
times somewhat free, translation of the Thera-therī-gāthā, into German verse. 4
He translated without the aid of any commentary on the Brothers' verses (a task
bristling with difficulties), and with a 'thorough scepticism' as to the value
of the commentarial chronicle about the Sisters. And in view of the shortness of
life and the length of literatures, there is no doubt much to justify immediate
translation of what we have, instead of waiting, to enrich and improve our work,
for materials that we have not yet. To what extent such materials as I wait for
do enrich and improve, the educated reader of past, present, and future
translations must judge. If he is not acquainted with the tradition of the
Buddhist Commentary, here it is in outline.
Whatever be the story of the Canon's evolution, while it had oral being only, it
stands recorded that the Pali Canon was committed to writing in 80 B. C. Down to
and after this date, the Attha-kathā, or 'talk about the contents, meaning, or
purpose' of the work in question, was a matter of traditional convention, which
individual expounding Bhikkhus or Bhikkhunīs might tell in more or less their
own words. And when the Attha-kathā was about a Gāthā, the two together formed
an Akkhāna (Sanskrit=Ākhyāna), a record or story in mixed prose and verse. The
great work of the Jātaka or Birth-stories 5 is a notable instance of this.
About 80 B. C., then, the Psalms 6 were committed to writing. But in the fifth
or sixth century A. D., either before or just after Buddhaghosa had flourished,
and written his great commentaries on the prose works of the Vinaya and Sutta
Pitakas, Dhammapāla of Kāñcipura (now Conjevaram, Madras Presidency), wrote down
in Pali 7 the unwritten expository material constituting the then extant three
Attha-katha's 8 on the Psalms, and incorporated it into his commentary on three
other books of the Canon, naming the whole 'Paramattha-dīpanī,' or Elucidation
of the Ultimate Meaning. He not only gives the ākhyāna in each Psalm, but adds a
paraphrase, in the Pali of his day, of the more archaic idiom in which the
gāthās were compiled, as well as the Apadāna citations alluded to above.9
All this, if read in a properly critical spirit, and with mindfulness of the
effect of transmission and the long-time intervals on exegetists not versed in
the canons of evidence and historical criticism, is of considerable help, both
to the text editor, and to the translator, and to the reader. Professor Pischel
has recorded, magnanimously modest, the help he derived from Dhammapāla, help of
which his distinguished colleague and co-editor was, for nearly one-half of his
editorial work, deprived for the reason already stated. To myself the Commentary
has been indispensable. Without accepting in blind faith the accuracy of the
synonyms or equipollent phrases supplied in its exegesis, I have, in many
ambiguous terms, been determined by the ruling of the Commentator, as
representing the most ancient orthodox tradition. Again, it will be seen that
the gāthās often record different episodes in one and the same career, or the
utterances of different persons whose identity has at times to be guessed at.
Now, the Commentator's explanations of episode and speaker are, it is true,
legends woven out of legends. In the first place, of the seventy-one Sisters 10
to whom poems are attributed, we only meet with twenty in other works of the
Pali Canon. The poems of half as many again are repeated in the Apadāna, but the
names of the putative compilers do not always agree. A similar want of agreement
between name and poem appears in the Saŋyutta version of certain of the Psalms
given here in an Appendix. Hence it is only for a very limited section of the
Psalms that we can, with any fraction of confidence, associate a given gāthā
with a putative poetess for whom something approaching historical personality
may be claimed. This does not, of course, warrant the conclusion that the
majority of Sisters named as authors of gāthās, but of whom nothing is elsewhere
recorded, never existed. But the fact that, in the Therī-gāthā and Saŋyutta
Nikāya versions of certain gāthās, there is a discrepancy in five out of ten
poems between poem and assigned author,11 shows us that, if the verses were
carefully preserved, the identity of the authors had, for the preservers,
something of a Shakespearian or Homeric indefiniteness. And the fact, again,
that in seventeen of the poems the Therīgāthā assigns one author's name, the
Apadāna another, increases our want of confidence.
To this legendary status of the Therīs, as historical realities, we have to add
the accumulated growth round their names of legend and myth revealed in the
commentarial chronicle. For this growth Dhammapāla must not be held responsible.
Its rate of progress had been much quicker. The canonical Apadāna, in its
metrical tales of thirty-three of the Therīs, reveals their pre-natal legend
already full grown. Besides, Dhammapāla drew his materials from three older
Commentaries, as he himself admits. Now, even if we so stretch our less copious
imagination as to concede to a few highly-gifted persons, just 'then' and
'there,' the supernormal power of visualizing that which they judged to be their
own antecedent personalities in previous lives, there is no record whatever of
Therīs, who claimed so to remember, recounting these reminiscences to their
contemporaries. To this rule of reticence in divulging there are two marked
exceptions. These are the last two poems, those of Isidāsī and Sumedhā, poems
which, more than all the rest, suggest later literary craft, and, like the last
few, bear the impress, not of traditional sayings handed down, but of deliberate
literary creation.
Even apart from the, to us, mythological traditions attaching to each Sister,
the record of her final rebirth does not always show signs that the scenes where
she moved were, for the chronicler or for his authorities, choses vues. In one
story we find the classic Gijjha-kūti, or Vulture's Peak, above Rājagaha, moved,
apparently, to Sāvatthī. At Sāvatthī, too, is the Buddha found, while he is said
to be preaching on the banks of the Nerañjarā in Magadha. And there are more
such little 'faults,' geologically speaking.
But when all of that ilk is said and considered, the Western reader may still
judge it well that the Psalms have been here presented along with, not in
isolation from, their ancient if less venerable chronicle. All who are capable
of a historical sympathy–of an appreciation, that is, of ideas as evolving in
time–will be glad to see somewhat of the age-long traditions in which these rare
and remarkable utterances have been set and fostered in so venerable a
literature as that of the Pali manuscripts. Strangers to Christianity would have
no conception of how profoundly the traditions grouped about the persons of the
Virgin Mother and the Magdalene have permeated its history, who only knew the
pale etchings of these women in the Gospels. Enshrined in the casket of legends
constructed by the loving piety of centuries, these little poems of the Therīs
take life and breath and colour. Whether the verses in search of an owner have
perchance missed their way, whether, indeed, in some of the first few stanzas a
name may not have been created to fit the words, still may we see, in this
dream-pageant of Sisters of the antique world conjured up for us by the
chronicler, the reiterated testimony to high quest, to devoted heart, to
indomitable resolve.
