Dhammapada Buddhist classics series

Abstract

The Buddha was born towards the end of the fifth century BCE, renounced the world at the age of twenty-nine, attained Enlightenment six years later, and spent the remaining forty-five years of his life communicating the Truth he had discovered to anyone who was willing to learn. He communicated that Truth orally, by means of the spoken word, though many people were also deeply moved by his mere presence. His words made a deep impression on his hearers, so that some of them remembered them all their lives and both before and after his death repeated them for the benefit of others. In this way there sprang up and developed an oral tradition, which not only preserved the Buddha’s teaching but organized, edited, and amplified it in various ways. The process of oral transmission lasted for several hundred years and probably it was not until the first century BCE that the Buddha’s discourses and sayings began to be committed to writing. By this time that tradition had become very rich, the more especially as it now included exegetical and commentarial material by several successive generations of the Buddha’s followers. By this time, too, those followers had become divided into a number of different schools, each of which transmitted, in its own language, its own particular version of orally transmitted material. When the oral tradition of the Buddha’s teaching came finally to be written down, therefore, it was written down in at least four different languages or dialects, one of them being the language now known as Pali. This Pali version of the oral tradition, which was committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE by members of the Theravada School, is the only version of that material to have survived complete in the original language, and as such it is of enormous historical and spiritual importance. It is divided into three pitakas or ‘baskets’, a basket of monastic rules, a basket of discourses, and a basket of further teaching, the last being actually the work of latter-day followers. The basket of discourses or Sutta Pitaka is divided into five collections, the fifth of which is the Khuddaka-Nikaya or ‘Little Collection’. The ‘Little Collection’ consists of fifteen separate works, some very long and some quite short. The Dhammapada is one of these. Though none of the other literary versions of the oral tradition has survived complete in the original language, a handful of separate works, or portions of works, fortunately are still available to us. Thus in addition to the Pali Dhammapada we have a Prakrit Dhamapada and a Sanskrit Dharmapada (also known as the Udanavarga). The Chinese Buddhist Canon also contains four texts of this name, all translated from different Sanskrit originals. Such comparative studies as have so far been made reveal no basic discrepancies among the various recensions of the work, whether Pali, Prakrit, or Sanskrit. As I have written elsewhere, ‘All consist of the same type of material organized in the same way, that is to say, of verses embodying ethical and spiritual precepts grouped more or less according to subject under various sectional headings. Though the total number of verses is not the same, and though the selection of verses, as well as the number and nature of the sections into which they are classified, differ considerably from one text to another, all the Dhammapadas have certain blocks of verses in common. Some of these blocks are found elsewhere in the Sutra Pitaka; others appear to be peculiar to the Dhammapada literature. It would seem, therefore, that taking these blocks, which together constituted the basic text,… each of the early schools composed a Dhammapada of its own.’ That the Pali Dhammapada is at present the best known of this class of Buddhist canonical texts is largely the result of historical accident. Since its appearance in a Latin version in 1855 it has been repeatedly translated into the principal European and Asian languages, ‘the depth and universality of its doctrine, the purity and earnestness of its moral teaching, and the sublimity of its spiritual ideal, combined with the refined simplicity and pellucid poetical beauty of its language, winning for it an honoured place in world literature.’ Small wonder, then, that the Dhammapada should now be one of the best known and best loved of all Buddhist scriptures, or that for many Western Buddhists, irrespective of school, it should be a perpetual source of inspiration. For me it has been a source of inspiration, encouragement, and guidance for well over fifty years. Indeed, I sometimes think that the Dhammapada contains, at least in principle, as much of the Buddha’s teaching as most of us really need to know in order to progress towards Enlightenment. As the Buddha himself tells us in verse 100, ‘Better than a thousand meaningless words collected together (in the Vedic oral tradition) is a single meaningful word on hearing which one becomes tranquil.’ There are many such meaningful words in the Dhammapada – words that are of infinitely greater value than the tens of thousands of meaningless words we hear every day of our lives.....