First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening
Review of the book by Susan Murcott (translation of The Therigatha, with commentary)
It is difficult for me to understand and empathize with the basic teachings of Buddhism. I cannot imagine rejecting the goals I take for granted, what motivates me to get up in the morning. Why would anyone strive for nothingness?
But having read these poems (composed around 600 BC and first written down hundreds of years later) together with the commentary, I see the beliefs not as philosophical statements, but rather as a reaction to the human condition, to pain and suffering. It’s not a question of “what is truth?” but rather “how could this belief change how I live and hence reduce my pain?”
Many of the women who wrote these poems turned to Buddhism because they needed a release from suffering, typically from grief at the death of loved ones. Others were in reaction to near-death experiences or to the realization that their bodies would inevitably decay and return to dust — the impermanence of all that lives.
Their chosen religion did not console them with promises that they would join their loved ones again an afterlife. Rather, they sought to be “free of desire and its chains.” As Wordsworth put it,
“The world is too much with us late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers …”
They also did not want reincarnation, as if life were a videogame and when you die you automatically come back in another body, over and over again. They believed that was what normally happened but wanted that cycle to end for them.
The poems and the commentary in this book make me think of Buddhism as a remedy for grief and suffering, rather than as a statement about the nature of reality. They help me emotionally connect with those women, to empathize with what they suffered and how they coped.
A sampling of passages from the poems:
“Bathing my feet
I watched the bathwater
spill down the slope.
I concentrate my mind
the way you train a good horse.” p. 46
“the truth of impermanence” p. 78
“This is how my body was,
Now it is dilapidated,
the place of pain,
an old house
with the plaster falling off.” p.148
“I have ended the hunger
of gods and humans,
and I will not wander
from birth to birth.
I have no thought of becoming.” p. 67
“I wish to stop running,
never to go
from birth to birth again. p. 142, similar “This is my last body.” p.151
“Everywhere the love of pleasure is destroyed,
the great dark is torn apart,
and Death,
you too are destroyed.” p 67 and repeated verbtaim p. 103, p. 176
(cf. the very different response to death in Donne’s “Death shall have no dominion” and Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go quiet into that dark night.”
“I know there is no happiness in anything born from a cause,
and I cling to nothing.” p. 198
As the author points out in her commentary, when these poems were written a wealthy married woman was, in some ways, worse off than a slave.
“It is possible that the distinction between wife and consort was based in part on economics — consorts receiving remuneration, wives not.” p. 36
“Neither a sudra wife — sudra being the lowest caste (servants or slaves) — nor a wife purchased by bride price, was entitled to any religious rights or privilege.” p. 72
“Because Khujjuttara, as a slave, had greater freedom of mobility than the more confined upper-class woman, she could do this.” p. 156
Susan Murcott concludes, “‘First Buddhist Women’ is an attempt to transfer and communicate to Western readers a religious text that has had profound meaning in various Asian cultures over a span of 2500 years. To me, the Therigatha is a treasure because it is something I should and could not find in my own culture.” p. 236
