John Ross Carter - The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha

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THE DHAMMAPADA

THE Dhammapada, sayings of dhammathat is, religiously inspiring statementsis the Pli version of one of the most popular texts of the Buddhist canon. Like all religious texts in Pli, it belongs to the Theravda school of the Buddhist tradition whose participants are at present found primarily in Kampuchea, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Compiled in verse, it is a religious work meant to inculcate a certain set of religious and ethical values, as well as a certain manner of perception of life and its problems and their solutions. That it has performed this task with remarkable success is hardly debatable. Perhaps the best testimony for that is its enduring popularity among Buddhists of all denominations, throughout the centuries of their existence.

JOHN ROSS CARTER is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion and the Robert Hung-Ngai Ho Professor of Asian Studies at Colgate University. He has written, edited, and contributed to several other books on the religious traditions of Asia.

MAHINDA PALIHAWADANA is Professor of Sanskrit Emeritus at Sri Jayawardhanapura University in Sri Lanka. He has written several articles on Theravda Buddhist thought.

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Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JOHN ROSS CARTER
and
MAHINDA PALIHAWADANA

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

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Translation Oxford University Press 1987
Editorial matter John Ross Carter and Mahinda Palihawadana 2000

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2000

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tipitaka. Suttapitaka. Khuddakanikaya. Dhammapada English.
The Dhammapada/translated with an introduction and notes by
John Ross Carter and Mahinda Palihawadana.
(Oxford worlds classics)
I. Carter, John Ross. II. Palihawadana, Mahinda. III. Title. IV. Series.
BQ1372.E54 C36 2000 294.382322dc21 00037519

ISBN 0192836137

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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To
Kusuma and Sandra
and for
Priyamvada, Ravindra, Nirmala, Ruchira,
Christopher John, Mary Elizabeth

Twenty-two years ago our project of translating the Dhammapada was launched when we began work together in Sri Lanka. Over the years our long-distance correspondence has witnessed enormous change: from a time when it took more than one month to receive a response by one of us to the others work on one segment of the project, to todays email, when a reply is often received in the same day. Our larger work, The Dhammapada, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1987, with a paperback edition, containing a new introduction, appearing in 1998. It was a massive undertaking. In that work, we decided to provide first a new English translation of the Pli verses followed by a presentation of the Pli text together with the English translation both of the verses and of the commentarial glosses on words appearing in those verses. We followed the order of presentation of the verses developed by the fifth-century Pli commentary on the Dhammapada (the Dhammapadahakath). We decided not to stop there. We continued searching later Sinhala commentarial sources running from the tenth to the twentieth century to provide, in extensive notes, our own critical textual comments as well as translations of elaborations on doctrinal matters. And throughout that work we integrated scholarly discussions available at the time of issues dealing with the early and received text.

That earlier and larger work, from which the English translation of the verses appears here with but very few changes, remains available for anyone wishing to pursue in greater depth issues that might arise from reading the verses appearing in this volume in the Oxford Worlds Classics series. We have designed this present translation of the most popular canonical text among Buddhists, and one of the great religious texts of the world, for the general reader, and notes have been included to provide some elaboration of terms and concepts that might not be entirely clear at first reading.

J.R.C.
M.P.

Hamilton, NY
Maharagama

THE Dhammapada is among the most popular canonical texts in the Buddhist world. It is quoted by politicians, and students learn it by heart in the original Pli in Buddhist schools in countries such as Sri Lanka. New translations of it appear in print every few years. In fact it has had a remarkable history of being translated into other languages, beginning with the oldest Chinese version called the