The Dhammapada is a work familiar to every devout Buddhist and to every serious student of Buddhism. This small collection of 423 verses on the Buddha’s doctrine is so rich in insights that it might be considered the perfect compendium of the Dhamma in its practical dimensions. In the countries of Theravada Buddhism the Dhammapada is regarded as an inexhaustible source of guidance and spiritual inspiration, as the wise counselor to which to turn for help in resolving the difficult moral and personal problems inescapable in daily life. Just as the Buddha is looked upon as the human kalyanamitta or spiritual friend par excellence, so the Dhammapada is looked upon as the scriptural kalyanamitta par excellence, a small embodiment in verse of the boundless wisdom and great compassion of the Master.

To draw out the living message of any great spiritual classic, it is not enough for us merely to investigate it in terms of questions that might be posed by scientific scholarship. We have to take a step beyond scholarly examination and seek to make an application of those teachings to ourselves in our present condition. To do this requires that we use our intelligence, imagination and intuition to see through the limiting cultural contexts out of which the work was born, and to see into those universal features of the human condition to which the spiritual classic being studied is specifically addressed. With these stipulations in mind we will examine the Dhammapada in order to discover what this ancient book of wisdom regards as the fundamental and perennial spiritual problems of human life and to learn what solutions it can propose for them that may be relevant to us today. In this way we will uncover the living message of the Dhammapada: the message that rings down through the centuries and speaks to us in our present condition in the fullness of our humanity.

When we set out to make such an investigation, one difficulty that we meet at the outset is the great diversity of teachings contained in the Dhammapada. It is well known that during his teaching career the Buddha always adjusted his discourses to fit the needs and capacities of his disciples. Thus the prose discourses found in the four main Nikayas display richly variegated presentations of the doctrine, and this diversity becomes even more pronounced in the Dhammapada, a collection of utterances spoken in the intuitive and highly charged medium of verse. We even find in the work apparent inconsistencies, which may perplex the superficial reader and lead to the supposition that the Buddha’s teaching is rife with self-contradiction. Thus in many verses the Buddha commends certain practices to his disciples on the ground that they lead to heaven, while in others he discourages disciples from aspiring for heaven and praises the one who takes no delight in celestial joys. Often the Buddha enjoins works of merit, yet elsewhere in the work he enjoins his disciples to go beyond both merit and demerit.

To make sense out of such contrary statements, to find a consistent message running through the Dhammapada’s diversified pronouncements, let us begin with a statement the Buddha makes in another small but beautiful book of the Pali canon, the Udana: “Just as the great ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, so this doctrine-and-discipline has but one taste, the taste of freedom.” Despite their variety in meaning and formulation, the Buddha’s teachings all fit together into a perfectly coherent system which gains its unity from its final goal. That goal is freedom (vimutti), which here means spiritual freedom: the liberation of the mind from all bonds and fetters, the liberation of our being from the suffering inseparable from wandering in samsara, the cycle of rebirths. But while the Buddha’s teachings fit together harmoniously through the unity of their final goal, they are addressed to people standing at different levels of spiritual development and thus must be expressed in different ways determined by the needs of the people to be taught. Here again water provides a fitting analogy. Water has one essence — chemically, it is a union of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom — but it takes on the different shapes of the vessels into which it is poured; similarly, the Dhamma has a single essence — deliverance from suffering — but it assumes varying expressions in accordance with the dispositions of those who are to be instructed and trained. It is because the different expressions lead to a single end, and because the same end can be reached via teachings that are differently expressed, that the Dhamma is said to be sattha sabyañjana, “good in meaning and good in formulation.”

To make sense out of the various teachings found in the Dhammapada, to grasp the vision of human spirituality expressed by the work as a whole, I would like to suggest a schematism of four levels of instruction set forth in the Dhammapada. This fourfold schematism develops out of three primary and perennial spiritual needs of man: first, the need to achieve welfare and happiness in the present life, in the immediately visible sphere of human relations; second, the need to attain a favorable future life in accordance with a principle that confirms our highest moral intuitions; and third, the need for transcendence, to overcome all the limits imposed upon us by our finitude and temporality and to attain a freedom that is boundless, timeless, and irreversible. These three needs give rise to four levels of instruction by distinguishing two levels pertaining to the third need: the level of path, when we are on the way to transcendence, and the level of fruit, when we have won through to transcendence.

Now let us examine each of these levels in turn, illustrating them with citations of relevant verses from the Dhammapada.