The Book With Verses

The "Book With Verses" (Sagāthāvagga) is divided into eleven saṁyuttas, with a total of 271 suttas.

While most of the Saṁyutta is organized around subject matter, here the organizational principle is people. Each saṁyutta depicts a conversation involving the Buddha or his disciples with a different person or kind of person, such as gods, kings, nuns, or brahmins.

A typical sutta has a bare narrative framework, where someone comes to the Buddha and utters a verse, and the Buddha replies with a better one. In some cases, notably the Sakka Saṁyutta, the narrative element is developed into a lively exchange.

Verse & Prose

Each of the suttas in this collection contains verse with a prose narrative background, although in many cases the prose has been omitted through abbreviation. This kind of literary form is common in Indic literature, so it is worth spending a little time to understand it.

The oldest Indic literature is the Ṛg Veda, a collection of about 10,600 verses. These were passed down in the oral tradition of the brahmins for thousands of years. One of the keys to the accurate transmission of this sacred lore was the use of meter: rhythmic patterns of long and short syllables. Such meters provide a scaffolding that organizes words, and hence knowledge, in a form that is as memorable as a song; indeed, they would have been sung in a simple melody. In this way, the verses become set in a precise and defined form, one that may be preserved and passed down unaltered through the generations.

But poetry is not just technically complex; it is ecstatic, inspired, divine. The brahmins did not see the Vedas as being authored in the normal sense, but channeled as the divine word of god (Brahmā) through human sages (Pali: isi; Sanskrit: ṛṣi). The Vedic verses constantly allude to stories, myths, and events---for example, the slaying of the dragon Vṛtra by the god-hero Indra---that were well known to their audience, and thus did not require spelling out in the text itself. The verses are hymns, invoked in ritual to heighten the emotional response, to inspire awe, fear, or devotion. They are given meaning and context by the background understanding of the mythology. Thus the verses imply a story, of which they are the emotional and narrative climax.

So we can think of a verse as the seed crystal around which a more flexible prose narrative grows and evolves. The prose may be adjusted to time and place, presented in greater or lesser detail, or adapted for the audience. It may comment on contemporary events or express a personal perspective, but the verse is (in theory) always the same.

We are speaking here of the verses found in the Sagāthāvagga. But it is worth bearing in mind that there are plenty of verses in the nikāyas outside the Sagāthāvagga, and they are not all of the same type. Here is a summary of the main verse types you will encounter. This is just to help a reader get a rough orientation, and exceptions and blurred lines are easily found.

Climactic verse

: As in the Sagāthāvagga, such verses appear at the climax of a narrative. The narrative may be very thin, or even absent, yet it is always assumed. Sometimes it is supplied in later commentaries. This form is used outside the Sagāthāvagga in such texts as the Dhammapada, Udāna, and Jātakas. We might also consider under this head longer devotional verses such as those of Sela (MN 92, Snp 3.7).

Independent poems

: A set of verses that makes up a unified literary and thematic whole, and is independent of a prose narrative. There are relatively few of these in the four nikāyas, but they dominate the Sutta Nipāta. The last vagga of that book contains a series of such independent poems, all united within a narrative set in verse. Some of the verses of the Sagāthāvagga might be considered under this head, if the prose narrative is dismissed as negligible.

Devotional invocations

: Such texts as the Mahāsamaya Sutta (DN 20), the Āṭāṇātiya Sutta (DN 32), or the Isigili Sutta (MN 116) occupy an unusual place in the early Buddhist corpus. Thin in their doctrinal content, they appear more as incantations for protection or blessings.

Summary verse

: Like the climactic verses, these accompany prose. But rather than being an emotional highlight, they serve as a mnemonic device to help preserve the content of the prose. These are most familiar in the uddānas that appear at the end of vaggas and other sections throughout the EBTs, typically listing a keyword from each text and thus acting as a kind of table of contents. These are not to be confused with the genre of climactic verse known as udāna, "inspired saying", which, despite the similar spelling, is a completely different word. In addition to the formal uddānas, we can consider under this head many of the verses of the Aṅguttara, especially in the Fours, which often serve purely to summarize the content of the prose, although occasionally they are developed into a more satisfying poetic reflection on the theme. Occasionally a longer sutta will contain mixed portions of prose and summary verse, notably the Dvayatānupassanā Sutta (Snp 3.12). A much later development of this style is found in the Lakkhaṇa Sutta (DN 30).

In my translations, I have rendered verse as prose broken into lines, rarely attempting poetic virtue. To render these highly didactic verses, dense with doctrinal terms, into genuine English verse is no easy task. In many cases, especially with the summary verses, the text in Pali has little in the way of literary merit. Other texts, especially the later verses, display a learned command of complex and sophisticated literary forms such as is rare to find, even among writers of English poetry. Combined with the often obscure vocabulary, rare and archaic grammatical forms, and syntactic flexibility of Pali verses, the task of rendering them in readable and accurate English is hard and time-consuming, even without aspiring to poetic beauty. So my verse is workmanlike, and I can only hope that poets take up the task of rendering selected verses with the beauty they deserve.