The last-named feature, that of the Resolve and its persistent efficacy
throughout rebirths, is of special interest. It is not characteristic of the
earlier doctrine, but in Mahāyānist Buddhism, we find it taken up and
elaborated, from the Hīnayānism of the Nidānakathā, 12 and of our Commentator
into the Praṇidhāna's, or aspirations of persistent effect, formed when, in any
human being, the bodhicitta (or heart of intelligence) awakes and transforms him
into a nascent Bodhisatva.
But leaving the Commentary and reverting to the gāthās, it is very possible–nay,
probable–that in all but the poems of a single śloka, and in some of two or
three ślokas, later work of compilation may have been wrought on brief runes
landed down from the beginning as the utterances of contemporaries of the
founders of Buddhism. Another important and ancient canonical work–the Sutta
Nipāta–would appear to have been thus threaded together. 13 It is not, of
course, claimed that the Sisters, or any other notable Buddhists, spoke, however
briefly, in blank verse; but it is held that, in early literatures, spoken
utterances are ever the earliest records to be put in metrical form. And the
Pali of practically all the Therī-gāthā is of ancient type. Moreover, under
social conditions such as prevailed where and when Buddhism took its rise, that
is to say, where there was considerable intellectual activity, but where writing
was not used to register its products, there would be a tendency to convert with
little delay all utterances deemed worth memorializing into metrical form.
Some of these metrical memorial utterances appear as the common property of
several Sisters.14 Once composed, it is quite conceivable that certain Sisters
may have made frequent use of them in teaching and preaching. They may thus have
become more associated with the memoirs of those Sisters than with the tradition
attaching to others, whether the Sisters in question actually composed them or
not. And where two or more detached stanzas were handed down, thus linked to the
memory and tradition of one name, some member or members of the Sangha–man or
woman, or both–of literary gifts may have welded them together, more or less,
when the Canon was being arranged and becoming a closed work. An excellent
instance of such a collection of detached gāthās, where no organic welding has
been attempted, is that of Uppalavaṇṇā (Ps. lxiv.). Here are four episodes
grouped about a name that occurs more frequently in Pali romance than any other
woman's name.15 The Therī is held up by the Buddha, according to Saŋyutta
Nikāya, ii. 236, linked with another Therī, Khemā (Ps. lii.), as the standard
and limit of what a woman in holy orders ought to be. But in the Vinaya, a
Bhikkhunī, Uppalavaṇṇā, is thrice quoted in a connection that reveals her twice
as an instance of a woman attractive to the other sex, and once as a student of
weak memory. Another name, too, that of Ummādantī (enchantress), is mixed up
with her legend. Hence the great Therī of supernormal power is as difficult to
identify as our own St. George, and it is not strange that her gāthā should be
composite.
The gāthā of Kisāgotamī (Ps. lxiii.) is another interesting case of possibly
later work of welding. Here the tragedy of Sister Paṭācārā's life, no mention of
which is made in the brief poem bearing her name (Ps. xlvii.), is woven into the
Psalm called after Kisā-gotamī. And the fine summary of woman's 'woeful lot' is
preceded by another brief episode on kalyāṇamittatā, or friendship with the good
and lovable (κaλoκάγaθoί). It is very probable from inspection of the poem (and
chronicle), that of two poems attributed to Paṭācārā, one recounting her
sufferings, given in the Apadāna and quoted in the Commentary, has been lost, or
merged with that of Kisā-gotamī. It is also probable that the latter, if it
introduces a gāthā already existing alluding to Paṭācārā, is of later date than
this gāthā.
When we come to the last seven poems we find, not larger congeries of
fragmentary sayings, but only homogeneous structure. The type approaches that of
the ballad 16 or the incipient drama, or is a consecutive symmetrical monologue
(Ambapālī, lxvi.). None of the putative authors, save Ambapālī, is an historical
personage. And her poem is a type-lyric, not a personal document. It may have
been composed by anyone of poetic gifts, and concerning ageing beauty in the
abstract. Here, then, there is no question of sparse verses welded together and
collectively ascribed to an age-dimmed, but very possibly genuine, personage.
Either the Sisters in question composed these longer effusions, or they did not.
According to Pischel, 17 'we have reason to suppose that' the ballads of Cāpā
and Sundarī (Ps. lxviii, lxix.) 'are very old compositions,' because 'they bear
the stamp of the oldest Indian ākhyāna as described by Professor Oldenberg.'18
But in the case of the last two Psalms, there are features pointing to different
and possibly later conditions attending their compilation. Isidāsī's poem, for
one who comes to it steeped in the phraseology of the preceding Psalms, strikes
a strangely varied, almost a discordant note. The scene is Patna, a city rising
on the decline of the Kosalan and Magadhese capitals, let alone that of Kāsī
(Benāres). The wretched girl's plea to join the Order of Bhikkhunīs might be
that of a Jain, so Jainistic is her aspiration. 19 The name of her sponsor
Bhikkhunī–Jinadattā–which does not occur elsewhere in the Canon, is possibly
significant. In the opening stanzas the work of editorial hands, as if dealing
with less familiar material, is frankly admitted by Dhammapāla. Sumedhā's
aspirations, on the other hand, have the older orthodox ring, even though often
clad in different phraseology. But her harangues, differing in their copious
flow from the severe and reticent terseness of the majority of poems, are
sermons preached from a Bible: 'Remember,' she cries, 'this parable and remember
that!' 20 as if the Nikāyas had already crystallized into shape. And where, in
either Psalm, is the all-pervading influence of 'the Master' as a living
presence?
