The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

The works in this set of translations – the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada – are among the earliest and most universal of messages like these, sent to inform us that there is more to life than the everyday experience of our senses.

If the Upanishads are like slides, the Dhammapada seems more like a field guide. This is lore picked up by someone who knows every step of the way through these strange lands. He can’t take us there, he explains, but he can show us the way: tell us what to look for, warn about missteps, advise us about detours, tell us what to avoid. Most important, he urges us that it is our destiny as human beings to make this journey ourselves. Everything else is secondary.

And the third of these classics, the Bhagavad Gita, gives us a map and guidebook. It gives a systematic overview of the territory, shows various approaches to the summit with their benefits and pitfalls, offers recommendations, tells us what to pack and what to leave behind.

The body of Buddhist scripture is much more voluminous than the Bible, but I would not hesitate to make a similar claim: if everything else were lost, we would need nothing more than the Dhammapada to follow the way of the Buddha.

Dhammapada means something like “the path of dharma” – of truth, of righteousness, of the central law that all of life is one. The Buddha did not leave a static structure of belief that we can affirm and be done with. His teaching is an ongoing path, a “way of perfection” which anyone can follow to the highest good. The Dhammapada is a map for this journey.

We can start wherever we are, but as on any road, the scenery – our values, our aspirations, our understanding of life around us – changes as we make progress. These verses can be read and appreciated simply as wise philosophy; as such, they are part of the great literature of the world. But for those who would follow it to the end, the Dhammapada is a sure guide to nothing less than the highest goal life can offer: Self-realization.

The Aryans brought with them a social order presided over by priests or brahmins, the trustees of ancient hymns, rituals, and deities related to those of other lands, especially Persia, where Aryan tribes had spread. India seems to have dealt with this new religion as it has dealt with cultural imports ever since: it absorbed the new into the old. As a result, in even the earliest of the Indian scriptures – the Rig Veda, whose oldest hymns go back at least to 1500 B.C. – we find Aryan nature-gods integrated with the loftiest conceptions of mysticism. There is no inconsistency in this integration, only a very early recognition that life’s supreme reality is described in many ways. “Truth is one,” says a hymn of the Rig Veda; “the wise call it by different names.”

Sometimes graduates of these forest academies would go on to become teachers themselves. But it was at least as likely that they would return to society, disciplined in body and mind, to make a contribution to some secular field. Some, according to legend, became counselors of kings; one, Janaka, actually was a king. These men and women turned inward for the same reason that scientists and adventurers turn outward: not to run from life, but to master it.

The modern mind balks at calling meditation scientific, but in these sages’ passion for truth, in their search for reality as something which is the same under all conditions and from all points of view, in their insistence on direct observation and systematic empirical method, we find the essence of the scientific spirit. It is not improper to call brahmavidya a series of experiments – on the mind, by the mind – with predictable, replicable results. Yet, of course, the sages of the Upanishads took a different track from conventional science. They looked not at the world outside, but at human knowledge of the world outside.

Their principle was neti, neti atma: “this is not the self; that is not the self.” They peeled away personality like an onion, layer by layer, and found nothing permanent in the mass of perceptions, thoughts, emotions, drives, and memories that we call “I.” Yet when everything individual was stripped away, an intense awareness remained: consciousness itself. The sages called this ultimate ground of personality atman, the Self.

In medieval Europe, it was the realization that there cannot be one set of natural laws governing earth and another set governing the heavens which led to the birth of classical physics. In a similar insight, Vedic India conceived of the natural world – not only physical phenomena but human action and thought – as uniformly governed by universal law. This law is called dharma in Sanskrit, and the Buddha would make it the focus of his way of life.

In its broadest application, dharma expresses the central law of life, that all things and events are part of an indivisible whole.

In the sphere of human activity, dharma is behavior that is in harmony with this unity. Sometimes it is justice, righteousness, or fairness; sometimes simply duty, the obligations of religion or society. It also means being true to what is essential in the human being: nobility, honor, forgiveness, truthfulness, loyalty, compassion. An ancient saying declares that ahimsa paramo dharma: the essence of dharma, the highest law of life, is to do no harm to any living creature.

Like the Buddha, the sages of the Upanishads did not find the world capricious. Nothing in it happens by chance – not because events are predestined, but because...

All these consequences – for others, for the world, and for ourselves – are our personal responsibility. Sooner or later, because of the unity of life, they will come back to us. Someone who is always angry, to take a simple example, is bound to provoke anger from others. More subtly, a man whose factory pollutes the environment will eventually have to breathe air and drink water which he has helped to poison. These are illustrations of what Hinduism and Buddhism call the law of karma. Karma means something done, whether as cause or effect.

Actions in harmony with dharma bring good karma and add to health and happiness. Selfish actions, at odds with the rest of life, bring unfavorable karma and pain.

