An Atheist Explores the Dhammapada Part 1: Introduction

 Dhammapada Introduction

 Welcome to the latest addition to “An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts”. In this series I work my way through the sacred texts of various religions and ponder them from a secular standpoint. Not to mock or belittle or to debunk, but to try to understand them from a mythic and historical perspective, what they tell us of psychology of the people that wrote them and what we know about ourselves now.

 So far I’ve read the Bible and Apocrypha, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad Gita. And I’m still an atheist – the arguments of none have made me Christian, Muslim nor Hindu.

 Now, it’s the turn of Buddhism.

 As with the Hindu corpus, there’s not really a central, essential text like there is with the Abrahamic faiths. Instead, there’s a whole range of different documents (kind of like the Bible) that aren’t necessarily collected into one book (unlike the Bible).

 The essential Buddhists texts are arguably the Pali Canon, a collection of texts in the Pali language that form the basis of Theravada Buddhism – these are divided into the Vinaya Pitake which mainly concern themselves with rules for monastic orders, the Sutta Pitaka which are a collection of texts attributed to the Buddha Siddharta Gautama and his followers, and finally the Abhidhamma Pitaka, which are a reworking of the Sutta Pitaka to make the doctrines more systematic (as I understand it).

 The Dhammapada is part of the Sutta Pitaka, and is sort of a distillation of sayings of the Buddha such that it forms a kind of brief introduction. Certainly it’s the one that came up most as being the “popular” Buddhist text, so perhaps it’ll serve as a simple introduction. The name derives from Dhamma (equivalent to Sanskirt Dharma), meaning “doctrine” or “eternal truth” and Pada, meaning both “path” and implication of a metric foot of verse. So, it’s kind of the “Path of Eternal Truth” and “The Poem of Doctrine”, and variants thereof.

 I expect to be horribly wrong about all of this, but maybe emerge the other side a little less ignorant.

 For the online Dhammapada that I use, see here The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom (accesstoinsight.org)

 

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