SHE, too, having made her resolve under former Buddhas, and heaping up good of age-enduring efficacy in this and that rebirth, was, when Vipassi was Buddha, reborn in a clansman's family. Come to years of discretion, because of the promise that was in her, she waxed anxious at the prospect of rebirth, and, going to the Bhikkhunīs, heard the Norm, believed, and entered the Order. Perfect in virtue, and learning the Three Pitakas, she became very learned in the Norm, and a teacher of it. The same destiny befell her under the five succeeding Buddhas–Sikhi, Vessabhu, Kakusandha, Koṇāgamana, and Kassapa. But because of her tendency to pride, she was unable to root out the defilements. 330 So it came to pass, through the karma of her pride, that, in this Buddha-era, she was reborn at Sāvatthī, in the household of Anāthapiṇḍika, the Treasurer, of a domestic slave. She became a Stream-entrant after hearing the discourse of the Lion's Roar. 331 Afterwards, when she had converted (lit. tamed) the baptist 332 brahmin, and so won her master's esteem that he made her a freed woman, she obtained his consent, as her guardian and head of her home, to enter the Order. And, practising insight, she in no long time won Arahantship, together with thorough grasp of the Norm in form and in meaning. Reflecting on her attainment, she uttered these verses in exultation:
For the brahmin, established in the Refuges and the Precepts, when later he had heard the Master preach the Norm, became a believer and entered the Order. Using every effort, he not long after became Thrice-Wise, 336 and, reflecting on his state, exulted in those verses. And the Sister, repeating them of herself, they all became her Psalm.
329 The Commentary gives her the latter name, of which the former is the diminutive. Possibly Puṇṇikā may have been used to distinguish her from the Therī Puṇṇā of Ps. iii. It is curious that in the Subha-Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya, where young brahmins come to the Jeta Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's gift, to interview the Buddha, a slave-girl Puṇṇikā is alluded to in the conversation. Subha says: 'They [certain brahmin teachers] are not able to read the thoughts of slave-girl Puṇṇikā. How should they be able to know the minds of all recluses?' If this is our Puṇṇikā, she would not yet be a Therī, or she would be referred to as such.
330 Kilesā. For the ten, see Buddh. Psy., pp. 327, ſſ.
331 Majjhima Nikāya, i., Sutta xi. or xii.
332 Udakasuddhika. Believer in purification through water (as a mystic rite), and not through sacrifice by fire.
333 The Ac(h)iravatī (now Rapti), a tributary (with the Gogra) of the Ganges, flowing past Sāvatthī.
334 Not specified in the text.
335 These four last lines are expansions of four brahminical technical terms, each connoting more than we could express with equal terseness:Tevijjo vedasampanno sotthiyo c'amhi nhātako.The brahmin student performed, like a new knight, a bath-rite before returning home from his teacher's house.
336 See Ps. xxii. 26 n.