The Dhammapada is one of the best-known collections of verses associated with the Buddha in the Pali textual tradition. It is organized as 26 chapters, each gathering sayings around a theme. The form makes contrasts memorable—carelessness and attentiveness, anger and restraint, confusion and insight—without turning the collection into a sequence of biographical episodes.
This English text should be understood as a translation of Pali verses, not as the Pali source itself. A verse can circulate with parallel forms in other Buddhist collections, and interpretive traditions explain its concise expressions in different ways. Müller’s edition makes the text accessible to English readers but belongs to an earlier European scholarly period.