How far editors of the earlier and authors of the later poems were identical, we
shall never know. The canonical books are all, with one exception, 21 of too
early a date to be claimed by any one author. 'They were the result rather of
communistic than of individual effort.' 22 There is sufficient variety of style
in all the longer poems, even though some of these are more mutually alike than
others, for more than one author. As to the authors' sex, the genuine artist in
words can give expression, with sympathy and verisimilitude, to the heart of man
or woman. There seems, for all that, no sufficient warrant for Dr. Neumann's
assumption that the poems of the Sisters, let alone those of the Brothers, 'must
have been shaped by . . . a man.' 23 Not often since the patriarchal age set in
has woman succeeded in so breaking through her barriers as to set on lasting
record the expression of herself and of things as they appeared to her. But to
assume that, because this happened seldom, therefore, this collection of
documents, though ascribed to her, 24 are necessarily not by her, is to carry
over far the truth: 'He that hath, to him shall be given, and she that hath not,
from her shall be taken even that which she hath!' I make no counter-assumption
that gifted Therīs had a hand in the compilation of the Brothers' Psalms. I
would only ask English readers to await the appearance of those, and note the
interesting differences in idiom, sentiment and tone between them and the
Sisters' Psalms. Even the 'common stock' of refrains is different, the only
exceptions being that of
kataŋ Buddhassa sāsanaŋ,
tisso vijjā anuppattā,
and
n'atthi 'dāni punabbhavo. 25
II
However, it lies with future historians of the Pali Canon as a whole to deal
with these baffling questions. By whomsoever compiled, the contents of the
Psalms are profoundly and perennially interesting as expressions of the
religious mind, universal and unconquerable; a mind which is so intensely alive,
because, to quote R. L. Stevenson, 'it knows what it prefers, instead of humbly
saying Amen! to what the world tells it it ought to prefer.' Even in the shorter
gāthās we may eliminate the common stock of refrains, and yet discern, in each
residuum, a distinctly and pathetically individual note, telling its own story
of a supreme 'conjuncture' seized, of Nibbana (in its later Sanskrit form,
Nirvāṇā) or Arahantship won.
More interesting, to the social historian, than the peace they hymned is the
account of the various motives that drove women, when Buddhism had arisen, from
the world to embrace the an-agāriyā or homeless life. These motives are as
diverse as those revealed in the records of Christian monasticism. Across time
and space a common humanity is manifest. In some cases it is the drawing power
of the Dhamma, preached by the Buddha, or by a senior disciple of either sex,
which brings about the crisis. The mental upheaval or commotion (saŋvega)
produced in the hearer is occasioned, not so much by a 'sense of sin,' as by the
flash of insight into universal impermanence in all things human and divine, and
by the prospect of being reborn, world without end, in the infinite chain of
life, ever renewing itself in the resultants of its own acts.
In other cases it is the vis a tergo of goading circumstance that impels the
woman to break out of the groove. Escape, deliverance, freedom from suffering
mental, moral, domestic, social–from some situation that has become
intolerable–is hymned in the verses and explained in the Commentary. The
bereaved mother, the childless widow, are emancipated from grief and contumely;
the Magdalen from remorse, the wife of raja or rich man from the satiety and
emptiness of an idle life of luxury, the poor man's wife from care and drudgery,
the young girl from the humiliation of being handed over to the suitor who bids
highest, the thoughtful woman from the ban imposed upon her intellectual
development by convention and tradition. It is a suggestive point that the
percentage of Sisters' Psalms, in which the goal achieved is envisaged as
Emancipation, Liberty won–about 23 per cent.–is considerably greater than the
corresponding proportion in the Psalms by the Brethren (13 per cent.). In most
cases, the male singer had had the disposal of his life in his own hands to a
greater extent than was the case with each woman. I do not so misread the poems
as to conclude that the liberty they hymned was merely a shaking off the
trammels of the 'House-life.' As a novelist of to-day sagaciously puts it: 'Only
the selfish and the useless are ever free.' 26 'CITTAŊ vimucci me!'–it was the
freed mind, the release from sense, superstition, craving, and the round of
rebirth that made them break forth into singing. All other escape was but the
anagārūpanissaya, 27 the indispensable conditions of the final release.
Nevertheless, these little women of old were every whit as human as we, and I am
convinced that the glory of saintship was for them, and at first–when they
hymned it–no white light, but prismatic through the circumstances and
temperament of each. Thus, those who had had most ado in breaking away from the
world were most likely to sing:
'O free indeed! O gloriously free am I!'28
and to climb alone and sit on rocky peak, where the keener air smote on their
brow and the world grew wide beneath, while they mused on this good thing that
had come to them:
'So sit I here
Upon the rock. And o'er my spirit sweeps
The breath of LIBERTY!' 29
To gain this free mobility, pace the deeper liberty, they, like their later
Christian sisters, had laid down all social position, all domestic success; they
had lost their world. But in exchange they had won the status of an individual
in place of being adjuncts, however much admired, fostered, and sheltered they
might, as such, have been. 'With shaven head, wrapt in their robe'–a dress
indistinguishable, it would seem, from the swathing toga and swathed
under-garments of the male religieux–the Sister was free to come and go, to dive
alone into the depths of the wood, or climb aloft.
Moreover, to free mobility she could wed the other austere joy of being
recognized, at least by her brother 'Arahants,' as a rational being, without
reference to sex. As such she breathed the spiritual atmosphere, she shared the
intellectual communion of that religious aristocracy called in the Pitakas,
Ariyas, with whom she claimed that power of 'seeing all things as they really
are' (i.e., have come to be, sabbaŋ yathābhūtaŋ disvā), which the Buddhist
called being Awake (buddho).
'How should the woman's nature hinder Us–
us Ariyas?' says Somā:
'What can that signify to one in whom
Insight doth truly comprehend the Norm?
To one for whom the question doth arise:
Am I a woman in such matters, or
Am I a, man? or what not am I, then?–
To such an one is Māra fit to talk!'
It is true that the Bhikkhunīs were, technically, appointed juniors in
perpetuity to the Bhikkhus. It is equally clear that, by intellectual and moral
eminence, a Therī might claim equality with the highest of the fraternity. In
the Psalms an instance occurs, in xxxvii., where Bhaddā associates herself in
spiritual attainment with the great Kassapa, successor, as head of the Order, to
the Founder himself.
Not less touching than the sacrifices made for their dual liberty by rebels of
the hearth are the few brief utterances of women who saw the land of freedom,
but who repressed their longing to 'go forth,' even for many years, so long as
duties to those depending on them kept them at home. To these the late-won
liberty comes more as a haven of rest, and the poem a welcome spoken to her by
the Master himself:
'Happily rest, thou venerable dame,
Rest thee . . . knowing Nibbana's peace.' 30
It is worthy of passing note that these hindrances are chronicled as having been
duties owed to husband, parent, or master, but never to children. If the
mother's need is so great that she wrenches herself away from her children,
either it is recorded that the child is handed over to grandparents, or the fact
of the sacrifice is merely stated:
'Home have I left, for I have left my world!
