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    Dhammapada: Annotated & Explained
    Dhammapada: Annotated & Explained
    Dhammapada: Annotated & Explained
    Ebook180 pages2 hours

    Dhammapada: Annotated & Explained

    By Max Muller, Jack Maguire and Andrew Harvey

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    Ancient words of the Buddha ("awakened one") that can become a companion for your own spiritual journey.

    The Dhammapada ("Path of the Buddha's Teachings") is a daily inspiration for millions of Buddhists all over the world and for people of all spiritual traditions who have been impressed by its beauty and power. These words—believed to have been spoken by the Buddha himself over 2,500 years ago—contain most of Buddhism's central teachings.

    Originally composed in the ancient language of Pali, this timeless text concisely and inspirationally portrays the route a person travels as he or she advances toward enlightenment. With poetic sequence and rhythm, the Dhammapadadescribes the fundamental role of mental conditioning in making us who we are. It paints contrasting portraits of three levels of our human existence—the fool, the wise one, and the enlightened one—and addresses specific aspects of experience, conduct, and belief that characterize our transformation from one of these modes of being to another.

    Now you can experience the Dhammapada with understanding even if you have no previous knowledge of Buddhism. This SkyLight Illuminations edition offers insightful yet unobtrusive commentary that explains references and philosophical terms, shares the inspiring interpretations of famous spiritual teachers, and gives you deeper insight into the text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateMay 2, 2011
    ISBN9781594733369
    Dhammapada: Annotated & Explained
    Author

    Jack Maguire

    Jack Maguire is a Zen student and author of more than twenty books. He lives in the town of Highland in New York's Hudson River Valley. His books include Essential Buddhism (Simon & Schuster).

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    Reviews for Dhammapada

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    • 4/5
      Much better than the Penguin edition.
    • 5/5
      This is a lovely translation, but the word choices lean towards the Christan mind set.
    • 4/5
      There is wisdom here hidden in verse form and covered over with years of translation. After decoding it is a great insight into Goatama Buddha,
    • 4/5
      This is a slim volume of Buddhist teachings- only a page or two per topic. It ranges from Anger, to Old Age. The wisdom presented is easily understood, but difficult to master. Regardless of what you believe, or religion you follow, there will be something for you to ponder on.
    • 5/5
      This is a golden nugget of a book - a tiny paperback containing tons of wisdom. Dhammapada (Dhamma in Pali, Dharma in Sanskrit - both meaning the Truth), the 423 aphorisms of the way of the Buddha, the Perfect Path, is translated from Pali language. The Introduction by Juan Mascaro, covering one third of the tiny book, is in itself a wonderful interpretation of what is to follow. A must book on one's bedside table.
    • 5/5
      Simply beautiful! A reader can immerse oneself for days. An amazing translation. Beautiful! This book is small enough to carry around in a pocket, and I keep it with me at all times. It's that amazing.
    • 2/5
      The translation is a bit odd at times: Church for Sangha for instance. Not sure where the yin-yang on the cover comes from?I'm sure there are better translations of this pop collection of Lord Buddha's teachings, but I wouldn't know as after reading I went straight to Bhikkhu Bodhi's excellent translations of the Nikayas.
    • 3/5
      The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, is certainly a book filled with wisdom from a very wise man. It was great to read it and, as a Christian, to be able to appreciate his insights into human nature and into the nature of reality. Buddhist spirituality has always deeply impressed me and I was certainly not disappointed by reading this book. Easwaran's notes are generally very helpful, though his constant need to compare Christianity and Christ, neither of which he seems to understand very well, with Buddhism and the Buddha was a bit annoying at times. Overall, I think this is a book from which much insight can be gained and I recommend it to others as well.
    • 5/5
      I doubt I have anything original to say about The Dhammapada, but I'll offer my tuppence-worth anyway.Its message is a deceptively simple one, in essence "be kind, be mindful". In that, as the editor of my edition, Juan Mascaró, says, it has a commonality with the essence of every major world religion. I guess the differences between religions are mainly in the particular cultural presentation of universal truths (and, perhaps, the lengths to which we go to justify deviating from the clearly marked path).The passages in the Dhammapada which particularly resonated for me on this reading were those that chime with the person-centred worldview based on the psychological theory of Carl R. Rogers. So, for example, chapters one and two (Contrary Ways and Watchfulness) had meaning for me in respect of Rogers' quality of Congruence: the awareness of the flow of thought and feeling in ourselves and how they arise and are more or less distorted through the lens of past experience and psychological defensiveness. Other chapters speak to me of the process of personality change and the movement from rigid, pre-defined views of the world, to a more fluid, in-the-moment 'way of being' (to borrow the title of one of Rogers' books). There are, for me, other correspondences (though I wouldn't go so far as to say there are exact matches throughout) which I won't elaborate on, but which added to the richness of my reading this time around.I find it fascinating that a secular, science-based approach to understanding the nature of being human can arrive at some very similar conclusions to those underlying our oldest religious traditions. This is why, as an atheist, I'm still interested in religion. It's part of who we are and the tendency towards religious ways of experiencing is likely to continue unabated as a part of us.I'm not personally inclined towards a belief in godhead, but the numinous feeling of universal oneness which I have sometimes (rarely) felt speaks to me of the deep relatedness which, at our best, we can recognise for each other as persons of intrinsic worth, regardless of any other perceived differences.

