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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So welcome to this fourth talk where I reading some of the verses the poems of the Terries, the ancient nuns who were disciples of the Buddha or lived in the years after him.

And maybe the earliest poetry of religious poetry of women that survives.

And before I read some poems today, I wrote a tentative introduction to my translation.

And I want to read just a couple of paragraphs from it.

It's kind of setting the stage, perhaps for what will the poems. of

a couple of paragraphs from it. The Teri Gata, that is the verses of the elder nuns

evokes the struggles in spiritual transformation

of the ancient Indian women.

The stories of their challenges highlight their success in attaining the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path.

Accounts of tragic and oppressive lives provide dramatic contrast through their inspired words

celebrating their great liberation.

The social constraints and oppressions experienced by women in ancient India are the backdrops for the radical

inner freedom and peace they achieve. Depictions of wisdom, courage, and determination used to overcome

their suffering culminate with confident declarations of their full realization.

And one of the ways that they declare,

there's many ways they declare their full liberation, one of them is shattering the mass of darkness.

To shatter this darkness is to become free of the obscuring influence of ignorance and

delusion.

As a metaphor, the mass of darkness evokes not only a lack of self-understanding, insight, and wisdom,

it may well refer to ignorance and blindness of social beliefs that kept women oppressed.

This includes claims that women can't attain awakening because of their meager to finger wisdom.

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