BUKLINGAME. — BUDDHAGHOSA's DHAMMAPADA COMMENTARY. 4G9 



Canon. This Anthology consists of twenty-six parts, or books (vaggas), 

 the arrangement of the stanzas being by subjects, such as Heedfulness, 

 The Fool, The Wise Man, The Buddha, Pleasure, Anger, and so on. 

 The relation between the Anthology and its Commentary will at once 

 become clear from an example. Suppose we had a collection of detached 

 sayings of Christ ; such as, for example, " Labor not for the meat which 

 perisheth;" or, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast 

 a stone at her." The Commentary bears much the same relation to 

 the Sacred Stanzas as the Gospel narrative to the Sacred Sentences. 

 The parallel is not a perfect one, for the Commentary does not rank as 

 canonical ; besides which, there are certain other important differences. 



The Commentary cousists of upwards of three hundred stories (vat- 

 thus), distributed in twenty-six books (vaggas), corresponding to the 

 parts of the Dhammapada described above. Ordinarily each story 

 consists of eight subdivisions, as follows : (1) quotation of the stanza 

 (gatha) to illustrate which the Buddha told the story; (2) a brief 

 statement of the occasion and the person or persons about whom the 

 story was told ; (3) the story proper ; or, more strictly, the Story of 

 the Present (paccuppanna-vatthu), closing with the utterance of 

 (4) the stanza or stanzas ; (5) word-for-word commentary or gloss on 

 the stanza ; (6) a brief statement of the spiritual benefits which accrued 

 to the hearer or hearers ; (7) the Story of the Past ; or, more accu- 

 rately, the Story of Previous Existences (atita-vatthu); (8) identification 

 of the personages of the Story of the Past with those of the Story of the 

 Present. Sometimes the Story of the Past is omitted, together with the 

 accompanying Identification ; but it is so much expected as a matter 

 of course, that at the end of the story of Nanda the Herdsman (iii. 8), 

 where none occurs, the author is at some pains to say that, as no one 

 asked the Teacher about Nanda's deed in a previous existence, the 

 Teacher said nothing about it. It will readily be seen that the Dham- 

 mapada Commentary closely resembles, both in form and content, the 

 commentary on the famous Jataka collection ; indeed, so close is the 

 connection between the two that it would not be inappropriate to call 

 the Commentary a supplement to the Jataka. The Commentary 

 constantly refers to the Jataka, every now and then borrows a story 

 from it, sometimes showing interesting variants, and as often gives a 

 different version of some familiar Jataka story. The stories of the 

 Dhammapada Commentary stand in precisely the same relation to 

 the stanzas of the Dhammapada as the Jataka stories do to the Jataka 

 stanzas. The Dhammapada Commentary has sometimes been referred 

 to as a sort of Buddhist Acta Sanctorum ; it would perhaps be more 

 appropriate to speak of it as a Collection of Stories about Buddhist 