Child have I left, and all my cherished herds.' 31
Whatever the mother's feelings may have been in such cases–and there are but one
or two of them occurring in the book–the custom of the sons continuing to live
with their parents after marriage seems to have been so prevalent that the
children would not have been left unmothered. In nearly every case of a matron
leaving the world, either no children are mentioned, or they are provided for,
or grown up, or Death is mothering them.
For if Freedom drew, not less did Sorrow drive.
'Woeful is woman's lot! hath He declared–
Tamer and Driver of the hearts of men;'
and there are many erstwhile broken-hearted women who, in these verses, tell of
how they had found consolation. One noteworthy point is that, not only is there
not the faintest suggestion of suttee, there is no case even of the widow so
greatly mourning the loss of her husband as one beloved that she seeks comfort
at the Master's feet. Where her 'lord' 32 leaves her to enter the religious
life, she follows in emulation, and enters it with the Bhikkhunīs; but if she be
widowed, she mourns either her impoverished lot, or she is, as it happens,
mourning for a child, or for kinsfolk, at the same time. It is 'Rachel weeping
for her children because they are not' that constitutes, far more than does the
bereaved daughter, sister, wife, or widow, as such, the type of Mulier Dolorosa–
'Cuius animam gementem
Contristantem et dolentem
Pertransivit gladius'–
to whom life in the Order came chiefly as comfort and support in mortal anguish.
The 'Light of Asia' has familiarized the West with the episode, narrated in our
Commentary, of Kisāgotamī–the Frail Gotamid33–who, cheating her distracted mind,
sought medicine for the little child she bore about, dead, on her hip. The poem
ascribed to her is one of the most striking of the series. Released from all her
sorrows by insight gained through communion in the Order 'with noble souls,' and
chiefly through the object-lesson given her by the noblest of them all, she
strikes in her verses a broader note. Into the echoes of her own grief she
weaves the chords of the sufferings of her sex, and more especially the terrible
experiences of her great colleague the Sister Paṭācārā,34 as if to illustrate
the teaching of him who had comforted her, namely, that 'there hath no trouble
overtaken you save such as is commen to men.'
The Gotamid's swift acceptance of this stoic consolation may call up in contrast
how a Western poet, with insight into human nature, spurns such comfort for the
wounded heart while its anguish is yet raw:
'And common was the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.'35
But it should not be forgotten that Kisāgotamī, distraught though she was, is
represented as being, in her spiritual evolution, at the very threshold of the
Dawn, far nearer to saintship than the young Tennyson, mourning his friend,
claimed to be. It is because he 'saw the promise in her,' that the Master judged
her ready for the test he administered.
This method of consolation receives two developments in the poems. The former is
essentially the agnostic position, and is the theme of Paṭācārā's own poem of
consolation: 'So great a mystery was the little life now gone, both as to its
coming and its going, that it never was yours–your property–to have or to mourn
over. The great laws of the universe are not worked by you. Be quiet–und füge
dich.' Thus are many mothers said to have been effectually comforted. Again we
may feel sceptical, even scornful; but are we sure we have gauged the workings
of all human hearts and every touch to which they will respond? Moreover, again,
these were mothers ripe for salvation.
The other development alluded to is peculiarly Indian: 'No trouble hath
overtaken you, save such as hath already overtaken you many and many a time in
the infinite number of your past spans of life. Why, then, fall ever back on
these helpless tears that never have availed aught? Cut at the source whence all
these myriad bereavements have come.'36
Now, apart from their interest as a contribution to the history of women under
Monasticism, the most salient object-lesson given by East to West in these
Psalms is just this characteristic perspective taken of what we call 'life.' We
have heard it said here that life is a moment between two eternities. But, as a
normal attitude of thought, we wipe out the first eternity, and retain the
moment and the forward view. In the religious language of the Buddhists–to speak
only of this phase of thought–the word life, jīvita, hardly occurs. That which
we call life is for them but one anga, one segment or stage, in bhava, or being
(becoming) Their religious psychology, in the post-Asokan period, adopted the
term bhavanga to mean just that moment (one out of an infinite number of
moments) between the eternities, considered more especially as conscious, or
potentially conscious, life, much as our psychology has adopted the less
indigenous word continuum. 37 And accordingly, when these weeping mothers are
reminded that times without number have they stood wringing their hands for the
lost burden of sweetness unspeakable–ay, even there, at Sāvatthī itself, even
here, in that charnel-field, even for a girlie called Jīvā ('living,' 'Viva')
too,–even for many Jīvās–why then, for them at least, whose spiritual growth was
just about to show the ripened fruit, all the intolerable uniqueness of this
last bereavement fell away. No more could they say, 'Behold and see if there be
any sorrow like unto my sorrow.' . . . The little moment of their bhava and of
the child's bhava became merged into the past eternity. And the one thing
needful rose up: How to merge the future eternity into the moment:
'. . . had better live no longer than one Day,
So she behold, within That Day, That Path!'
Not without reason may the Western mind of to-morrow object that this attitude
too much resembles the hopeless outlook of the slum-cottage mother of to-day.
She will remark of her dozen Jīvās: 'Ah, well, you must have your lot!' and
also, 'As I ought to know, having buried nine!' To-morrow, it may be, living
under physical conditions less horrible than at present, and with some training
of the understanding, she will rise up and regulate both her 'lot' and let the
lot live to bury her. Yet will one child here and there be torn by death from
her. And the uniqueness will be the more intolerable then–or will she have heard
of Ubbirī?
Thus, anyway, did the Buddha and his elect Sisters seek to comfort Rachel,
administering no celestial balm, but educing from the tottering, anguished soul
its inner resources, its latent self-reliance, its cramped faculty of spiritual
vision. The Christian Bhikkhunī exhorted her sisters to
'Patere nunc aspera.
