Psalms of the Early Buddhists II: Psalms of the Brethren

The Saṃyutta Nikāya tells of a stage-manager named Tālapuṭa who asked the Buddha whether actors, who make audiences laugh with their pretences, are reborn among the gods. Pressed three times, the Buddha told him that such a player, holding a false view, faces hell or rebirth as an animal; Tālapuṭa wept, not at the answer, but at having been deceived by his teachers for so long, and asked to be ordained. In the Theragāthā, "the verses of the elder monks", a poem of some fifty verses under the same name asks again and again when its speaker will live in mountain caves, owning nothing he calls his own. It is one of 264 poems, in twenty-one chapters ordered by length, ascribed to monks of the early community, most of whom the tradition places in the Buddha's lifetime. They are not the Buddha's words but the voices of his first followers as the community remembered them. Scholars think the collection grew over centuries, with additions down to at least the period of the Third Council. Aṅgulimāla, the bandit, recalls how the Buddha, walking on the road, told him that he had stopped and the bandit had not, and how he then gave up violence. Monks praise the rain on a hut roof and the cry of peacocks in the forest. The verses were handed down orally and written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, and one commentary, by Dhammapāla, covers them together with the nuns' verses. Caroline Rhys Davids published her English translation in 1913 as Psalms of the Brethren, four years after the nuns' volume. The last and longest poem belongs to Vaṅgīsa, who admits that unwelcome thoughts of women come to him in the homeless life and sets the Buddha's teaching against them.