The Dhammapada

What it is

A collection of 423 verses in twenty-six chapters, part of the Khuddaka Nikāya of the Pāli Canon, and by a wide margin the most widely read Buddhist scripture outside Asia.

The title is usually rendered as verses (pada) of the teaching (dhamma), or path of dhamma.

It is an anthology, not a treatise. The verses are short, aphoristic and largely independent of each other, gathered by theme rather than developing an argument. Many have parallels elsewhere in Buddhist and broader Indian literature, which is what you would expect of collected sayings in circulation.

Where it came from

Compiled from material transmitted orally, and part of the Pāli Canon written down in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE.

It existed in variant versions, which is worth knowing. A Gāndhārī Dhammapada in Kharoṣṭhī script, one of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, was found in the nineteenth century; a Sanskrit Udānavarga and a Patna Dharmapada also survive. The collections overlap substantially but differ in content and arrangement — evidence that this was a genre of anthology rather than a fixed book.

A Pāli commentary supplies a story for each verse, explaining the occasion on which the Buddha is said to have spoken it. The stories are later than the verses and are often the more entertaining part.

How it is read

It opens with its most quoted lines, and they set the terms:

Mind precedes all things; mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a corrupted mind, suffering follows — as the wheel follows the hoof of the ox that draws the cart.

And, a few verses later, the line most often reproduced without attribution:

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.

The chapters cover heedfulness, the mind, the fool, the wise, the arahant, evil, ageing, the self, happiness, anger, the path, craving, and the true brahmin — the last redefining brahmin-hood by conduct rather than birth, which is a deliberate and pointed move.

What we can and cannot say

We can say it is accessible in a way most of the canon is not. The verses are short, concrete, frequently beautiful, and require no doctrinal apparatus to make sense of.

We can say that accessibility is also how it gets misused, and the pattern is by now familiar from Rūmī and the Daodejing. The Dhammapada is widely published as generic wisdom literature — a book of calm sayings about mind and peace — with the framework that gives the verses their meaning left out.

The framework is not decorative. These verses are about the ending of craving in order to escape rebirth. When the text speaks of the arahant it means someone for whom the round of birth and death has stopped. When it praises detachment it is not recommending equanimity as a lifestyle. Read as aphorisms about being nicer and calmer, the book becomes something considerably smaller than it is.

We can say it is not representative of the canon's difficulty. Anyone whose impression of Buddhist literature comes from the Dhammapada will be unprepared for the Abhidhamma's analytical machinery or the length and repetition of the discourses, and may reasonably conclude that Buddhism is simpler than it is.

We can say the verses are genuinely old, and that whether any are the Buddha's own words is unanswerable for the reasons set out under the Buddha.

We cannot say why this text rather than another became the world's Buddhist book. Max Müller's English translation in 1870 has a good deal to do with it, and so does its length: a short book of memorable verses travels in a way that a canon of thousands of pages does not.

Further reading

• The translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi, by Gil Fronsdal, or by Valerie Roebuck — read one alongside another, since they diverge more than you would expect from short verses.
• The commentarial stories, in Burlingame's Buddhist Legends, for the tradition's own framing.