Motherhood and Renunciation in the Therīgāthā

The Therīgāthā, the 'Verses of the Elder Nuns' composed by women that remain in the Pali Khuddaka Nikāya, is one of the earliest Buddhist texts, the only one that has been preserved to date and is attributed to female authorship. Returning time and time again is its seventy-three poems about the mother who loses a child, the wife who bends over the household mortar and pestle, and the daughter who steps away from an arranged marriage. This article explores the nature of motherhood as it is both the strongest form of saṃsāric attachment and the ultimate basis for liberation, or arahantship, to be finally achieved in the Therīgāthā. The article compares and contrasts the "de-mothering" of maternal loss described in Reiko Ohnuma's work with the study of the rhetoric of liberation by Kathryn Blackstone, along with readings provided by Alice Collett, Kate Crosby and Vanessa R. Sasson, and close readings of verses attributed to Muttā, Sumangalamātā, Ubbirī, Kisāgotamī, Vāsiṭṭhī, and Paṭācārā, and proposes that the Therīgāthā talks about the transvaluation of motherhood, rather than an eradication of it, converting maternal loss into insight and maternal bondage into freedom.