Dhamma Principles
Dhamma.gift exists to make the earliest available texts (the Pali root and its translations) easy to check against each other. That only matters if there is a principled way to judge whether a given teaching, or a given translation of it, is faithful to the Dhamma — otherwise "compare translations" is just noise. The suttas below are not a doctrine invented for this project; they are the Buddha's own stated criteria for verifying teachings, and they double as a practical checklist for spotting where a human or AI translation commonly goes wrong or misleads.
Textual authenticity — the Four Great References
AN 4.180 (Mahāpadesa Sutta) — how to check a claim of "this is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teacher's word": trace it back to the suttas and cross-check it against the Vinaya, rather than accepting or rejecting it on the authority of who reported it (even the Buddha himself, a community of elders, or a single senior monk).
Rational criteria — not authority, not hearsay
AN 3.65 (Kesamuttiya / Kālāma Sutta) — the companion piece to Mahāpadesa: don't accept a teaching merely because of tradition, report, hearsay, scripture, logic, inference, superficial appearance, agreement with a view you already hold, the speaker's apparent competence, or "the ascetic is our teacher." Test it against what is skillful/unskillful and what leads to harm/benefit.
Language and translation are not the dispute
MN 139 (Araṇavibhaṅga Sutta) — do not insist on a local dialect or phrasing and reject other legitimate ways of saying the same thing; meaning matters, not the particular regional word chosen for it.
DN 29 (Pāsādika Sutta) — when the meaning (attha) agrees but the wording (byañjana) differs, that is not something to quarrel over; disputes over minor phrasing waste the value of an otherwise correct teaching.
Scrutinize before you praise or blame
AN 4.3 — praising or condemning something without first examining and investigating it (ananuvicca apariyogāhetvā) is listed as a failing; examining first is the mark of the wise.
Definitive vs. interpretable meaning
AN 2.24 / AN 2.25 — misrepresenting a discourse whose meaning is already explicit (nītattha) as one that still needs interpreting (neyyattha), or vice versa, is exactly how mistranslation and misreading happen in practice.
AN 2.23 — two ways of misrepresenting the Realized One: ascribing a meaning to him he did not state, or denying one he did.
How a question should be answered
AN 4.42 — four ways of answering a question (vibhajjabyākaraṇa among them): some questions should be answered directly, some need to be analyzed/qualified, some should be turned back with a counter-question, and some should be set aside. Treating every question as if it deserved a flat yes/no is itself a source of distortion.
Memorized texts drift over time
SN 20.7 (Āṇi Sutta) — the simile of the drum repaired peg by peg until none of the original wood remains: discourses "spoken by the Realized One, deep, profound in meaning, transcendent" will stop being learned, while literary compositions "made by poets, pretty verses, pretty phrasing" are what get preserved and to what they are attributed as authoritative.
AN 5.156 (parallel: AN 4.160) — discourses learned with words and phrases misplaced, where the meaning goes astray.
What counts as "well spoken"
AN 8.8 — yaṁ kiñci subhāsitaṁ sabbaṁ taṁ tassa bhagavato vacanaṁ — "whatever is well said is all the word of the Blessed One." A useful check against a narrower, more territorial reading of what counts as legitimate Dhamma — while still being read together with Mahāpadesa and Kālāma above, not as license for anything to be called Buddha-word.
Grasping the teaching correctly
MN 22 (Alagaddūpama Sutta) — the water-snake simile: learning the Dhamma for the sake of debate and finding fault with others, rather than for understanding, is learning it wrongly, and it works against the learner rather than for them.
Read the passages
Pick a sutta to read it in the live reader, in Pali and translation:
See also
- Principles of Translation — how these criteria shape word-level translation choices.
- Rationale — the detailed reasoning and examples behind those principles.