Dhammapada, Dhamma Verses (KN 2)

Introduction – 11
The texts I am publishing here are the culmination of nearly 15 years of work on the Pāḷi
Dhammapada, and were preceded by a number of other texts, which I will list below.
They give information supplementary to the texts presented here, which I have not
repeated in this edition.
The first I worked on was the Romanised transliteration of the Sinhala-letter Buddha
Jayantī Tripiṭaka Granthamālā text which I prepared around 2002-3. That work set in
motion a study of the text that led first to a New Edition of the Dhammapada in 2004, 1
which compared the variants in the major printed editions of the Pāḷi text, and also took
into consideration the metre. For variant readings and metrical analysis, that is the
edition to refer to.
That work then formed the basis for A Comparative Edition of the Dhammapada, 2 which
brought together all the known parallels in Middle Indo-Aryan languages, together with
studies and extensive indexes. There you will find the same verse, or parts of a verse,
given in the ancient languages which were cognate to the Pāḷi, but it is for the advanced
student only.
This year when I began work on the current project, I extracted the information from the
latter work, and added more to it, listing all the parallels in the Pāḷi Canonical and para-
Canonical literature, as well as in other Middle Indo-Aryan languages. 3
Other works which have been connected to the Dhammapada include publishing online
Margaret Cone’s Patna Dhammapada, with studies, metrical analysis and indexes; 4 and
Franz Bernhard’s Udānavarga, 5 in which I made similar additions. I still have it in mind
to bring out translations of those texts when I can find time.
Acknowledgements
I am once again grateful to Ayyā Sudhammā, who went through the text very diligently,
and with humour and patience pointed out its manifold shortcomings. I have now
managed to remove some of those, but any that remain are of course entirely my own
fault.
I hope this work will help to continue the great tradition of providing moral guidance to
the present generation in a form that they can find clear and appealing. Any merit
accruing form this work I would like to dedicate to my parents: may they be well and
happy and peaceful in their new lives
1
http://bit.ly/ABT-NewDhp.
2
http://bit.ly/ABT-ComDhp.
3
http://bit.ly/ABT-DhpParallels.
4
http://bit.ly/ABT-PatnaDhp.
5
http://bit.ly/ABT-Udanavarga.