    Book preview

    Dhammapada - Max Muller

    The Heartbeat of God: Finding the Sacred in the Middle of Everything

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    Dhammapada:

    Annotated & Explained

    2005 Second Printing

    2002 First Printing

    © 2002 by SkyLight Paths Publishing

    Foreword © 2002 by Andrew Harvey

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to SkyLight Paths Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address/fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to permissions@skylightpaths.com.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Tipiòtaka. Suttapiòtaka. Khuddakanikåaya. Dhammapada. English.

    Dhammapada : annotated & explained/translation by Max Müller ; annotation by Jack Maguire.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 1-893361-42-X (pbk.)

    I. Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823–1900. II. Maguire, Jack, 1945– III. Title.

    BQ1372.E54 T54 2001

    294.3'82322—dc21

    2001006103

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Cover design: Walter C. Bumford III

    SkyLight Paths, Walking Together, Finding the Way, and colophon are trademarks of LongHill Partners, Inc., registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

    Walking Together, Finding the Way

    Published by SkyLight Paths Publishing

    A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc.

    Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237

    Woodstock, VT 05091

    Tel: (802) 457-4000  Fax: (802) 457-4004

    www.skylightpaths.com

    All created things are impermanent. Strive with diligence for your release.

    —The Buddha’s last words

    Contents

    Foreword by Andrew Harvey

    Acknowledgments and Dedication

    About the Dhammapada

    1. The Twin Verses

    2. Vigilance

    3. The Mind

    4. Flowers

    5. The Fool

    6. The Wise One

    7. The Enlightened One

    8. Better than a Thousand

    9. Evil

    10. Punishment

    11. Old Age

    12. Self

    13. The World

    14. The Buddha

    15. Happiness

    16. Pleasure

    17. Anger

    18. Impurity

    19. The Just

    20. The Way

    21. Miscellany

    22. The Downward Course

    23. The Elephant

    24. Thirst

    25. The Monk

    26. The Brahman

    Sources and Suggested Readings

    List of Special Terms

    About SkyLight Paths

    Copyright

    Foreword

    Andrew Harvey

    In the Anguttara Nikaya, one of the oldest of the Pali Buddhist scriptures (and part of what is known as The Third Basket of Discourses, the Sutta Pitaka), there is a haunting portrait of the Buddha. One day, a Hindu priest found the Buddha sitting under a tree in a state of deep peace: His faculties were at rest, his mind was still and everything around him breathed self-discipline and serenity. The Buddha reminded the priest of an old male elephant; there was the same sense of great power being controlled and channeled into a force of gentleness.

    The Brahman was amazed and asked the Buddha, Are you a god? No, the Buddha answered. Are you becoming an angel…or a spirit? Once again, the Buddha replied that he was not; everything that limited him to a human existence of suffering had been, he said, cut off at the root, chopped off like a palm stump done away with. The Buddha compared himself to a red lotus that had begun its life underwater but now rose above the water’s surface. So I too was born and grew up in the world, but I have transcended the world and I am no longer touched by it.

    He had attained nirvana. Through dying to his false self and devoting his entire life to the unstinting service of others, the Buddha had freed himself to live in the vivid serenity and spaciousness of a consciousness beyond struggle and suffering. The priest plucked up his courage once more and asked the Buddha how, then, he should be categorized. Remember me, the Buddha said quietly, as someone who has woken up.

    The confidence, clarity, and calm splendor of the Buddha’s presence, as described in the Anguttara Nikaya, permeate the Dhammapada. Although monks compiled and edited this text about a hundred years after the Buddha’s death and may have doctored it for polemical purposes, anyone reading the Dhammapada seriously and consistently has an overwhelming sense of the spiritual personality behind its teachings—a personality at once austere, forthright, and profoundly compassionate. The Buddha was both deeply troubled by the suffering, anguish, and evil in the world and also certain of the path that leads to overcoming and transcending them. In the section Old Age, the Buddha appears to be directly and personally describing his own spiritual realization—the same realization the Hindu priest felt so richly, and from whose luminous silence and authority all of the words of the Dhammapada’s teachings flow, and in whose shining they are all bathed:

    Looking for the maker of this house, I ran to no avail through a string of many births, and wearisome is birth again and again. But now, maker of the house, you have been seen. You shall not raise this house again. All the rafters are broken; the ridgepole is shattered. The mind, approaching eternity, has attained the extinction of all desires.

         My own relationship with the message and truths of the Dhammapada has had three distinct stages, which I suspect mirror the progressive understanding of many modern seekers grappling with this seminal and always challenging text.

    In the first stage, my admiration for the Buddha and his teachings was uncritical. I was in awe of the Buddha’s immense spiritual prestige and profoundly moved by his pragmatic radicalism, his desire to teach the highest truths to everyone in a popular language, his refusal of all superstition, pseudo-mystical explanations, and cultic rituals, and his relentlessly honest insistence on a rigorous, disciplined, self-responsible path to awakening. At the time I first studied the Dhammapada in depth, I was making a pilgrimage to the Buddhist sites in northern India. Three statements from the Dhammapada became the focus and inspiration of my journey:

    All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

    Through meditation, wisdom is won. Through lack of meditation, wisdom is lost.

    Your own self is your master. Who else could it be? With self well subdued, you gain a master hard to find.

    The no-nonsense force of these statements—as well as their wisdom—delighted me. Reading from the Dhammapada in the Indian cities of Bodh Gaya and Sarnath, and in buses and trains along the way, I was struck again and again by the earthiness of the way in which the Buddha taught the highest truths. Like Jesus, Ramakrishna, and Muhammad, the Buddha had a genius for illustrating the most elevated concepts with the simplest imaginable images and metaphors:

    The evil done by one’s self, born of one’s self, suckled by one’s self, crushes the foolish including oneself, even as a diamond cuts a stone.

    If a fool is associated

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