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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and welcome to this third of five talks focusing on the poems of the earliest female disciples of the Buddha, the ones that became fully awakened, the early nuns.

And yesterday the poem that I read had involved a conversation between Kizagotami and Patachara.

And Patachara, the Aya Pata Chara, the Vanderbilt Pataara, was probably one of the most important women

teachers in the time of the Buddha.

There's more references to her being a teacher,

especially to other nuns, other women,

than there is to any other woman at the time of the Buddha in these early texts.

And so there's a, in these poems, there's a number of poems that referred to her, including

one which is her own poem, which is her Enlightenment poem.

And it, and so I'd like to read that and describe, and you know, yesterday I told her a little bit of her about her story where she had phenomenal degrees of suffering

with the death of her whole family

in the course of one day,

or learning about it over the course of one day.

Two young child children, her husband, her parents, her brother.

And so she became a nun. So she

practice diligently,

practiced diligently,

and so this is her story that she tells in a poem.

And she's talking about herself, this is what she was thinking.

Young men gain wealth by plowing fields, sewing seeds in the ground, caring for children and wife. But why is it that I, thorough in virtuous conduct, doing the Buddha's instruction, not lazy or proud, have not attained release have not attained

nibana. With feet washed

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