Dhammapada

The Dhammapada — “the path of the dharma” — is the most widely read book in the Pāli Buddhist canon. It is a 423-verse anthology of short sayings attributed to the Buddha, organized into twenty-six chapters by theme: earnestness, thought, flowers, the wise man, evil, punishment, old age, the world, happiness, anger, the way, and so on. It is the text traditionally given to a new student of Buddhism as the distillation of everything else, and it has been continuously read in southern Asia for two thousand years.

We use F. Max Müller’s 1881 translation, published as Volume X of the Sacred Books of the East — the great Victorian project that first put the Asian classics into systematic English. Müller was a German Sanskritist who held the Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford; his Dhammapada is scholarly, restrained, and slightly archaic. It is not as poetic as some modern versions (Thomas Byrom’s, or the Buddhist Publication Society’s by Ācharya Buddharakkhita), but it is the version that taught the West how to read the text, and it remains the authoritative public-domain rendering.

Where to start: Chapter 1 (The Twin-Verses) opens with the most-quoted lines in Buddhism — “all that we are is the result of what we have thought.” Then read Chapters 5 (The Fool) and 6 (The Wise Man) as a pair. Chapter 20 (The Way) is the philosophical core. Reading the whole book takes about ninety minutes; you can return to single chapters for years.