Therī-apadāna
"The Past-Life Accounts of the Senior Nuns" — forty verse narratives, gathered in the Khuddaka Nikāya, in which the Buddha's most senior bhikkhunīs each recount the small act of generosity or devotion, lifetimes earlier, that set them on the road to full awakening. Ru-Yi's translation, made directly from the Pāli, works through it vagga by vagga — the original alongside our English and a reading note for what repays a second look.
Why a fresh translation
Bhikkhu Sujato's freely-licensed translation of the Pāli Canon, used throughout this site's Discourses section, does not extend to the Apadāna — his coverage of the Khuddaka Nikāya stops short of it. A complete modern English translation exists (Jonathan S. Walters, 2017), but it remains in copyright. That gap is the occasion for this page: a fresh translation made directly from the Pāli, chapter by chapter, in the same spirit as this site's Visuddhimagga and Abhidhamma work.
The Pāli source is the Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka (Buddhavasse 2500 edition), the standard modern critical text, cross-checked for internal consistency against the textual variants it records from the Burmese, Sinhalese, and PTS editions. The English translation is Ru-Yi's own, made directly from the Pāli. No existing English translation of the Apadāna — Walters' included — was consulted, paraphrased, or used as a guide for wording or structure. Where a line's reading is genuinely uncertain across the manuscript tradition, the reading notes say so plainly rather than presenting a confident translation of a contested text.
Why these forty stories
The Therī-apadāna is the companion volume, in the far larger Apadāna collection, to the better-known Therīgāthā already read elsewhere on this site — but where the Therīgāthā gives each nun's own testimony of her final life's struggle and breakthrough, the Apadāna reaches back further, into the lifetimes before that: the single ordinary act — a flower offered, a spoonful of food given, a lamp lit — that the text presents as the seed of everything that followed. Read together, the two collections give the same women both a beginning and an end.
Vaggas
New to this collection? Start with the Sumedhāvagga — its first poem, in the voice of the nun Sumedhā, sets the pattern every poem in the collection follows: an act of devotion offered to a Buddha of a distant past age, and the long chain of fortunate rebirths, ending in arahantship, that followed from it. It also parallels one of the longest poems in the Therīgāthā, Thig 16.1 (also named for Sumedhā) — worth reading alongside it.