Dhammapada - Literary Merits

Literary Merits

The literary merits of the Dhammapada are a matter of disagreement. Pali scholar K.R. Norman notes that some readers have claimed that the Dhammapada is a "masterpiece of Indian literature", but that this assessment is not universally shared. John Brough, who wrote extensively on the subject of the related Gāndhārī Dharmapada, believed that the text had largely been composed from a patchwork of cliches, and that while it contained a few novel and well-constructed verses, suffered from an "accumulation of insipid mediocrity." While he believed that the Dhammapada did not warrant the high praise sometimes lavished upon it, Brough did note that it contained "small fragments of excellent poetry", and that the Dhammapada fared well when considered alongside other, similarly composite works. Several scholars have noted that much of the Dhammapada consists of vague moral aphorisms, many of them not clearly specific to Buddhism at all.