Dhammapada · Pāli: dhammapada; Skt: dharmapada

Bhikkhu Bodhi calls the Dhammapada “the best known and most widely esteemed text in the Pali Tipitaka, the sacred scriptures of Theravada Buddhism”. The title, he writes, “means portions, aspects, or sections of Dhamma”, and the work carries it “because, in its twenty-six chapters, it spans the multiple aspects of the Buddha’s teaching”. It sits in the Khuddaka Nikaya (“Minor Collection”) of the Sutta Pitaka, part of the Pali Canon, “but its popularity has raised it far above the single niche it occupies in the scriptures to the ranks of a world religious classic”. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s contents run from “I. Pairs (vv. 1-20)” to “XXVI. Brahmans (383-423)”.

The verses are short enough to learn by heart. The collection opens, in Acharya Buddharakkhita’s translation, “Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought”, and verse 5 gives one of its most quoted lines: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.” Theravada tradition holds that “each verse in the Dhammapada was originally spoken by the Buddha in response to a particular episode”, with those episodes preserved in Buddhaghosa’s fifth-century commentary.

The Pali text is Theravada’s, but it is not the only Dhammapada. Ṭhānissaro notes recensions from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka and Thailand, “a Gandhari Dharmapada found in central Asia”, a Buddhist Hybrid-Sanskrit one, and “Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese versions of a text called the Udanavarga” sharing many of the same verses.