The Therigatha, meaning verses of the elder nuns, is a collection of poems in the Pali Canon attributed to early Buddhist women, members of the first generation of ordained female monastics following the Buddha, describing their paths to renunciation and their experience of spiritual liberation. Its poems range across a striking variety of personal circumstance: former courtesans, grieving mothers, women fleeing abusive or unwanted marriages, and women born into wealth who chose renunciation freely, each voice giving a distinct account of the suffering that preceded her ordination and the freedom she describes finding afterward.
The Therigatha sits within the Khuddaka Nikaya, the collection of shorter texts within the Pali Canon's Sutta Pitaka, alongside its companion collection the Theragatha, verses attributed to early Buddhist monks, though the Therigatha has drawn particular scholarly and popular attention as one of the earliest surviving bodies of literature anywhere in the world composed by and explicitly attributed to women.
Individual poems vary considerably in length, from short single stanza statements to extended accounts running many verses, and several are voiced by women named elsewhere in Buddhist tradition as particularly significant early disciples, which has encouraged scholars to read the collection alongside other early biographical material about the Buddha's first female followers rather than treating the verses purely as anonymous devotional poetry.