The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns.

The nuns' stories - of beleaguered wives, pawned off princesses, and discarded courtesans - offer glimpses of tales that transcend time periods. Many of the stories relate pain, poverty, and prostitution, with the narrator discovering the wisdom of Buddha as a salve to earthly woes. Weingast also includes an appeal for readers to eschew materialism in favor of matters of the heart in order to "shake up the world" and "set yourself free.". [Extracted from the article]