Dhammapada

The Dhammapada is a collection of sayings attributed to the Buddha, preserved in verse form within the Pali Canon and among the most widely read texts of Theravada Buddhism. As a primary scriptural text it is the correct source for the Buddha's teaching as this canonical collection presents it, in its own traditional form, rather than a secondhand paraphrase. Its limit is what any early Buddhist canonical text carries, the verses were transmitted orally for generations before being committed to writing, so a claim resting on the exact original wording of a specific verse, as opposed to its settled canonical form, needs to engage the broader textual and manuscript scholarship on Pali Canon transmission rather than treat the collection as a single fixed original composition.