In this view, no divine agency is needed to punish or reward us; we punish and reward ourselves. This was not regarded as a tenet of religion but as a law of...

The sages of the Upanishads would find this an entirely acceptable way of describing both their idea of personality and the goal of life: moksha, freedom from the delusion of separateness; yoga, complete integration of consciousness; nirvana, the extinction of the sense of a separate ego. This state is not the extinction of personality but its fulfillment, and it is not achieved after death but in the midst of life.

In its broad outlines, the worldview I have sketched must have been familiar to the vast majority in the Buddha’s audience: the kings and princes we read about in the sutras, the merchants and craftsmen and courtesans, and of course the numberless villagers who, then as now, made up most of India. Karma and rebirth were not philosophy to them but living realities. Moral order was taken for granted, and all looked to dharma as a universal standard for behavior.

These ideas form the background of the Buddha’s life and became the currency of his message. Like Jesus, he came to teach the truths of life not to a few but to all who would listen, and the words he chos...

The sixth century B.C. was a time of creative spiritual upheaval in most of the major civilizations of antiquity. Within a hundred years on either side we have Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, and the later prophets of Israel. These were also times of cultural expansion, when centers of civilization in Europe and Asia were expanding their spheres of influence in commerce and colonization. In the Buddha’s time at least sixteen kingdoms and republics lay along the Ganges and against the Himalayan foothills, part of an increasingly active trade route which ran westward through the vast Persian empire of Cyrus the Great all the way to the Mediterranean.

These were also the centuries in which ancient India’s scientific tradition began to blossom. Details are difficult to trace, but by the first century after Christ, astronomy, arithmetic, algebra, logic, linguistics, surgery, medicine, and a psychology of personality were all well developed. The encounter between India and Greece when Alexander the Great reached the Indus river, 326 B.C., invites comparison between these two civilizations and gives us in the West a familiar benchmark. India, with its decimal system and the potent creation of zero, dominated mathematics as Greece did geometry, and in medicine and surgery both led the ancient world.

Into this world, poised between the Vedic past and a new high-water mark of Indian culture, the Buddha was born. Like Jesus, it may be said, he came not to destroy tradition but to fulfill its meaning. And as Jesus rose out of the tradition of the prophets and yet transcends all traditions and breaks all molds, the Buddha, though he broke with the rituals and authority of the Vedas, stands squarely in the tradition of the Upanishads.

Vitality, a sublime self-confidence, an emphasis on direct experience in meditation without reference to any outside authority, and a passionate trust in truth, in the oneness of life, and in our human capacity to take our destiny into our own hands – all these are the very spirit of the Upanishads, and no one embodies it better than the Buddha.

Yet the Buddha brings to this spirit a genius all his own. The sages of the Upanishads sought to know, and their testaments sing with the joy of Self-realization. The Buddha sought to save, and the joy in his message is the joy of knowing that he has found a way for everyone, not just great sages, to put an end to sorrow. Meditation, once the sublime art of a very few, he offers to teach to all – not for some otherworldly goal, but as a way to happiness, health, and fulfillment in selfless service. He argues with no one, denies no faith, convinces only with truth and love. He brought not so much a new religion as sanatana dharma, “the eternal dharma,” the name India has always given to religion itself. Like an adventurer who pawns everything to discover some priceless jewel, he sought out India’s spiritual treasure and then...

The early Buddhists were not biographers or historians, any more than the early Christians were. Their first passion, when their teacher was no longer with them in the body, was to record not what they knew of his past but what he had taught.

Apparently his power was not absolute, but shared with a voting assembly called the sangha – the same name the Buddha would later give to his monastic order, one of the earliest democratic institutions in the world.

Like most loving fathers, however, King Shuddhodana had little interest in seeing his son and sole heir wander off into the forest in search of truth. He ordered his ministers not to expose the boy to tragedy or allow him to lack anything he desired.

Devadatta, furious, insisted that the bird was his, and took his case to the king. “I shot that bird,” he said. “It’s mine.” But Siddhartha asked, “To whom should any creature belong: to him who tries to kill it, or to him who saves its life?”

His questions must have been old when history began; we ask them still. Has life a purpose, or is it only a passing show? Is there nothing more to hope for than a few good friends, a loving family, some memories to savor before one goes? It was questions like these that sent many into the forests along the Ganges to the sages of the Upanishads,

The rest of that day he found no peace. The roses in his garden, whose beauty had always caught his eye, now reminded him only of the evanescence of life. The bright scenes and laughter of the palace flowed by like running water. “Everything is change,” he thought; “each moment comes and goes. Is there nothing more, nothing to the future but decline and death?” These questions are familiar from the lives of saints and seekers in every tradition, and there is nothing morbid about them; it is this awareness of death that brings life into clear focus. The Buddha-to-be was beginning to wake up.

