Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therīgāthā

The book begins by situating the Therīgāthā as a unique canonical text attributed to female authorship and as an important source for studying women’s religious experience in early Buddhism. It first analyzes the language of liberation, comparing the Therīgāthā and Theragāthā in their use of formulas, liberation refrains, technical terms, and patterns of expression. The study then turns to attitudes toward renunciation, showing how the poems depict women’s departure from household life, family obligations, sensuality, and social expectations. A major section examines the body, including themes of beauty, decay, anatomy, desire, and the body as a meditative object, highlighting how female renunciants transform culturally charged ideas of femininity into instruments of insight. The discussion then moves outward to the environment, considering forests, trees, natural settings, and symbolic landscapes as spaces for meditation, vulnerability, transformation, and freedom. The final major section focuses on the struggle for liberation in the Therīgāthā, including models of awakening, female authorship, and the distinctive ways in which women’s voices articulate liberation within the broader Buddhist path. Overall, the work presents the Therīgāthā as a powerful literary and doctrinal record of women pursuing nibbāna within, and sometimes against, the constraints of their historical and religious world.