For most of this year (2024) I have been working on a revision to E W Burlingame’s 1921 translation of the Dhammapada Commentary. It is a large work, over 1,100 pages in the revised edition, and it required reading the whole text through five times, and making many adjustments along the way. Although Burlingame’s translation opened up knowledge of this text to an English-speaking world, there were also many problems in the translation, both omissions and commissions. To learn more about these see my Introduction to the revised translation.
As some of you will know, I have done a lot of work on the Dhammapada over the years: editing a new edition and analysing the metre, making a comparative edition, which presents all the known variantions in Sanskritised Prakrit, preparing an accurate line by line translation of the verses, as well as an English verse translation, and now a new and expanded translation of the commentary.
One of the things I did when revising the Jātaka Translation was to fill out stories which the commentator had only referred to in the text, and I have taken the same approach in this Revised Translation of the Dhammapada Commentary, where many times the commentator referred to a canonical text, a Jātaka story, or to another part of the same collection, I have filled in the stories, so that they are complete in and of themselves.
I have also made a new translation of all the verse texts that occur in the text, not only the Dhammapada verses, but also Jātaka verses, verses from the canon, etc. I think it numbers something like 600+ verses in all. One thing I have not yet translated though is the gāthā-vaṇṇanā, which is the word by word commentary on the Dhammapada verses. This is something I intend to do soon, and publish as a separate book.
I hope this revision will help people in becoming familiar with this great collection of stories, which is one of the main collections in the Pāḷi tradition, giving traditional information about the Buddha and his disciples, and which serves to illustrate the deep teachings of the Buddha regarding impermanence, rebirth and the way to Awakening.
I am very grateful indeed to Dr. Ari Ubeysekara who read the whole translation through in record time for me, and also pointed out a number of mistakes in Burlingame’s translation that I had missed. The work is much better for his help.
The revised translation is available online as html; or in ebook as pdf, epub and mobi formats from the home page.
