The Dhammapada is an anthology of verses which the Theravada tradition holds to be the words of the Buddha. It sits within the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka, the fifth and last collection of discourses in the Pali Tipitaka, and is arranged in twenty-six chapters, each gathering verses around a theme. It is among the shortest texts in the canon and one of the most often turned to outside monastic study, read as much for its individual verses as for the whole.
This edition presents the Pali text in Devanagari script together with an English translation by Prof. N. K. Bhagwat. Readers who can follow Devanagari therefore have the original wording in front of them alongside the English, rather than the translation alone.
Bhagwat, of Poona in India, is one of the translators whose work Acharya Buddharakkhita names in the preface to his own well-known Dhammapada translation as having been consulted before he made his. A selection of Dhammapada verses in Bhagwat's rendering is recorded in the German National Library catalogue, so his version has circulated beyond India. That places this translation in the lineage of twentieth-century Indian scholarship on the Pali canon, prepared by someone working with the text in a script in which it is read across much of South Asia.
The book is published by Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo house issuing titles in Sinhala and English, with a list that includes Buddhist texts and scholarship alongside general publishing.
It will suit readers studying the Dhammapada seriously enough to want the Pali at hand, students of Pali working from Devanagari rather than Roman transliteration, and anyone building a shelf of the Buddhist canon in English translation. Those who simply want the verses in English will find the translation complete in itself.
- Author: Prof. N.K.Bhagwat
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 224
- ISBN: 9789553079961
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