Charles Willemen

in memoriam October 17, 1941 to June 3, 2024.

In 2013 Willemen published a work titled A Collection of Important Odes of the Law. <link> The Odes, known in Sanskrit as the Udānavarga, is a collection of sayings attributed to the Buddha Śākyamuni. In both style and format it is directly comparable to the better known Dhammapada. This work provides an entry point for considering the issue of canon.

My friend and colleague Franz Metcalf raised this issue when I blithely asserted that the Mahavagga is not canonic. While I thought this unproblematic, Franz pointed out that many people in Sri Lanka consider it canonic, and use it’s glorification of imperial conquest as justification for anti-Muslim violence in the present day.

Thus, the question of canon may be framed as What makes a work canonic? Is it being included in a particular collection, such as the Pāli, Tibetan, or Chinese collections? Is there an authoritative editor, such as Buston for the Tibetan, who serves to validate certain texts—and also to exclude others? Is it the claim of a transcendent source who reveals a teaching, a prophecy, commandments? Or is it popular acceptance of a work as authoritative?

For many Buddhist adherents in contemporary society, the Dhammapada is canonic. Its contents are considered to be the word of the Buddha, and are treated as timeless teachings. In his Preface to his translation <link Access to Insight> Acharya Buddharakkhita says, for example,

“The contents of the verses . . . transcend the limited and particular circumstances of their origin, reaching out through the ages to various types of people in all the diverse situations of life. For the simple and unsophisticated the Dhammapada is a sympathetic counselor; for the intellectually overburdened its clear and direct teachings inspire humility and reflection; for the earnest seeker it is a perennial source of inspiration and practical instruction. Insights that flashed into the heart of the Buddha have crystallized into these luminous verses of pure wisdom. As profound expressions of practical spirituality, each verse is a guideline to right living. The Buddha unambiguously pointed out that whoever earnestly practices the teachings found in the Dhammapada will taste the bliss of emancipation.”

Although claiming a timeless, ahistorical status, the context identified by Acharya Buddharakkhita is a contemporary understanding of spirituality.

In this same fashion, stanzas are quoted without qualification, such as the opening two stanzas:

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

<link>

These seem to be particularly popular in today’s highly psychologized environment. And that is a slightly differenty context, but not a timeless, ahistorical significance.

It is no doubt a matter largely of historical accident that has led the Dhammapada to be well-known and treated as a canonic expression of the Buddha’s teachings. And equally a matter of historical accident that the Odes, a work remarkably similar and accessible, is largely unknown in modern popular Buddhist circles.

Herewith, then, is the

Series Editor’s Preface to A Collection of Important Odes of the Law

We are very happy to be able to make Charles Willemen’s translation of the Udānavarga available once again, especially as this allows Prof. Willemen the opportunity to revise and update the introductory material in light of advances in the study of the Sarvāstivāda tradition over the course of the last three and a half decades. Also of value is that the work presented here brings together the translation and the glossary in a single volume. Although not as well known to Western audiences as the Dhammapada, the Udānavarga is of equal importance in the history of Buddhism—particularly in the development of Buddhism in East Asia. As a guidebook for Buddhist practitioners, it allows us to view what was important to the community of Sarvāstivādins at around the second century in northwest India and Central Asia, particularly Kashmir and Gandhāra. It also gives us the opportunity to reconsider what we understand Buddhism to be and what we find important. In doing so, we ourselves participate in the process by which “a text is both dependent and independent of the audiences which receive it . . . [and] we will inevitably end up having to rethink our conceptions of Buddhism as a translocal tradition with a long and self-consciously distinct history but which is at the same time a tradition dependent on local conditions for the production of meaning” (Charles Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” in Donald Lopez, ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], p. 51).