Psalms of the Early Buddhists: Psalms of the Sisters

Psalms of the Early Buddhists, Psalms of the Sisters, translated by Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids and published by the Pali Text Society in 1909, is a scholarly English translation of the Therigatha, the canonical Pali verses attributed to the earliest ordained Buddhist nuns, among the oldest surviving body of literature composed by women anywhere in the world. Rhys Davids was among the founding generation of Western Pali scholars and her husband T. W. Rhys Davids had founded the Pali Text Society specifically to produce reliable editions and translations of the Pali canon. Its strength is that direct grounding in the source language from a translator working within the discipline that built the modern critical apparatus for reading these texts at all. Its limit is that it is an early twentieth century translation, and later Pali scholarship has refined readings of individual verses and their historical context since, so a claim resting on a precise or contested point of translation benefits from checking a more recent scholarly rendering alongside this foundational one.