The Therigatha, a collection of verses attributed to early Buddhist nuns, was preserved within the Pali Canon. The poems speak of grief, ageing, motherhood, poverty, renunciation, and spiritual liberation. Their peculiarity lies in allowing named women from ancient India to speak in first-person religious poetry.

The Therigatha is one of the earliest surviving collections of women's literature. Its poems gave later Buddhist and feminist readers a lineage of female spiritual authority, showing how lyric utterance could transform suffering, social limitation, and domestic loss into a language of awakening.