Nunc sis Crucis socia,'
because they could expect to be
'Regni consors postea.' 38
The Indian sister was bidden: 'Come to thyself!' and confessed herself victor
over pain and sorrow:
'In that I now can grasp and understand
The base on which my miseries were built.' 39
But she is never led to look forward to bliss in terms of time, positive or
negative. If Death be conquered, it is not through the winning, in Arahantship,
of eternal living, but because, when Death comes, his eternally recurring
visitation ceases. It may be that in harping in highest exultation how they had
won to, and touched, the Path Ambrosial–the Amataŋ Padaŋ40–Nibbana, they implied
some state inconceivable to thought, inexpressible by language, while the one
and the other are limited to concepts and terms of life; and yet a state which,
while not in time or space, positively constitutes the sequel of the glorious
and blissful days of this life's residuum. Nevertheless, their verses do not
seem to betray anything that can be construed as a consciousness that hidden
glories, more wonderful than the brief span of 'cool' and calm they now know as
Arahants, are awaiting them. There is nothing pointing to an Avyākata–an
unrevealed mystery–concerning which 'we would, and if we could,' sing something.
It may be with them as with one who, after long toil and much peril, reaches
home, and is content with that for the day, whatever life may yet give or ask
for on the morrow. They have won up out of the Maelstrom of Saŋsāra, they have
'crossed over,' they have won to something ineffable, that now is, but is not to
be described in terms of space or after-time; and resting, they sing. We will
leave it at that.
In practically every case the breaking out of the groove of habit and convention
was proximately caused by a personal influence–magnetic, inspiring,
persuasive–that of a ransomed sister or brother, or of the greatest Brother of
them all. But herein we note a sharp contrast between these Indian Marys and
their Christian sisters. Where He, the Central Figure, intervenes, and gratitude
is blent with adoration, the little poem reveals no word of quasi-amorous
self-surrender to the person or image of the Belovèd, such as characterizes not
a little of that Christian literature for which the Song of Solomon–'I am my
beloved's and my beloved is mine'–was a sacred archetype. The 'rex virgineus,
sponsus dulcissimus,' who, in Abbess Herrad's psalm, 'prepares the bridal' and
'receives in his embrace,' belongs to a tradition naturally evolving around a
youthful Saviour. 41 The utmost length a Therī presumes to go in relating
herself to her Teacher, is to claim spiritual fatherhood in Him, whom she
perhaps first saw late in his long life (some of the Theras, the Brethren, use
the same language). Thus Sundarī:
'Thou art Buddha! thou art Master! and thine,
Thy daughter am I, issue of thy mouth.'42
and, again, Uttamā:
'Buddha's daughter I,
Born of his mouth, his blessed word, I stand!'
And Uppalavaṇṇā:
'Thou who presumest to lie in wait for a child of the Buddha.'43
While for Kisāgotamī, her great physician enters her Psalm regarded, though not
directly so addressed, more as a kind and noble friend (kalyāna-mitta).
In this connection, it should be noted, that, in Buddhist hagiology, there is no
premium placed on the state of virginity as such. The Founder himself was a
husband and father, and the most eminent Sisters were, three-fourths of them,
matrons, not virgins.44
It is also worthy of passing remark, that of the four notorious Magdalens who
found peace and purity in the Order of Bhikkhunīs–Aḍḍhakāsī, Vimalā, Abhaya's
Mother, and Ambapālī–not one expresses any deep feeling of personal attachment
to the Teacher. Had they been of such a temperament, it is probable their past
life might have proved impossible for them.45
Not a less interesting circumstance is it, when the rescued soul's devotion
fastens itself upon a woman saviour, as is shown notably in the loyalty
professed for Paṭācārā, the Great Pajāpatī, Dhammadinnā and Uppalavaṇṇā. 46 The
last two have individual acknowledgments paid them, but the first-named–a
veritable Mater Consolatrix–is hailed by a school of Bhikkhunīs as their
sovereign Lady
'Like unto Sakka o'er the Thrice Ten Gods.'
Hers is the system or sāsana that they obey; the Master himself is not for them
in the foreground of their cult.
From whatever motive and through whatever agency the Sisters had found their way
into the Order, it is clear that with the change a new and varied life opened up
for them. We see in the verses the expression of energies and emotions newly
awakened or diverted into new channels. Even where the poems breathe rest and
peace, their tone is exalted and hedonistic, telling of
'exceeding store
Of joy and an impassioned quietude.'47
Even in the verses of those women who have sought refuge in the Order from
overwhelming misery or disgust, there is little or no expression of the obtained
relief in terms of that quiescence and apathy and mortified vitality so readily
imputed to the religious ideals of the East. Life under the Vinaya was one of
both active and contemplative discipline. The emancipation won implied
'space'–okāsa–opportunity, that is, for developing, regulating, and
concentrating both thought and deed:
'La douce liberté cherchant la douce loi.'48
Under its régime the Bhikkhunī became the pupil of some Therī. She led the
simple life, and discharged the ministering duties of a novice. And by
prescribed exercises and daily lessons she worked out for herself, if the
promise was in her, her own salvation, qualifying to become a teacher and leader
in her turn. There was to be no forgetting by her of what she had left and
escaped from. Not only was she to turn and mark those past struggles, but, as
her insight grew, there was to come to her, if she was of the calibre of these
Therīs, memories of former lives, revealing the inevitable working of the law of
Kamma (karma), or the conservation of the effect of action. The vision might
have its terrors, but it was all part of her Peace–for had she not made an
end49–an end which all her days meant:
'. . . peace on earth.
Not peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
There in white languors to decline and cease;
But peace whose names are also Rapture, Power,
Clear sight and Love: for these are parts of Peace.'50
Such are a few of the salient features in these little cameos of thought, carved
by, or for, these notable women of long ago. It would take too long here to
analyze, not only the motives that brought them into the Order, but the various
aspects, peace and the rest, under which they viewed that adept state called
'Arahatta,' which they all are affirmed to have won, and the assurance of which
is termed AÑÑĀ (lit., ad-sciens). I will only touch on one avenue opened up for
the adept woman, that has ever been sought by her in whatever communion she
graduated. For all her inspired musings under the hilly skies or the cool shade,
the Therī's life was not wholly one of introspective reverie, free or regulated.
