The Theragaathaa, the Verses of the Elders, is a work found in the Khuddaka Nikaaya of the Sutta Pitaka of the Paali Canon. As its name indicates, this is a collection of verses ascribed to various elder monks, mostly celebrating their attainment of arahantship. As with a number of other works in the Paali Canon, such as the Anguttara Nikaaya and the Itivuttaka, the Theragaathaa is divided into sections (nipaata) with progressively increasing numbers of verses. It begins with a section of single verses, then continues with pairs, triplets, and so forth. In the later sections this system breaks down and the number of verses which the poems actually contain only approximate to the number of the section.

The present work is a translation accompanying the original Paali text of the final and longest section of the Theragaathaa, the Mahaanipaata or "Great Section." This is a self-contained anthology of fourteen poems with seventy-one verses, composed by a single elder, the Venerable Vangiisa. Although not indicated in the text, the various occasions for the composition and recitation of these poems is to be found in the commentary. These in turn are a summary of the information supplied by the Vangiisa-saṃyutta of the Saṃyutta Nikaaya, where we find a parallel version of these poems embedded in a series of short suttas giving the circumstances of their composition. Interestingly, the two versions of the poems are not identical, though the differences are mostly slight. They consist mainly of dialectical variants from a time when Paali was an oral literature being collected from the several dialects of Maagadhii, the actual spoken language of that region of Northern India in which the Buddha and his early followers lived and preached the Dhamma.

(from Introduction, obtained from Access to Insight)