The Dhammapada - The Eighth Oldest Wisdom Book
A small but powerful injection of Buddhism straight into your soul.
By: Unknown
Translator: Gil Fronsdal
Published: Sometime in the 3rd to 1st century BC
152 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
This is Buddhist scripture in a similar sense to how the New Testament is Christian scripture. In this case it’s 423 verses (as opposed to nearly 8,000 in the New Testament) all of which have supposedly been uttered by the Buddha. The verses are arranged into thematic chapters (Mind, Anger, Happiness, etc.)
What’s the author’s angle?
In theory the author is the Buddha, and his angle would be bringing the readers to enlightenment. In reality most people believe that the verses were compiled by early Buddhist communities. The angle I got out of it was the elimination of desire.
Who should read this book?
Given how important this book is to tens of millions of people, and how short it is (if you’re just looking at the verses absent commentary it’s around 10,000 words) I would say anyone who’s even remotely interested in religion, philosophy, or eastern thought, should read this book.
Specific thoughts: More directly Buddhist than I expected
I’ve read a fair number of really old books. And usually they’re pretty opaque. I mean not as opaque as people fear, but generally you have to either read them really closely or you have to rely on an expert of some sort to point you in the right direction. This is not the case with the Dhammapada. I found it to be very straightforward and exactly what I expected. In fact in a sense it seemed almost too down the line. The sort of thing you might imagine hearing from a stoned hippy at a party in San Francisco. For example:
As a bee gathers nectar
And moves on without harming
The flower, its color, or its fragrance,
Just so should a sage walk through a village.
That one I picked out in a minute or two of thumbing through the book. Here’s one that I pulled with a search on the internet:
Craving gives rise to grief;
Craving gives rise to fear.
For someone released from craving
There is no grief;
And from where would come fear?
It reminds me of something Yoda might have said.
In pointing this out, I’m not attempting to denigrate the book. Rather I think its accessibility is one of the big positives of the book.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, and I think I’m a better person for having read it.
I’ll leave you with one final verse. Something that seems very appropriate to our current situation:
Conquer anger with non-anger;
Conquer wickedness with goodness;
Conquer stinginess with giving,
And a liar with truth.
To be clear there are a lot of liars out there, and I’m not singling out any individual. We’re suffering through an acute crisis of epistemology and AI is only going to make it worse. It’s not entirely clear how we’re going to navigate it, or what measures can be taken, but I will recommend reading books like this one. And I’ll keep reviewing them no matter how pointless it might be to review a book that tens of millions of people have a deeper relationship with. If you want to continue to receive superficial reviews of deeply important books you know what to do!