The Order, refuge though it proved, was primarily an organization for the
propaganda of the Dhamma or 'Norm,'51 and its members were all, more or less,
wholly or at times, saviours and good shepherds of stray sheep. Instances of
this one and that 'teaching the Dhamma' will be met with in the Psalms and their
story, notably those of Paṭācārā, of Puṇṇikā the serf, of Vāsitthi, and of
Sukkā, pupil of the greater preacher, Dhammadinnā. Indeed, we find it not hard
to picture Sukkā53 pacing to and fro on the rostrum of her terrace, her audience
sitting cross-legged or otherwise, enchanted, spellbound in the dappled shade
around her, while from out of the venerable, once sacred tree, near which the
group of cells clustered, the elfin face of the Dryad–her ancient votive shrine
neglected, yet herself stirred to enthusiasm by this New Woman's eloquence–leans
out from the trunk,
'fain to quaff
That life's elixir, once gained never lost,
That welleth ever up in her sweet words,
E'en as the wayfarer welcomes the rain.'
Another Psalmist, Bhaddā Kāpilānī, is also spoken of in the Vinaya (Vin., iv.
290, 292) as a learned and honoured preacher of the Dhamma. And in the Anguttara
Nikāya we meet with another Sister, called 'The Kajangalan'– namely, of that
town–who, though no Psalmist, expounds to an inquiring congregation the very
theme, the first question concerning which baffled her notable colleague, Bhaddā
Curlyhair (Ang. Nik., v. 54 ſ.; Ps. xlvi).
The two instances–possibly versions of one and the same legend–of itinerant
women debaters,54 betray the breaking out of active intellects into less
cramped, if unprofitable channels. Organized educational work in the Order must
have proved greatly welcome to such temperaments.
It may assist readers to gain a purview of how the Therīs envisaged their summum
bonum, if I give a summary of my own analysis, together with the number of
Psalms in which each aspect is emphasized. The table is not exhaustive, and
might be supplemented, and in most cases more than one aspect appears in one and
the same poem. The End of Living or of Rebirths, e.g., forms almost a
ground-wave to be discerned in the majority of the Psalms, if not always the
surface-billow.
SALVATION, NIBBANA, OR ARAHANTSHIP VIEWED UNDER–
A. A NEGATIVE ASPECT.
(As a release, a getting rid of.)55
(a) Nibbana (the 'going-out' of greed, ill-will, and dulness) 5 (vi.,
xlvii., lxiii., lxx., lxxiii.).
(b) Freedom 17 (ii., iv., xi., xii., xvii., xxi., xxiv., xl., xliii.,
xlv.-xlvii., lii., lxiii., lxix., lxx., lxxiii.).
(c) Comfort, End to Ill 11 (xxxiii., xlix., l., li., lv., lix., lx.,
lxiii., lxviii., lxii.).
(d) End of Becoming or 'Life' 9 (xx., xxii., xxv., xxxi., xlii., xlv.,
lv., lxix., lxx.).
(e) End of Craving 10 (xxv.-xxviii., xxix., xxxiv., lii., liv., lxii.,
lxxi.).
(f) Rest 3 (i., xii., xvi.).
B. A POSITIVE ASPECT.
1. Subjectively considered.
(a) Mental illumination conceived as–
(i.) Light 12 (iii., xxiii., xxx., xxxv., xxxvi., xlviii., lvii.-lxi.,
lxiv.).
(ii.) Insight 8 (xxxvi., xxxviii., xli., xliv., liii., lx., lxiv.,
lxxi.).
(b) State of Feeling:
(i.) Happiness 5 (vi., xxi., xxxix., lvii., lxxiii.).
(ii.) Cool, calm, content ('sītibhāva,' 'nibbutā,' 'upasamo ') 12
(xiv.-xvi., xviii., xix., xxvi., xxxvii., xxxix., xli., xliv., lvi.,
lxx.).
(iii.) Peace, safety 11 (vi., viii., ix., xxix., xxx., xxxviii., xlii.,
xliv., lvii., lxii., lxxiii.).
(c) State of Will:
Self-mastery 14 (xv., xxviii.-xxx., xxxii., xxxvi., xl., xlv., xlvii.,
lvi., lvii., lix., lxi., lxiv.).
2. Objectively considered.
(a) As Truth 3 (liii., lxiii., lxvi.).
(b) As the Highest Good 1 (xlix.).
(c) As a supreme opportunity 1 (v.).
(d) As a regulated life 2 (iii., xlviii.).
(e) As communion with the Best 6 (xxxviii., xlix., lxiii., lxvii., lxix.,
lxx.).
(f) As bringing congenial work 5 (xxxiv., lxii., lxv., lxvii., lxxiii.).
56
For those who are acquainted with the way in which, in Christianity, the cult of
the Madonna and of women saints grafted itself upon, and in part sprang out of,
the widely spread cult of tribal goddesses in Europe, 57 the question will
arise: 'Can anything of the sort be traced regarding the veneration of these
women's names in the Buddhist scriptures?' But we are not here dealing with a
cult of a woman or women, hence we may scarcely expect anything of positive
value to comparative research in this field. Very faint traits of affinity here
and there may suggest themselves to the keen flair of the anthropologist. There
is, for instance, the association between Therī and tree. Beneath some tree they
are wont to sit, to stand, to preach. In the Appendix they are always said to be
found beneath, not a tree, but a certain tree:–aññatarasmiŋ rukkhamūle. Again,
while there is nothing in their names associating them with hill-shrines, as is
the case with 'berg and 'burg names of German women-saints, that the Therīs are
found, for no very apparent reason, seated on hill-tops, I have shown. Once
more, is there perhaps in the three sisters of Nālaka in Magadha–Cālā, Upacālā,
Sīsupacālā–some echo of those local triads of goddesses, or saints that are
common in German lore, and which loom, dim with antiquity, in the Semnai or
Venerable Goddesses of Greek worship, 58 and in the Trinity of the Norns or
Fates? Almost, finally, am I tempted to see significance in the form of the
refrain adopted by or for the ageing ex-courtezan's Psalm–that of Ambapālī–
'So and not otherwise runneth the rune, the word of the Soothsayer,'
i.e., literally, the Truth-speaker. 59 There is no mystic association attaching
to the word saccavādī, where it occurs elsewhere, hence I lay no weight on this
choice of a name for the Master. Nevertheless it is interesting to find these
two ancient institutions, the hetaira of the community and the Wise Woman, with
her monopoly of seeing things as they have been, are, or will be, combined in
one and the same poem.
