A Collection Organized by Theme, Not by Occasion

The Dhammapada differs structurally from most other texts in the Pali Canon in being organized into topical chapters, on anger, on the mind, on the self, on happiness and others, rather than presenting connected narrative discourses tied to a specific occasion or audience, which makes it function more like an anthology of verse teaching than a record of particular sermons, a format scholars believe made it especially suited to memorization and lay instruction from an early period. Its most quoted verse on peace, that hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world but only by love, appears within its opening chapter on contrasting pairs of mental states, and its logic rests on a claim about causation rather than mere moral exhortation, that responding to hostility with more hostility structurally perpetuates the very condition it seeks to end, while a different kind of response is capable of actually interrupting the cycle.

Because the Dhammapada circulates in numerous translations and has been one of the most widely available Buddhist texts to non-specialist Western readers since the nineteenth century, its verses on peace have reached an audience considerably broader than practicing Theravada Buddhists specifically, frequently quoted independently of their canonical context in general discussions of nonviolence and conflict resolution.