The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and this Monday and to do a new series the theme for this week and maybe for the first days of next week as well. That one of the activities I've been involved in

for this month of August is continuing with an ongoing project I have

of translating and then writing commentary

or introduction to the ancient verses of the nuns.

In Polly, it's called it Terrigata.

And people say it's, it might be the earliest poetry that we know, religious poetry by women. And it's purported to be the verses and the poetry of their direct

disciples of the Buddha, though I think some of them were written later, maybe by nuns in the centuries after the Buddha as well.

And it's a remarkable collection of poems, Buddhist poems, for many reasons. One of them is that

a tremendous confidence of these women. They go through, they describe some of them tremendous difficulties that they go through,

the life difficulties, the death of their children, the death of their family, the challenges of abusive marriages,

and all kinds of challenges that they have, and somehow they make their way through it.

They practice, they become nuns,

and they confidently live in the world,

and they confidently live recognizing and proclaiming their full

awakening that the full awakening is possible and and I think this this text is a

celebration of people who are celebrating not only their potential for awakening, but they're actually

attainment of it.

And as a, and it makes, has greater value in the contrast to the very difficult lives some of them lived before they became nuns.

So I've translated this some years ago and that's been sitting on the shelf for some time and

now I'm writing the introductions to it.

So I hope to have some point be able to publish it as a book.

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