Five Hundred Students of Paṭācārā (THIG6.1)

Verses of the Senior Nuns 6.1

The Book of the Sixes

Five Hundred Students of Paṭācārā

“One whose path you do not know,

not whence they came nor where they went;

though they came from who knows where,

you mourn that being, crying, ‘Oh my son!’

But one whose path you do know,

whence they came or where they went;

that one you do not lament—

such is the nature of living creatures.

Unasked he came,

he left without leave.

He must have come from somewhere,

and stayed who knows how many days.

He left from here by one road,

he will go from there by another.

Departing with the form of a human,

he will go on transmigrating.

As he came, so he went:

why weep over that?”

“Oh! For you have plucked the arrow from me,

so hard to see, stuck in the heart.

You’ve swept away the grief for my son,

in which I once was mired.

Today I’ve plucked the arrow,

I’m hungerless, quenched.

I go for refuge to that sage, the Buddha,

to his teaching, and to the Saṅgha.”

That is how five hundred nuns declared their enlightenment.