The Dhammapada Gautama Buddha / Translated by John Richards pdf version by Desolution
[email protected] Translator's Preface The Dhammapada is an anthology of verses, belonging to the part of the Theravada Pali Canon of scriptures known as the Khuddaka Nikaya, and consists of 423 verses. Something like a quarter of the verses are to be found in other parts of the Pali Tipitaka, particularly in the other verse parts of the Khuddaka Nikaya such as the Sutta Nipata and the Thera- and Theri-gatha. The Dhammapada is probably the most popular book of the Pali Canon, with the possible exception of the Satipatthana Sutta, or the Sutta on the Turning of the Wheel of the Law (Dhamma-cakka-ppavattana Sutta). It is certainly the most frequently translated portion. There are a number of Mahayana works to which it appears to be closely related. There are in the Chinese scriptures 4 works resembling the Dhammapada. The nearest is the Fa Chu Ching, which was translated in AD 223. (translated by Beal), the first part of which seems to be a direct translation of the Pali Dhammapada. (It is intriguing to wonder how a Pali work found its way to China in those early years. The Introduction merely says it was brought from India and was translated as a joint venture by a Chinese and an Indian.) One small piece of evidence that the Chinese is a translation from the Pali is found in the verse corrsponding to the Pali verse 146. The Chinese here reads "remembering the everlasting burnings", having mistaken the word "sati", (which in the Pali is the locative case of the present participle of a verb for "being") for the noun "sati", memory, or recollection. The later part of the Chinese appears to be an anthology in its own right. There is also a Dhammapada in the Gandhari