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Introduction

Texts of the early Buddhist tradition are preserved in Pàëi, Gàndhàrã, and various other forms of Sanskritised Prakrit; ⁰¹ besides being found in Chinese and Tibetan translation. Of the MIA versions the only one that has come down to us in anything like a complete recension is preserved in the Pàëi Tipiñaka, ⁰² and it is certainly the Pàëi texts, mainly in modern translations, that constitute the best known version of the early teachings, which is not surprising as they belong to a living Buddhist tradition.

Of the Pàëi texts the Dhammapada is perhaps the best-loved collection of the Buddha's teachings. There have been many editions, ⁰³ and almost innumerable translations of this ever-popular text in nearly all modern languages. ⁰⁴ And in countries that have a Theravàda tradition there is a copy of the book in most Buddhist homes, and many people know at least some of the verses by heart.

Apart from the Pàëi Dhammapada, however, there are comparable collections of the Dharmapadàni verses available in complete, or very nearly complete, editions in three other MIA recensions, and these parallels can often throw light on the early teachings, and act as a complement, and sometimes also as a corrective, to the Pàëi verses. There are also parallels to individual verses found in other texts belonging to the early Buddhist traditions of other schools. ⁰⁵

Of the collections, the closest to the Pàëi is what is now known as the Patna Dharmapada. ⁰⁶ All the editions are based on a manuscript found in a Tibetan Monastery by Ràhula SaükÔtyàyana some time in the 1930s. ⁰⁷ The photographs of this manuscript are now held in the K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute in Patna, which is how the conventional name for the text has arisen.

The language of the verses that have been collected in the Patna Dharmapada is very close to the Pàëi version of the text. The morphology is slightly more Sanskritised, but anyone who can read Pàëi, and has even a passing acquaintance with Sanskrit, should be able to read the text.

The same cannot be said of the Gàndhàrã Dharmapada, the scribe of which did not regularly distinguish between short and long vowels; for the most part he didn't mark the difference between assimilated conjuncts and the simplex, or preserve niggahãta (anusvara) either; also the phonetic values of the text are considerably different to the other recensions. It is a desideratum that some attempt be made to restore the phonetic values of the text, so as to clarify the true nature of the language underlying the written remains.

The basis for this text is a set of manuscript remains that were found in the Gandhàra region in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China in the late 19th century. There were initially a number of partial publications of this text which it appears had been broken into three pieces and sold off to various European explorers. One part found its way to France, another to Russia, and a third part, it appears, has been irretrievably lost. ⁰⁸ According to Prof. Brough's estimate there must have been approximately 540 verses in the text in total, but the verses in Brough's edition only amount to 342, and many of those are very fragmentary.

The third major parallel to the text is not called a Dhammapada, but is known as the Udànavarga. However, it is clearly a recension of the same Dharmapadàni material, even if the collection has been greatly expanded. The Sanskrit remains of the text are fragmentary, but owing to the fact that there are many fragments to compare, it has been possible to restore the verses to a much greater degree than with the Gàndhàrã. ⁰⁹

The text is evidently much more Sanskritised than the other versions we have discussed so far, but the degree of Sanskritisation is not standardised throughout and the text contains something of a mixture in terms of its language. The metre of the text is also a mixture of early and late forms, as I have shown in a separate study. ¹⁰

Of the incomplete parallels, two chapters from yet another Dharmapada have been preserved in the Mahàvastu, one of the earliest of the Sanskritised Prakrit texts; one of the chapters is named as the Sahasravarga, and appears to be the whole of the chapter; the other is a selection that comes from an unnamed Bhikùuvarga. Parallels also exist in the Divyàvadàna edited by E.B. Cowell & R.A. Neil (Cambridge 1886); the Gilgit Manuscripts edited by Prof. Nalinaksha Dutt (Calcutta, 1950); and the Avadàna-èataka, edited by J.S. Speyer (St. Petersburg, 1902, 1906).

In preparing this Comparative Edition of the Dhammapada I have used the Pàëi Dhammapada as the basis, and collected the rest of the material around it. This should not, however, be taken as implying that the Pàëi is the standard from which the other versions have more or less departed; nor should it be thought to imply that the Pàëi edition is the original, or even the earliest version. ¹¹

* * *

In re-presenting this material my primary aim has been to present matter that actually throws substantial light on the verses in question. Because of this I have not presented every fragment that could possibly have been parallel to each of the verses, considering that it actually adds little to our understanding of the verses, but have normally only admitted material when it is at least parallel to a quarter verse. ¹²

Similarly, I have not reproduced every parallel to every verse, which would entail an enormous amount of redundancy, but have reproduced the parallels at the place where they are closest to the Pàëi verse, so that if there is a parallel that is equal to all four lines of one of the Pàëi verses, and later is found equal to three lines of another verse, it is only reproduced on the first occasion. ¹³

Presenting the material in this way should throw much light on the Pàëi verses, and the relationship they have to the other versions. However, it does not reveal the whole picture, as the other texts sometimes have many verses that could be regarded as parallel to one of the Pàëi verses, owing to repetition of a verse with the replacement of keywords. This applies especially to the Udànavarga.

To help rectify this situation, in the Appendix some important verses that have found their way into the parallel versions, but are missing in the Pàëi recension, have been gathered together, and are presented from four different angles. The first follows the parallels to the Pàëi with their variants, then the Patna, Gàndhàrã, and Udànavarga texts with their parallels in turn. This shows both the texts and parallels to the verses in all the editions, and also reveals how the verses have been organised in the various versions. ¹⁴

Texts employed in this Edition

The Dhammapada, A New Edition edited by ânandajoti Bhikkhu (Ancient Buddhist Texts website, 2002).

