Dhammapada, Dhamma Verses (KN 2)

Introduction – 7
Uṭṭhānen’ appamādena saṁyamena damena ca,
Through activity, heedfulness, through self-control and through restraint,
dīpaṁ kay i rātha medhāvī yaṁ ogho nābhikīrati.
the sage should make an island that no flood waters can overcome.
I identify 77 verses in this collection that use metaphors (18%): 25, 26, 35, 40, 46, 47, 48,
54-57, 60, 66, 69, 80, 85, 86, 103, 121, 122, 145, 147, 151, 153, 154, 160, 174, 175, 204, 205,
211, 218, 222, 235-238, 242-244, 254, 255, 262, 263, 275, 276, 282, 283, 288, 294, 295, 302,
321-323, 339-341, 344-346, 350, 351, 354, 356-359, 363, 369-371, 385, 387, 388, 414.
Related Verses from the Dhammapada
I have studied the collecting of the verses in A Comparative Edition of the
Dhammapada, 1 so there is no need to study it again here, but one thing I thought might be
useful in this version was to collect related verses together at the end of each chapter.
At the end of the Chapter about the Pairs, you will therefore find presented nine other
pairs of verses. For the most part though I have restricted myself to relying on word
collocation for the listings, so that other verses, for instance, which mention appamāda
are placed at the end of the second Chapter about Heedfulness, verses mentioning citta 2
are at the end of the third Chapter about the Mind, and similarly throughout.
I have not necessarily included all verses that have word collocation, if I judge they are
not relevant to the theme of the chapter, but only those which might have made it into the
chapter had the recitors who collected them chosen to include them.
Most chapters in fact have multiple verses collected after them in this way, but for
obvious reasons I have omitted the Miscellaneous Chapter from this. The Chapters about
Anger and about Elephants have no verses collected, as none occur outside those chapters.
Surprisingly, the Chapter about the Brahmins also has only one verse, as is the case also
for the Chapters about Flowers, Stains and about the One who stands by Dhamma.
Layout
Most of the verses are written in the Siloka metre, which has four lines of eight
syllables to the line. As the semantic unit is normally a pair of lines, they are laid out in
the text as two pairs of lines.
The translation wherever possible also follows this structure, and is given in four
octosyllabic lines. If you count the syllables in the Pāḷi and the English of the example (v.
29) below you can see this has been adhered to: 3
1
http://bit.ly/ABT-ComDhp.
2 But only when the word has the sense of mind.
3
I split the lines with markers here to clarify the syllabic lengths, in the text these markers are
omitted.