The Dhammapada

The Dhammapada (“Verses on Dhamma” or “Path of Dhamma”) is a collection of 423 verses attributed to the Gautama Buddha, arranged in twenty-six chapters, in the Khuddaka Nikāya (“Minor Collection”) of the Pāli Canon of Theravāda and the Abhidharma Buddhism. Compiled probably in the third century BCE from verses found throughout the early scriptures, it is the most widely read and most frequently translated Buddhist text — a concentrated anthology of the Buddha’s ethical teaching, memorised by monks and laypeople across South and Southeast Asia and beloved in the West since the nineteenth century. Its verses are short, rhythmic and memorable, contrasting the fool and the wise, the heedless and the vigilant, the path of craving and the path of freedom.

Themes

The mind

The Dhammapada opens with its most famous pair of verses, the “twin verses”:

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 foot of the ox. Mind precedes all things; mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows, like a shadow that never leaves. (1–2)

The third chapter, on the mind, continues: “As a fletcher straightens an arrow, the wise man straightens his trembling, unsteady mind, hard to guard, hard to restrain” (33); “Whatever an enemy may do to an enemy, or a hater to a hater, a wrongly directed mind can do one greater harm. Not mother, father or any relative can do one greater good than a well-directed mind” (42–43).

Hatred and non-hatred

“He abused me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me” — in those who harbour such thoughts, hatred does not cease… Hatred never ceases by hatred in this world; by non-hatred alone does it cease. This is an eternal law. (3–5)

The chapter on anger adds: “Conquer anger by non-anger; conquer evil by good; conquer the miser by giving; conquer the liar by truth” (223).

Self-conquest and self-reliance

Though one should conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, he who conquers himself is the greatest victor. (103) You yourselves must make the effort; the Tathāgatas only point the way. (276) One is one’s own refuge; who else could be the refuge? (160)

Non-violence

All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill. All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. (129–130)

Impermanence and craving

All conditioned things are impermanent — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purity. (277) There is no fire like passion, no grip like hatred, no net like delusion, no river like craving. (251) As a tree, though cut down, grows again if its root is undamaged, so suffering springs up again and again if the latent craving is not rooted out. (338)

The true Brahmin

The last chapter redefines the “Brahmin” — the highest caste — as anyone, of any birth, who has attained purity: “Not by matted hair, not by lineage, not by birth is one a Brahmin. He in whom there is truth and dhamma — he is pure, he is a Brahmin” (393). This was a direct challenge to the caste claims of the Brahmin priesthood.

Significance

The Dhammapada’s verses are recited in Theravāda temples and homes; its commentary, which tells a story for each verse, is a treasury of Buddhist folklore. In the West, Max Müller’s translation (1870, 1881) made it one of the first Buddhist texts known to the general reader. Its central teaching — that the mind shapes experience, and that hatred is overcome only by its opposite — has been quoted by figures from Tolstoy to the Dalai Lama to Martin Luther King Jr.

In conversation

“Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone” (5). And: “Though one conquer a thousand men in battle, he who conquers himself is the greatest victor” (103).