Patna Dhammapada, Patna Dhamma Verses

Preface - 6
Prof. K. R. Norman has contributed a number of articles in which he wrote about the
Patna text; 14 and his translation of the Pāḷi Dhammapada 15 included much discussion of
the Patna text.
In 1997 Peter Skilling wrote a paper On the School-affiliation of the “Patna
Dhammapada”. 16
The Text and Translation
In 2007 I received permission from Dr. Cone and the Pali Text Society to reproduce her
edition of the text online. 17 When I prepared the digital edition I made two studies of the
text, as well as analysing and writing a running commentary on the prosody of the text.
That transcription now forms the basis for the text presented here.
Dr. Cone had prepared a translation of the text for her thesis, a copy of which is with me,
but she has never published it, and doesn’t intend to. 18 My translation of Patna, which is
the first published translation of the text that I know of, was based primarily on my own
translation of the Pāḷi text, with the required changes owing to the difference in readings
between the texts, together with other translations I made afresh from Pāḷi canonical texts
and from the Udānavarga. I then read through Cone’s thesis, including her translation,
which led me to making some corrections to my own translation.
Presentation
As the language and forms of the text have been described and discussed in detail by some
of the greatest philologists of our time, it seemed redundant to repeat, or try to add to,
their descriptions and arguments here.
Rather I have taken a different approach here, presenting the text and translation,
together with just one close parallel for comparison, normally from a Pāḷi text, 19 to
indicate the sorts of variations that occur, without overburdening the student with
scholarly discussion. In both the parallel text and its translation I have italicised the
words that differ, adding notes only when I wished to say more about the difference.
For this edition of the text I made numerous changes to the way Cone printed it,
following the methods normally adopted when printing Pāḷi texts. Hence here you find:
Repunctuation throughout to follow sense,
Capitalisation of the start of sentences and proper names,
The elision sign (avagraha) removed or added as needed,
14
Most notably Notes on the Patna Dhammapada, reproduced as no 78 in his Collected Papers, vol.
IV, pp 1-17, published prior to Cone’s edition.
15
The Word of the Doctrine, PTS, 1997.
16
JPTS vol. XXIII, pp 83-122.
17
See http://bit.ly/PDhpText.
18
Private communication to me around 2007.
19
I have quoted the Udānavarga text as established by F. Bernhard, Göttingen, 1965, which is
reproduced with permission.