III
In conclusion, let it be said that, while the text of the Commentary containing
the life-history of each Sister has been here and there abridged and condensed,
the verses have been translated as faithfully as lay in my power consistently
with the attempt to convey something of the poetic and religious feeling of the
metrical original. To do this for a foreign idiom and an alien and ancient
tradition, it was often necessary to expand each bead in some rosary of terms
into a phrase. E.g., the end of verse 337:
vītarāgā.
'Who also have themselves from passion freed,
visaŋyuttā
Unyoked from bondage, loosened from the world,
katakiccā
Who have accomplished their appointed task,
anāsavā
And all that drugged their hearts have purged away.'
No attempt has been made to force English into the Pali rhythms. Of these the
one that is used in nearly all the gāthās is the śloka. It is as prevalent in
Buddhist metrical diction as is the iambic five-footed line in ours. The line
just quoted may be recited to illustrate it: ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘
˘ ˘ ˘
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Vītarāgā visaŋyuttā || katakiccā anāsavā.
Where the metre varies, I have indicated the variety so far as I was able.
One of the more interesting varieties is the poem of Ambapālī, in which this
once famous Thaïs contemplates her wasted charms. The metre is approximately
that which came, in later literature, to be known as the Rathoddhatā (or
Chariot-borne) variant of the Trishṭubh:
_ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Kāḷakā bhamaravaṇṇasadisā
Jetty black like-the-colour-of-the bee
_ ˘ _ _ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Vellitaggā mama muddhajā ahuŋ.
The curling tips of the headgrowth of me were.
_ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Te jarāya sānavākasadisā
They thro' age are-like-hemp-and-bark:
_ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _ ˘ _
Saccavādivacanaŋ anaññathā.
Soothsayer's word not otherwise.
But in two or three cases I have not been able to identify the metre. 60 Studies
in Indian prosody so far have been made chiefly in much later literature, when
verses were largely made for metres. In these early rhythms, the poet may have
been less hampered by precedent and convention.
Where the English limps lamely (I pass over the lack in the translator of poetic
gift or training), this is in part due to a desire to put in no religious tropes
and figures from Western traditions. Where they have intruded, notice of the
exotic element is given. Some day the Pali gāthās will find their William
Morris, their Gilbert Murray. In this makeshift venture, I have striven to make
the translation such that the English reader, mindful as he goes of wayside
warnings in footnotes, might feel confident that the lines before him do not
omit subject-matter that is in the original, nor add subject-matter that is not.
61 At the same time, let it be readily admitted that the renderings are so far
free as to disqualify the book from serving as a 'crib' to the student. If my
gifted German predecessor in this effort could not adhere literally to the text,
the English language, with its abhorrence of compound words, its poverty in
prefixes and verbal nouns, starts him who wields it at a yet greater distance
from the Pali. To regulate the more careful reader's confidence, or want of it,
in the renderings selected, many words in the Index will be found with the Pali
originals appended.
One more word in this connection. If I have used 'Sister' in preference to
'nun,' it was not, in sooth, that the latter term, in its original connotation
of nonna, or mother, was not an adequate, and more than adequate, rendering for
Bhikkhunī. It was rather to keep my Indian recluses free from such implication
of confinement within walls and to lifelong vows as may now attach to the word
'nun.'
It needs no confession of mine to place on record the help I found, at the
initial stage of translation, in Dr. Neumann's translation of the gāthās, as
well as in Professor Windisch's prose rendering of the verses in the Appendix.
That with regard to the former, the differences in German and English metrical
idiom, combined with, here and there, difference in judgment, should have often
led me to reach the end by a different way, does not by any means obviate the
fact of the aid received. Pioneers had been step-cutting before me, and all
honour to pioneers.
'Ukkādhāro manussānaŋ
Niccaŋ apacito mayā.' 62
And as my husband, seventeen years ago, introduced me to these dear and revered
ladies–
'So me dhammaŋ adesesi therīhi suppakāsitaŋ'
–so now has he furthered and guarded my efforts with advice and criticism.
Gladly and gratefully would I record the kindness of those who have helped me in
procuring the illustrations–to wit, Mr. J. H. Marshall, Director-General of the
Archaeology Survey of India, who sent me many photographs of Rajgir,
Sahēṭh-Mahēṭh, and other places; Dr. T. Bloch, of the Indian Museum, Calcutta;
Mr. C. H. Hooper, of Messrs. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, who sent me
several forest scenes; my brother, C. W. Foley, of Calcutta, who procured for me
a selection of views about Gayā; Mrs. Arthur Schuster, who laid her large
collection of photographs, taken on her Indian travels, at my disposal; Mr. and
Mrs. Ernest B. Havell; and lastly, Mr. F. J. Payne, hon. secretary of the
Buddhist Society, G.B. and I., who has given me valuable assistance in carrying
out the work of illustration. Through their prompt and generous aid the book
might have been interleaved throughout with interesting views of the ancient
haunts of the Sisters, had it been practicable.
C. A. F. RHYS DAVIDS.
ASHTON-ON-MERSEY,
July, 1909.
1 The Thera- and Therī-Gāthā: Stanzas ascribed to Elders of the Buddhist Order
of Recluses. London, 1883.
2 Paramattha-Dīpanī, Part V. London, 1893. Discussed by me at the Ninth
Congress of Orientalists, London, 1892 (Transactions, i., p. 393. London,
1893).
3 This work consists of commentaries on the canonical works, entitled Udāna,
Vimāna-vatthu, Peta-vatthu, beside the two under discussion.
4 Die Lieder der Mönche und Nonnen Gotamo Buddho's. Berlin, 1899.
5 The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births. 6 vols. Cambridge,
1895-1907.
6 Johnson defines 'psalm' as 'a holy song.' There is no indication of
'psaltery' having accompanied the recitation of canonical gāthās.
7 He rewrote in Pali what had been handed down in Sinhalese, or perhaps in
Tamil.
8 See below, p. 178: porāṇaṭṭhakathā-tayaŋ.
9 I have judged it best not to overload this volume by translating the Apadāna
verses. They are adduced to confirm the attha-kathā with the words, 'As it is
said in the Apadāna.' This work is now being edited by Mrs. Mabel Bode, Ph.D.,
for the Pali Text Society.
