Dhamma Verses (Dhammapada, KN 2)

Introduction – 13
metrical translation. The model for this work was my previous
Buddhist Wisdom Verses, 1 which contained around fifty of the
verses from the Dhammapada.
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, 2 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, 3 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. 4
Other works which have been connected to the Dhammapada
include publishing online Margaret Cone’s Patna Dhammapada, with
1 http://bit.ly/ABT-BWV.
2 http://bit.ly/ABT-NewDhp.
3 http://bit.ly/ABT-ComDhp.
4 http://bit.ly/ABT-DhpParallels.