The Pali Therīgāthā are portrayed by their commentator Dhammapāla as the authentic songs of early Buddhist nuns, or of their entourage: he is at pains to explain away the evident narrative (or otherwise literary) form of at least a large proportion of the text. A new revised edition and first translation of Dhammapāla's commentary, published under Pali Text Society auspices, will facilitate study of the Therīgāthā text. Since, however, they studiously ignore the critical work of the Society's own past editors, in favour of the relentlessly 'normalized' Burmese edition, it is still those critical editions that best reveal the appealing poetry that lies hidden in Therīgāthā, albeit fragmented in the compilation and textually garbled as a result of the commentator's misguided search for historicity. Restoration based on textual criticism, rather than on the commentary, shows how these vernacular poems can be related to later Vedic, epic and Pali literature, and their importance for the subsequent development of classical prosody and the rhetorical figures.