The text of the Dhammapada in this new edition has been established through a comparison of the Sinhalese, Burmese, Thai, and European editions.

Changes in presentation made in this edition:

• Chapter and verse numbers have been added to the parallels, alongside the sequential numbers.
• I have somewhat simplified the punctuation to bring it into line with the parallel versions.

Patna Dharmapada edited by Margaret Cone (JPTS Vol XIII, Oxford 1989) (reproduced by permission of PTS).

I am grateful to Prof. K.R. Norman, who sent a few small corrections to be made to the printed text. These include the accidental omission of a half-verse (145cd), and a repetition of a quarter-verse (149b).

Changes in presentation made in this edition:

• Chapter and verse numbers have been added to the parallels, alongside the sequential numbers.
• The use of the avagraha (elipsis sign) in the original has been replaced with " ' ".
• The vowel ri sign in Sanskrit is written with a ring underneath, not with a dot e.g. dÔùñà (not dçùñà).
• Line breaks in the original manuscript, which were noted in the text by the first akùara being written in bold type, have been omitted.
• Uncertain readings are marked with red coloured italic text.
• Dr. Cone occasionally discussed uncertain readings in the notes, these discussions have had to be omitted, and the akùaras in question are marked with red coloured italic text.
• Missing words and akùaras that were marked by empty square brackets " [     ] " are here marked by elipsis " . . . "
• A few characters that Dr. Cone (in private correspondence) said she thought had no semantic meaning, have also been omitted.

The Gàndhàrã Dharmapada edited by John Brough (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2001) (reproduced by permission of Motilal Banarsidass).

I am very grateful to the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project at the University of Washington, and particularly to Dr. Andrew Glass who prepared the database, for making the text available to me. This re-presentation of the text was made with the help of Dr. Mark Allon.

Changes in presentation made in this edition:

In the original text of the Gàndhàrã Dharmapada as printed by Brough certain conventions were employed which have had to be dropped here. These include:

• dividing compounds with a hyphen.
• using a double wavy line to show vowel elipsis.
• Brough indicated initial vowel mid-word with alif " ' ". Here vowels that occur after another vowel mid-word should be understood to have been written as an initial vowel in the original text. Note that where this change has resulted in a & i or a & u coming together, the second vowel is marked with diaresis (aï & aü) to distinguish it from Sanskrit ai & au.

Also note that:

• Chapter and verse numbers have been added to the parallels, alongside the sequential numbers.
• In his edition Brough provided titles for the last 13 vaggas of the text; he put them in square brackets and wrote them in Sanskrit. Here the brackets have been retained, but the Sanskrit has been replaced by Prakrit, which is more in keeping with the nature of the work.
• Uncertain readings which were marked with italic text are here marked with red coloured italic text.
• Brough sometimes entered conjectural readings into the text, and placed them in square brackets. The square brackets have been removed here, and they have been marked with green coloured italic text.
• Brough occasionally made suggestions in his footnotes for correcting mistakes in the readings in his footnotes; here I have inserted them into the text: they are also marked with green coloured italic text. The footnotes themselves, which were in any case very few in number, have had to be dropped.

Udànavarga edited by Franz Bernhard (Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1965) (reproduced by permission of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, and Mrs. Sobotzik the editor's sister and literary heir).

Changes in presentation:

• The numbering of the chapter titles has been changed from Roman to Arabic numerals (e.g. 33: Bràhmaõavarga, not XXXIII: Bràhmaõavarga), which is the way they appear at the end of the chapters in the original edition anyway.
• The sequential numbers have been omitted.
• The vowel ri sign in Sanskrit is written with a ring underneath, not with a dot, e.g. dÔùñvà (not dçùñvà or dçiùñvà).
• Uncertain readings are marked with red coloured italic text.
• Verses which had 2 irreconcilable versions have been given separate numbering (as [a], [b]), rather than printed side by side.

Divyàvadàna edited by E.B. Cowell & R.A. Neil (Cambridge 1886). The transliteration of this text has been modified to accord with the other texts presented here.

Excerpts from the following have been transliterated by the present writer: 

Method of Presentation

When lines in a verse of one of the parallels are not found in the Pàëi Dhammapada, I have included those lines, so as to represent better the form of the original, but have placed them in square brackets [ ], and they are written in grey coloured text.

It should also be pointed out here that a verse that is only partially paralleled in the Dhammapada may find a complete parallel elsewhere in the Pàëi Tipiñaka, though it appears that normally when a verse as a whole is absent from the parallels it is also absent from the rest of the Canon.

I have occasionally included more than one parallel where it seemed to me that the inclusion was justified by the light it throws on the Pàëi verse. But normally I have only chosen the closest parallel to the Pàëi verse that I could find - this applies particularly to the Udànavarga, where there are often a number of parallels to choose from.

The layout adopted in regard to the parallels has been maintained throughout this presentation:

This layout has normally been preserved even when it leads to a lot of white space, as it makes referencing a lot easier if one is looking for a parallel from a particular text; also it seems useful to be able to see where no parallel exists in any of these texts.

There are a few parallels from other sources, the Mahàvastu, Divyàvadàna, Avadànaèataka, & Målasarvàstivàdivinaya; these have normally been omitted from the table if no parallel has been found, but when they are included the layout is expanded thus:

However, occasionally when there are parallels from one of these sources but not from the Gàndhàrã and Udànavarga, then the layout looks like this:

I have given the reference numbers by chapter and verse number to the 3 main parallels, even though Brough's edition of Gàndhàrã and Cone's edition of Patna give only sequential numbers, ¹⁵ as this allows us to see at a glance whether verses in the parallels are, for instance, at the beginning of a chapter.