The Dhammapada: A Collection of Verses (Being One of The Canonical Books of The Buddhists)

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IT has been a great and unexpected pleasure to me to have to bring out a new, the third edition of my translation of the Dhammapada. The first was published in 1870, the second in 1881. I cannot indeed pretend to have improved the present edition very much, for I have not had any time left during the last few years to continue my study of Pali. Nor has Pali ever been more than a parergon to me. I began it in 1845 during my stay at Paris with Burnouf, who was then almost the only scholar who could read Pali texts, and I still have a letter of his in which he apologises for his imperfect knowledge of the language. At that time Pali scholarship had not yet become a special and independent study, but it was a kind of annexe to Sanskrit. Men like Bopp and Burnouf were expected to teach not only Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, but at the same time, Zend, the Prakrit dialects, and, as one of them, Pali. Clough's Pali Grammar (Colombo, 1824 and 1832) and Turnour's Mahavanso (1837) were all that we had to depend on. Some advance was made by Spiegel and Westergaard, but the real impulse to an independent and scholarlike study of Pali literature came from my friend Childers, the author of the first Pali Dictionary, published in 1875. Before that time the only names to be mentioned in Pali scholarship were those of James D'Alwis, Spence Hardy, Spiegel, E. Kuhn, Minayeff, Senart, Weber, and last, not least, Fausböll. After the publication of Childers' Dictionary, the progress of Pali scholarship has been very rapid, and the number of 'Pali texts and translations has increased very considerably. As the most active among the new generation of Pali scholars deserve to be mentioned Rhys Davids, the founder of the Pali Text Society, Oldenberg, the editor of the Vinaya-pitaka, Trenckner, E. Senart, Feer, Morris and the translators of the Gataka, Professor E. B. Cowell, Messrs. R. Chalmers, W. H. D. Rouse, H. T. Francis, and R. H. Neil.