Download or read book Verses of the Senior Monks: A Translation of Theragāthā written by Bhikkhu Sujato and published by SuttaCentral. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SuttaCentral has published an entirely new translation of the four Pali nikāyas by Bhikkhu Sujato, which is the first complete and consistent English translation of these core texts. This is an ebook version of Bhikkhu Sujato's translation of the Theragāthā, which can also be read at SuttaCentral website. The “Verses of the Senior Monks” is a collection of about 1288 verses attributed to 264 of the senior monks alive in the Buddha’s time, or in a few cases, a little later. It is a pair with the Therīgāthā, the “Verses of the Senior Nuns”. These verses celebrate the joy of freedom and the life of meditation in the forest. Together these collections constitute one of the oldest and largest collections of contemplative literature, preserving the unique voices of hundreds of early practitioners. Based on style and content, these collections belong to the early discourses. They are referred to on occasion in the northern canons, but no parallel collections have survived.