The Play of the Gods

In the Book With Verses we see the ancient Vedic pattern adopted to serve a Buddhist purpose. It is no coincidence that here we meet various deities, many of whom hail from Vedic mythology, in contexts that sometimes directly respond to specific Vedic or Brahmanical passages.

The casual appearance of deities throughout these texts is, of course, problematic. These days, we don't normally see gods manifesting with glorious light at spiritual gatherings. So how are we to understand this?

One obvious answer is that such texts are literally true: gods of these names did appear in exactly the way depicted and have these exact conversations. If so, why are such things not seen in our day? One might be tempted to point regretfully to the decline of religious and ethical life in modern times. But this is just another unverifiable claim: how could we possibly know such a thing? And it creates an even bigger problem. For when we see the past as a uniquely privileged era, one blessed with a degree of purity and wholesomeness that is lost to us, then what is the point of practice? Are we not better off pining for the glories of old, and wishing for the renewal of the Dhamma under the future Buddha Metteyya? Such views forget a basic principle of the teaching: it is akāliko---we can realize it here & now, no matter when we live.

So perhaps we are better off adopting a skeptical view: such deities do not exist, and such events did not happen. They are simply religious propaganda, fictions whose purpose is to convert simple people by importing a familiar Indic cosmology. If there is any reality at all to them, it is purely psychological; such beings represent different aspects of the mind. Despite its scientific appearance, this reductive view, too, is unsustainable. The ideas of rebirth and the existence of multiple dimensions of existence are not found just in popular narratives, but are central to core teachings such as dependent origination and the four noble truths---the second noble truth is precisely "the craving that leads to future rebirth" (yāyaṁ taṇhā ponobbhavikā). They can't be simply written off as an uncritical inheritance from Indian culture.

These views are polar opposites; and like all pairs of opposites, they share more in common than they like to admit. Both of them are concerned with facts, with whether these events were true or not. But the texts as we have them are not collections of facts: they are stories. And the significance of a story lies in its meaning. Whether a story is real or not is at best secondary, and often beside the point entirely. It serves to engage an audience, provoking wonder, surprise, awe, or joy.

The Buddhist traditions understood this well, as evidenced by the textual situation. While in some cases the verses and story are tightly linked, it is very common for the same verse to be accompanied by completely different background narratives, or by no background at all. The verses, which convey the essential Dhamma teaching, the core of meaning and emotion, remain the same, while the story varies. To insist on the factuality or otherwise of the story is to miss the point. The story provides a context that brings the teaching in the verses to life for an audience.

Thus the best lens through which to see such texts is neither as history nor as propaganda but as sacred story; that is, as myth. Each of the short suttas tells a story that conveys a timeless spiritual truth in a way that spoke to the audience of that time and place. They take place within a wider mythology that helps people find their place in a vast and unknown cosmos.

As always, the early Buddhist response to the earlier religious traditions is complex and nuanced. And, while it is true that many of the details of both literary form and subject matter are drawn from the Vedas, it is in the differences that the distinctively Buddhist character of the texts shows itself.

In the Vedas, the human agents are merely the transmitters of the sacred word of the gods. Exactly how this happened is unclear, but it probably involved a combination of drugs (soma is one of the great Vedic deities), ritual, creative inspiration, traditional lore, devotion, and communal empowerment, all of which inspired the sacred poets to heights of ecstatic visioning through which the words of the gods manifested. But regardless of the details, the key point is that the traditions regarded the human agent in the relationship as incidental, and the real value of the texts as stemming from the divine.

In the Buddhist texts, the situation is reversed. The gods do not inspire human hosts, they speak for themselves. And they are no infallible reserves of Truth; they may be right or wrong, skillful or foolish, just like anyone else. While the magnificence of their presence is emphasized, the ultimate effect is to show the worthlessness of such displays, for the gods are constantly being schooled by the Buddha. The most characteristic form of dialogue is where a god presents an idea that is pretty good, within a limited, mundane (i.e. Vedic) worldview, but which the Buddha elevates to an entirely new level.

It is an elementary axiom of Buddhism that the gods are not metaphysical, in the sense that they do not exist in a separate realm governed by different principles than our own. On the contrary, they are impermanent and suffering, trapped in the cycle of transmigration just like us. It follows from this that they do not have access to any special form of knowledge or wisdom. Buddhists do not look to the gods for teachings; rather, the Buddha is "teacher of gods and humans".

I have focused on the interactions with divine beings in this collection, as these require the most contextualizing. But not all of the collections feature divine beings. Many of the saṁyuttas feature kinds of people familiar from other texts of the time. And even when divine beings are involved, in the majority of cases, the verses themselves do not require a divine setting, as there's nothing about the gods and their divine dramas in the verses themselves.

Some of the texts in this collection are well-known and widely quoted, such as the invitation of Brahmā or the nun Vajirā's simile of the person as a chariot. Most of the suttas here have parallels in the Chinese Saṁyuktāgama translations; the partial translations SA-2 and SA-3 include Sagāthāvagga material. In addition, many of the verses have parallels elsewhere throughout the Buddhist literature in all languages.