At the edge of the forest, Siddhartha scavenged some rags from the graves of executed convicts. They too had severed their bonds with the world, and were not all creatures under sentence of death? Their color, saffron yellow, has been ever since the emblem of a Buddhist monk.

Siddhartha put on his makeshift robe, burned the rest of his clothes, and cut off his black hair. Henceforth he would own no more than his robe and a mendicant’s bowl, and eat only such food as he might be given. He was ready to plunge into his quest.

In the forest, Siddhartha studied yoga – meditation – with the best teachers he could find. With each he learned quickly what they had to teach, mastering their disciplines and matching their austerities, and discovered that they had not found the goal he sought. Siddhartha then struck off on his own. For six years he wandered in the forest, subjecting his body to all kinds of mortification. Perhaps, he reasoned, his teachers had not been austere enough to reach the go...

Thus determined, full of peace, Siddhartha passed into deep meditation, when the senses close down and concentration flows undisturbed by awareness of the outside world. Then, the chronicles say, Mara the tempter came, much as Satan came to tempt Jesus in the desert. Mara is Death and every selfish passion that ties us to a mortal body. He is “the striker,” who attacks without warning and never plays by the rules. Any kind of entrapment is fair.

The Buddha’s return is a pivotal moment, one of those rare events when the divine penetrates history and transfigures it. Like Moses returning from Mt. Sinai, like Jesus appearing in the crowd at the river Jordan to be baptized by John, a man who has left the world returns to serve it, no longer merely human but charged with transcendent power. As the scriptures record of Moses and Jesus, we can imagine how the Buddha must have shone that bright spring morning in the Himalayan foothills. Dazzled by the radiance of his personality, it is said, people gathered about him and asked, “Are you a god?” “No.” “Are you an angel?” “No.” “What are you then?” The Buddha smiled and answered simply, “I am awake” – the literal meaning of the word buddha, from the Sanskrit root budh, to wake up.

Thus to these five, his first students, the Buddha began his work of teaching the dharma, the path that leads to the end of sorrow. The place was the Deer Park near the holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges, and the event is revered as the moment when the Compassionate One “set in motion the wheel of the dharma,” which will never cease revolving so long as there are men and women who follow his path.

“The First Truth, brothers, is the fact of suffering. All desire happiness, sukha: what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease. Yet all find that life brings duhkha, just the opposite: frustration, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, suffering, sorrow. Life is change, and change can never satisfy desire. Therefore everything that changes brings suffering.

“The Second Truth is the cause of suffering. It is not life that brings sorrow, but the demands we make on life. The cause of duhkha is selfish desire: trishna, the thirst to have what one wants and to get one’s own way. Thinking life can make them happy by bringing what they want, people run after the satisfaction of their desires. But they get only unhappiness, because selfishness can only bring sorrow.

Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.

“There is a Third Truth, brothers. Any ailment that can be understood can be cured, and suffering that has a cause has also an end. When the fires of selfishness have been extinguished, when the mind is free of selfish desire, what remains is the state of wakefulness, of peace, of joy, of perfect health, called nirvana.

“The Fourth Truth, brothers, is that selfishness can be extinguished by following an eightfold path: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right ...

“Right understanding is seeing life as it is. In the midst of change, where is there a place to stand firm? Where is there anything to have and hold? To know that happiness cannot come from anything outside, and that all things that come into being have...

“Right purpose follows from right understanding. It means willing, desiring, and thinking that is in line with life as it is. As a flood sweeps away a slumbering village, death sweeps away those who are unprepared. Remembering this, ...

“Right speech, right action, and right occupation follow from right purpose. They mean living in harmony with the unity of life: speaking kindly, acting kindly, living not just for oneself but for the welfare of all. Do not earn your livelihood at the expense of life or connive at or support those who do harm to other creatures, such as butchers, soldiers, and makers of poison and weapons. All creatures love life; all creatures f...

“The last three steps, brothers, deal with the mind. Everything depends on mind. Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it....

“Right attention follows from right effort. It means keeping the mind where it should be. The wise train the mind to give complete attention to one thing at a time, here and now.

“Right meditation is the means of training the mind. As rain seeps through an ill-thatched hut, selfish passion will seep through an untrained mind. Train your mind through meditation. Selfish passions will not enter, and your mind will grow calm and kind.

“This, brothers, is the path that I myself have followed. No other path so purifies the mind. Follow this path and conquer Mara; its end is the end of sorrow. But all the effort must be made by you. Buddhas only show the way.”

Yashodhara’s handmaids could not have heard the exchange, but they saw the Buddha lift Rahula to his feet with a sweet smile, and remove the gold-hemmed wearing cloth from the boy’s shoulder to replace it with one of saffron. Rahula, seven, had become the first and only child permitted to join the Buddha’s disciples.