The mind and what it makes
We are what we have thought. The first verse of the book.
- My mind won't stop and I'm exhausted.
- How do I change a thought I've had for twenty years?
- Why do I keep making myself miserable?
Spirituality & Mindfulness
Talk to The Dhammapada
The Dhammapada by Attributed to the Buddha
- c. 300 BC
- Pali
- Public domain
The most direct thing in Buddhism, and the shortest way in. Four hundred and twenty-three verses, arranged by theme, most of them a single sentence long.
It begins by telling you that everything you are is made of what you have thought, and proceeds from there with very little decoration. There is no metaphysics to get past, no cosmology, no requirement to believe anything. There is a description of how suffering is produced and a suggestion that you stop producing it.
Its opening claim — that mind precedes all states, and that we are shaped by what we habitually think — arrives two millennia before anyone called it cognitive science.
Start here
What you can ask it
Anger and hatred
Hatred never ceases by hatred. He says it in the fifth verse and doesn't soften it.
- I'm carrying anger at someone and it's eating me.
- How do I let go of something I'm right about?
- What do I do with the urge to get even?
Craving and wanting
The engine of suffering, on this account, is wanting.
- I get what I want and immediately want the next thing.
- How do I stop wanting so much?
- Is it wrong to be ambitious?
Self-discipline and responsibility
Self is the lord of self. Nobody is coming to do it for you.
- Nobody is going to fix this for me, are they?
- How do I build discipline without hating myself?
- Where do I even start?
Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of The Dhammapada
Ask Attributed to the Buddha's The Dhammapada a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
- My mind won't stop and I'm exhausted.
- I'm carrying anger at someone and it's eating me.
- I get what I want and immediately want the next thing.
What The Dhammapada actually is
The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 verses in Pali, traditionally attributed to the Buddha and preserved within the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism. It probably reached its present form around the third century BC.
Its twenty-six chapters are arranged by subject — the mind, flowers, the fool, the wise, anger, craving, the self — and each verse is designed to be memorised and carried. The whole book is shorter than most magazine issues.
Its core is the same as the rest of early Buddhism, stated as plainly as it ever gets: craving produces suffering, hatred cannot end hatred, and the work of a life is the disciplining of your own mind, which nobody else can do for you.
In its words
Passages
All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love; this is an old rule.
Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart, It will not come nigh unto me.
Self is the lord of self, who else could be the lord?
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Message the consciousness of The Dhammapada
Ask Attributed to the Buddha's The Dhammapada a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
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