The Therīgāthā, often translated as Verses of the Elder Nuns (Pāli: therī elder (feminine) + gāthā verses), is a Buddhist text, a collection of short poems of early enlightened women who were elder nuns (having experienced 10 Vassa or monsoon periods). The poems date from a three hundred year period, with some dated as early as the late 6th century BCE. According to Thanissaro Bhikkhu, the Therigatha is the "earliest extant text depicting women’s spiritual experiences." in Theravada Buddhism. In the Pāli Canon, the Therigatha is classified as part of the Khuddaka Nikaya, the collection of short books in the Sutta Pitaka. It consists of 73 poems organized into 16 chapters. It is the companion text to the Theragatha, verses attributed to senior monks. It is the earliest known collection of women's literature composed in India. Overview of the text The poems in Therigatha were composed orally in the Magadhi language and were passed on orally until about 80 B.C.E., when they were written down in Pali. It consists of 494 verses; while the summaries attribute these verses to 101 different nuns, only 73 identifiable speakers appear in the text. Like the Theragatha, it is organized into chapters that are loosely based on the number of verses in each poem. While each poem in the Theragatha has an identified speaker, several of the Therigatha texts are anonymous, or are connected with the story of a nun but not spoken to or by her—in one case, no nun seems to be present, but instead the verse is spoken by a woman trying to talk her husband out of becoming a monk. More so than the Theragatha, there seems to have been uncertainty between different recensions about which verses were attributable to which nuns—some verses appear in the Apadāna attributed to different speakers. Longer poems later in the collection appear in the Arya metre, abandoned relatively early in Pali literature, but include other features indicative of later composition, including explanations of karmic connections more typical of later texts like the Petavatthu and Apadāna. A section of the Paramathadippani, a commentary attributed to Dhammapala, provides details about the Therigatha. Composition and Inspiration The concept of ancient India aesthetics was based on the central premise of “savors”, eight classical emotional states known as bhāva expressed in artistic texts, each of the emotions with their own associated savors as follows: love with sensitive, humor with