The Dhammapada is the verse most Buddhists can quote from memory, and the most read of all the old Buddhist books. It is short: 423 verses, the length of a long pamphlet. It is also two and a half thousand years old, written in Pali, and the translators do not agree on what its very first line says.
The whole of the Buddha's psychology is supposed to sit in that first line, four Pali words: Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā. Every translator agrees it is the keystone. None of them renders it the same way. The word mano is mind, or heart, or intention. The word dhammā is mental states, or experiences, or phenomena, or just everything. Watch seven readers cross the same four words.
Manopubbaṅgamā dhammāverse 1, line 1 · four words said to hold the whole of the teaching
- All that we are is the result of what we have thought.Müller, 1881
- All states arising have mind for their causing.Wagiswara & Saunders, 1912
- All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor.Kaviratna, 1980
- Mind precedes all mental states.Buddharakkhita, 1985
- Phenomena are preceded by the heart.Thanissaro, 1997
- All things are preceded by the mind.Suddhaso, 2016
- Intention shapes experiences.Sujato, 2021
Same four words. One reader makes it about thought, one about mind, one about the heart, one about raw intention. None is wrong. Pali has no exact English for mano or dhamma, so each translator has to decide what the Buddha meant before they can write the line, and they decide differently. That spread is the subject of this page.
Below is the whole book, all 423 verses, in the order the tradition fixed them. For each verse you get the Pali, then every English version I could gather, stacked so you can read them against each other. For the load-bearing verses, the ones the rest of the tradition leans on, there is a plain-language breakdown of what the verse is doing and where the translators part ways. The gold-dotted verses in the index are the ones with a breakdown. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move between verses.
Where the text comes from
Every translation here is reproduced verbatim, not paraphrased. The complete ones were pulled with scripts and parsed, so nothing in them was retyped or rephrased by hand or by a model. The two that appear on the keystone verses only were read from clean online editions and checked line by line against a second copy of the same edition. The only change to any quotation is curly quotation marks turned straight, to match the rest of the site.
- The Pali is the romanized Mahasangiti edition, segmented verse by verse, from SuttaCentral (dedicated to the public domain).
- Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1997) and Acharya Buddharakkhita (1985) come from Access to Insight, which distributes both for free.
- Bhikkhu Sujato (2021) and Bhikkhu Suddhaso (2016) are from SuttaCentral; Sujato's is a public-domain dedication.
- F. Max Müller (1881), the first scholarly English Dhammapada, and Wagiswara and Saunders (1912), a metrical verse rendering, are both from Project Gutenberg (public domain).
- Harischandra Kaviratna (1980) is the bilingual Theosophical University Press edition, online at theosociety.org.
- Narada Thera (1959) and Daw Mya Tin (1986) appear on the keystone verses only. Narada's is the Buddhist Publication Society edition, read at Reading Faithfully; Mya Tin's is the Burma Pitaka Association edition, read at tipitaka.net. Both are in copyright, quoted here for comparison where a breakdown turns on their wording.
That is seven complete English translations, spanning 140 years, from Müller's Victorian Sanskritist English to the contemporary monastic readings, stacked verbatim across all 423 verses, plus Narada and Mya Tin on the keystone verses. The other famous moderns the breakdowns point to, Gil Fronsdal, Eknath Easwaran, Juan Mascaró, Glenn Wallis, Ananda Maitreya, and the scholars' editions of Carter and Palihawadana, Roebuck, and Norman, are still in copyright and printed in books, not posted as clean machine-readable text. Rather than retype them by hand and risk a wrong word, I name them in the breakdowns where their choice matters, and leave the quoting to the editions I could verify exactly.
The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship and on Buddhaghosa's fifth-century commentary, which tells a back-story for every verse. The Pali word glosses are checked against the Pali Text Society edition and the analysis at SuttaCentral.
The painting on the homepage card is a leaf from a 19th-century Thai manuscript of the Phra Malai, a Theravada Buddhist text, with the verses written in the Khom script (LACMA, public domain). This reader follows the Theravada Dhammapada, the older Pali canon. A Mahayana reader would not put the same verses at the center, and where that matters a breakdown says so.