Dhammapada or Verses On the Dhamma

The Dhammapada, an immensely popular work, held in great veneration by followers of the Dharma of the Awakened One, has been for them a doctrinal compendium, a life guide, a book of wisdom, and a spiritual treasure trove for over two thousand years. But not only for them, for it also contains timeless and trans-confessional wisdom, the kind we encounter through contact with the great ancient cultures of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, China, Judaism, Greece, and Rome. The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 verses in the form of aphorisms, maxims, or sapiential gnomes. It was written in Pali, a Middle Indian language closely related to Sanskrit, in which the so-called Pali Canon, the most complete and arguably oldest doctrinal corpus of Theravada Buddhism (often called the Southern or Pali Canon), was compiled in Ceylon in the first century BCE, under King Wattagamani. The Pali Canon, the Buddhist sacred book, consists of three so-called baskets (Pali: pi?aka) Vinaya, Sutta, and Abhidhamma; the Dhammapada is found, as a separate collection, in the Khuddakanikaya subset of the middle collection (Sutta).