10 Omitting the two poems ascribed to the followers of Paṭācārā collectively,
and assuming that certain poems attributed to Sisters with the same name are
by different persons.
11 Professor Windisch concludes that these ten Psalms were taken from an old
collection of Māra legends (Māra und Buddha, 134).
12 Translated in Rhys Davids's Buddhist Birth Stories. See especially pp.
12-14.
13 Windisch, Māra und Buddha, pp. 222 ſſ.; Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, pp.
177-186.
14 Cf. verses 16, 18; 14, 20; 38, 41; 59, 62, 188, 195, 203, 235; latter part
of 112, 117, 175; 120, 173, 179, 180, etc.
15 See Professor E. Müller's Introduction, Paramatthadīpanī, xiv., xv.
16 In one of the shorter Psalms (xlviii.) the narrative form emerges:
'The Thirty Sisters heard, and swift obeyed,' etc.
17 Therīgāthā, Preface.
18 Zeitschrift der D. M. G., 37, 54 ſſ., especially pp. 77-82.
19 See verse 431 n.
20 One brief poem makes a bare allusion of this nature, verse 40 n.
21 The Kathā Vatthu, in the Abhidhamma-Pitaka, compiled by Moggaliputta Tissa
in the reign of the Emperor Asoka.
22 Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, p. 179.
23 Op. cit., Introduction.
24 We may ignore for present purposes the pious humility which ascribed
several shorter gāthās to the Buddha himself.
25 'The bidding of the Buddha is done'; 'the Threefold Lore is won'; 'rebirth
comes now no more.'
26 The Inner Shrine.
27 Ps. lxx., verse 349; cf. Ps, xi., xl.
28 Ps. xi., xxi.
29 Ps. xxiv.
30 Ps. xvi.
31 Ps. xviii.
32 Sāmī, sāmiko, pati mean equally owner, lord, husband.
33 Ps. lxiii. I.e., physically frail or lean.
34 Pronounoe c like ch in 'church.'
35 In Memoriam, vi.
36 Cf. Ps. xxxiii., Ubbirī.
37 The fact that bhavanga in this sense occurs frequently in the Commentaries,
and, earlier still, in Milinda, and in Netti-Pakaraṇa (where a bodily and a
mental continuum are distinguished, 91), but not in the Pitakas, is not wholly
without chronological significance.
38 L. Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism, p. 486.
39 Ps. li., v. 138.
40 On the term Amata, Cf. Questions of Milinda (S.B.E.), Vol. i. 236. The word
'state' in connection with it does not occur in the Psalms.
41 Eckenstein, op. cit., pp. 253, 307 ſſ, 486.
42 'Tuvaŋ Buddho tuvaŋ Satthā, tuyhaŋ dhīt amhi brahmaṇa Orasā mukhato jātā. .
. .' (Ps. lxix., verse 336).
43 Ps. xxxi.; Ps. lxxi., verse 384.
44 Anguttara Nikāya, i. 25.
45 'The loose woman and the nun . . . have this in common, that they are both
the outcome of the refusal among womankind to accept married relations on the
basis of the subjection imposed by the fatherage' (L. Eckenstein, op. cit.,
5).
46 Ps. xlviii.-l., 1viii., xxx. xxxiv., xxxviii., lxx.
47 William Watson. As I have said elsewhere, Matthew Arnold's lines in Rugby
Chapel might have been written of the Therī's:
'Ye like angels appear,
Radiant with ardour divine;
Beacons of hope ye appear;
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.'
48 V. Hugo, L'Âne.
49 Ps. lxxii.: '. . . tassa pi anto kato mayā!' Isidāsī.
'Even of that now have I made an end.'
50 W. Watson, Wordsworth's Grave. The English poet and the Buddhist spirit
here embrace. Santi or Samatha (peace, calm) is closely allied by the latter
with Vipassanā (clear sight, insight); and with all good thought is involved
also Samādhi or Jhāna (contemplative rapture), and often Pīti (emotional
rapture), the Indriya's (or Bala's, powers) and Adosa (or Mettā, love).
51 This word is in some respects a more adequate translation of Dhamma
(Sanskrit, Dharma) than Law, Truth, or Gospel. 52 By Dhamma is meant one of
the five cosmic orders or sequences of happenings in the universe. Beside the
order of action (kamma), of the physical forces (utu), of biological forces
(bīja, or germs), and of mind, there was, if one may so call it, the moral or
regenerative cosmos–dhamma-niyama–by which the living universe evolved its
Buddhas and toiled upward out of the eternal round of saŋsāra towards
salvation and the ideal. These five are severally declared in the Canon, but
were classified later. See Buddhaghosa's Commentary on Dīgha Nikāya, Sutta
xiv.
52 Rhys Davids, American Lectures, 38.
53 Ps. lxv., li., xxxiv., xii.
54 Ps. xlvi., xlii.
55 This twofold classification must, of course, not be taken absolutely. It is
merely a question of relative emphasis–e.g., B 1 (a) is equally a getting rid
of the 'Darkness' of Ignorance.
56 Sumedhā was evidently a born preacher!
57 I refer readers to the deeply interesting opening chapter in Miss
Eckenstein's book, Women under Monasticism.
58 Dr. Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to Greek Religion, pp. 239 ſſ.
59 Saccavādivacanaŋ anaññthā.
60 E.g., in Ps. lxiii. (see p. 110, n. 2); Ps. xxi.:
Sumuttike sumuttikā sādhu muttikāmhi musalassa;'
and the last poem, beginning:
'Mantāvatiyā nagare rañño Koñcassa aggamahesiyā.'
Cf. in verse 512 the curious rhythm:
˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ _ ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘_ ˘ _ ˘_
'Idamajaraŋidamamaraŋidamajarāmarapadamasokaŋ.'
61 One instance of unnecessarily 'free,' not to say incorrect, rendering,
discovered too late for revision, I have amended on p. 192, slightly revising
the Pali text.
62 Sutta Nipāta, verse 336.
PSALMS OF THE SISTERS,
WITH THE
CHRONICLE FROM THE COMMENTARY BY DHAMMAPĀLA ENTITLED 'THE ELUCIDATION OF THE
HIGHEST MEANING'
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)