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The Path

Dhp 273-289, the Maggavagga — set 2, The Basic Diagnosis and the Path

Reading time: about 3 min · 461 words

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Before you read

This is the Path chapter of the Dhammapada: seventeen short verses about the way out of dissatisfaction.

It opens by ranking things. The best path is the eightfold path, and there is no other. Then comes the line many people remember from this chapter: you yourselves must make the effort; Tathāgatas only tell the way.

Verses 277 to 279 are the heart of it. Each takes one of three facts, that everything put together is impermanent, that it is unsatisfactory, and that all phenomena are not-self, and says the same thing about it: when you see this with discernment, you grow disenchanted, and that is the path. AN 3.136 states the same three facts in prose.

The rest is practical: get up when it is time to get up, guard your speech, cut down the forest of desire, and do not assume there will always be more time.

The numbers beside the verses are the Dhammapada's own verse numbers.

Translation

Verses

273Of paths, the eightfold is the best; of truths, the four statements; of dhammas, fading is the best; and of those who walk on two feet, the one with vision.

274This is the path; there is no other for the purifying of vision. Follow this path: it leaves Māra bewildered.

275Following it, you will make an end of dissatisfaction. I have taught you the path, knowing how the arrow is drawn out.

276You yourselves must make the effort; Tathāgatas only tell the way. Those who follow it and practice the mental themes will be freed from Māra's bonds.

277'All that has been put together is impermanent': when someone sees this with discernment, they grow disenchanted with dissatisfaction. This is the path to purity.

278'All that has been put together is unsatisfactory': when someone sees this with discernment, they grow disenchanted with dissatisfaction. This is the path to purity.

279'All phenomena are not-self': when someone sees this with discernment, they grow disenchanted with dissatisfaction. This is the path to purity.

280Not getting up when it is time to get up, young and strong, but given to idleness, their attitude and mind sunk low, the lazy do not find the path by discernment.

281Guarding speech, well restrained in mind, doing nothing unwholesome with the body: keep these three paths of action clean, and you will win the path the seers made known.

282From practice, wisdom grows; without practice, wisdom wastes away. Knowing this two-way road to growth and to decline, set yourself on the way by which wisdom grows.

283Cut down the forest, not just a tree: danger is born from the forest. Once you have cut down the forest and the undergrowth, be free of the forest, bhikkhus.

284As long as the undergrowth of a man's desire for women is not cut down, even the smallest bit of it, so long his mind stays bound, like a suckling calf to its mother.

285Cut out your fondness for yourself, as you would pull an autumn lily with your hand. Develop only the path to peace, the nibbāna the Sugata taught.

286'Here I will spend the rains, here the winter and the summer': so the fool thinks, and does not see what may cut it short.

287That man, intoxicated with children and cattle, his mind attached, death seizes and carries off as a great flood a sleeping village.

288Children are no shelter, nor a father, nor relatives. For someone overtaken by the Ender there is no shelter among kin.

289Seeing the force of this, the wise, restrained by conduct, should quickly clear the path that leads to nibbāna.

The twentieth chapter, on the path, is finished.

Words used in this translation (12)
arrow
A recurring image with more than one meaning. In MN 63 it is a poisoned arrow: refusing treatment until you know every background fact about the wound. It warns against blocking practice with questions no one can answer. In SN 36.6 the image is different. An ordinary person's pain is one arrow, and the extra suffering they add on top is a second arrow they could avoid.
bhikkhus
Buddhist monks -- those who have left household life to practise full time. The Buddha's usual way of addressing the assembly, roughly "friends" in force.
body
The physical body, as distinct from speech and the mental side of experience.
conduct
This project's rendering of "sīla", often translated "morality" or "virtue". It means how a person actually behaves. The rest of the practice grows from it; it is not a set of rules to obey.
dissatisfaction
This translation's rendering of "dukkha," the Buddhist term for the unsatisfying, unstable quality of ordinary experience. Often translated "suffering," but that can sound more dramatic than the everyday sense of things not quite being right.
fading
The fading away of attraction and investment in experience, as passion cools.
flood
A force that overwhelms a person and carries them along unless they cross it. SN 1.1 leaves the image open; it does not define it as one specific mental state.
knowing
This project's rendering of "viññāṇa" (often translated "consciousness") -- bare awareness of an object through one of the senses or the mind.
nibbāna
The end of greed, hatred, and confusion -- the traditional goal of Buddhist practice. Left untranslated because no single English word covers it; "quenching" is the closest one-word gloss.
not-self
This project's rendering of "anattā". It does not claim that you don't exist. It says that, when you actually look, nothing in experience holds up as a fixed self you could own.
put together
In "all that has been put together", this project's rendering of "saṅkhārā" on its result side: anything assembled from conditions, as opposed to the activity of assembling.
unwholesome
This project's rendering of "akusala". Roughly: mentally and ethically harmful. It is blameworthy, leads to harm, and people with good judgment criticize it.
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