Prof. Lin Chong'an: The Essentials of the Dhammapada

The Essentials of the Dhammapada

Lin Chong'an

I. Preface

The Dhammapada is a collection of Buddhist verse that circulated throughout India during the Buddha's lifetime. Zhi Qian (c. 225 CE) observed: "Among those in India just beginning their training, anyone who does not study the Dhammapada is said to be skipping the proper sequence. It is the great ford for beginners, and the deep treasury for those who have gone further. It can open the eyes of the ignorant, resolve doubts, and lead people to stand on their own. The effort required to study it is slight, yet what it encompasses is vast." For those seeking a clear entry into the Dharma, the Dhammapada serves as an essential gateway. The Buddha's teachings were classified into twelve divisions: (1) discourses (sūtra), (2) mixed prose and verse (geya), (3) explanations (vyākaraṇa), (4) verses (gāthā), (5) inspired utterances (udāna), (6) cause-and-condition narratives (nidāna), (7) illustrations (avadāna), (8) accounts of past events (itivṛttaka), (9) birth stories (jātaka), (10) expanded teachings (vaipulya), (11) accounts of wonderful qualities (adbhutadharma), and (12) treatises (upadeśa). The Dhammapada belongs to the "udāna" category. Below, I will first trace how the Dhammapada took shape and how it was compiled after the Buddha's passing.

II. The Formation of the Dhammapada

After his enlightenment, the Buddha first taught the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (the Discourse Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma) to the five bhikkhus and, later, guided sixty worthy men and others to the path. These disciples, having attained arhatship, traveled throughout India to spread the Dharma. To make the teachings easier to transmit, they began compiling the Buddha's instructions and circulating them as texts. The earliest texts to be recited were verse-form udānas and gāthās. Another type consisted of prose-form sūtras, sometimes with geyas appended at the end. The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya's Bhaiṣajyavastu records that when the merchant Pūrṇa of Śūrpāraka set out to sea with a group of merchants, the merchants would regularly recite the Buddha's verses and sūtras:

Day and night, those merchants constantly recited the Udāna Verses, the Verses of the Elders, the Sīlanī Verses, the Verses of the Sage, the Collection of Meanings, and the Sūtras, chanting them in clear, melodious voices. Pūrṇa overheard them and asked: "You sing beautifully." The merchants replied: "Merchant chief, this is not singing." Pūrṇa asked: "What words are these?" The merchants answered: "They are the words of the Buddha." (T24, p. 11b)

The Udāna Verses recited by the merchants day and night are verse-form "inspired utterances" (udāna). The Verses of the Elders, the Sīlanī Verses, the Verses of the Sage, and the Collection of Meanings are verse-form "verses" (gāthā). The Saṃyuktāgama (Alternate Translation) also records:

At that time, the Venerable Anuruddha was traveling with the Buddha and arrived at the Āmrapālī Shrine in the Vajjian country. In the middle of the night, Anuruddha rose, sat upright, and recited the Dhammapada Verses, the Pārāyaṇa, and the Verses of the Great Sages, loudly chanting their meanings along with the Sūtras. (T2, p. 480c)

This shows that Anuruddha, one of the Buddha's ten chief disciples, began his day by reciting the Dhammapada Verses and similar texts. The Dhammapada Verses belong to the verse-form "inspired utterances" (udāna), while the Pārāyaṇa and the Verses of the Great Sages (= Verses of the Elders) are verse-form "verses" (gāthā). From this we can see that the Buddha's disciples—both householders like these merchants and monastics—used the recitation of udānas and similar texts as their daily practice, with the Dhammapada Verses as their primary text. "Udāna" (inspired utterance) refers to verses the Buddha spoke spontaneously in response to events in his daily life; the Dhammapada verses are such improvised utterances arising during his teaching, and thus fall under the "udāna" division. The Abhidharmamahāvibhāṣā Śāstra explains:

What is udāna? It refers to those sūtras in which the World-Honored One spoke spontaneously on account of joyful or sorrowful events. As an example of a joyful event: once, seeing a wild elephant king, the Buddha spontaneously recited, "The elephant king dwells in the open wilderness, his mind at ease and free of worry; the wise person dwells in a tranquil grove, content and still." As an example of a sorrowful event: once, seeing an old couple, he recited, "In youth, not cultivating the holy life, one loses the treasure of sage wealth; now like two old cranes, they share a single withered pond." (T27, p. 660a)

These udānas were transmitted very early on. The Saṃyuktāgama records the Buddha's speaking of the Udāna Verses:

At one time, the Buddha was staying at Jīvaka's mango grove in Vaiśālī. Having spoken all the Udāna Verses, the World-Honored One addressed the Venerable Ānanda: "The eye is impermanent, subject to suffering, and liable to change." (T2, p. 52b)

From the common core preserved in both the Southern and Northern transmissions of the Dhammapada today, we can infer that the Dhammapada Verses compiled during the Buddha's time contained twenty-six chapters, running from the "Pairs" to the "Brāhmaṇa," and were already being recited throughout India by his later years—comparable, perhaps, to how widely the Three Hundred Tang Poems were received in China.

Summary: The twenty-six-chapter Dhammapada Verses = Early Collection [A