3 ideas
The former courtesan Ambapālī takes each part of her body in turn: hair once black now like bark fiber, eyes once brilliant now dim, breasts once full now hanging. Each stanza closes with the refrain that the truth-speaker's words are not otherwise. Her own decay becomes firsthand proof of impermanence, so the body she was prized for becomes the evidence that frees her from attachment to it.
Several nuns describe freedom in concrete household terms. Muttā is freed from three crooked things: mortar, pestle, and her crooked husband. Sumaṅgalamātā is freed from the kitchen, the cooking pot, and a husband who valued her less than his sunshades. For these women, spiritual release and escape from gendered drudgery arrive as a single experience, not as separate metaphysical and social events.
Paṭācārā washes her feet and watches the water run down the slope. She settles her mind on it, then goes to her cell, takes a lamp, and draws down the wick with a needle. As the flame goes out, her mind is liberated. An ordinary, repeated physical act becomes the precise image of nibbāna as the quenching of a fire, and insight arrives through close attention to small things rather than through dramatic revelation.