Dhamma Principles
The "o" translations, and the approach Dhamma.gift offers as a whole, rest on the points of the Buddha's Teaching from the Suttas below. These are the criteria the Buddha recommended for verifying teachings, and at the same time a practical checklist for recognizing the errors and distortions found in the vast majority of existing traditions and translations.
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": check it against the suttas and the Vinaya, rather than accepting or rejecting it on the authority of whoever reported it (the Sutta makes clear that individual monks and whole communities can pass on what is not the Teacher's Teaching, and verifying it takes a check against the Suttas and the Vinaya). Read →
The national language doesn't need to change
MN 139 (Araṇavibhaṅga Sutta) — a great many points in translations of the Dhamma violate this very principle. English words such as suffering, craving, arising, cessation, form, and intention have been given modified — either broadened or narrowed — meanings within "translated Buddhism," which breaks the principle stated by the Buddha himself: the receiving language doesn't need to be reshaped, and phenomena should be called what they would ordinarily be called in that language — in our case, English. More on this in the Rationale. Read →
MN 103 (Kinti Sutta) — when the meaning (attha) agrees but the wording (byañjana) differs, that is not something to quarrel over; disputes over minor phrasing devalue an otherwise correct teaching. But a mismatch in meaning does matter — even at the cost of some friction between both sides, it is worth clarifying what was poorly grasped as poorly grasped, and what was well grasped as well grasped. Read →
Criteria of "effectiveness" — not authority, not hearsay
AN 3.65 (Kesamutti / Kālāma Sutta) — the companion piece to Mahāpadesa: don't accept a teaching merely because of tradition, report, scripture, logic, inference, superficial plausibility, agreement with a view you already hold, the speaker's apparent competence, or "this ascetic is our teacher." Test it by whether it leads to the skillful or the unskillful, to harm or to benefit. Read →
MN 95 (Caṅkī Sutta) — the companion to Kālāma: where Kālāma says what not to infer a teaching's truth from, MN 95 says what one may honestly say instead. Safeguarding the truth (saccānurakkhana) is to say "such is my faith," not "this alone is true, anything else is wrong." Read →
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. Read →
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. Read AN 2.24 → Read AN 2.25 →
AN 2.23 — two ways of misrepresenting the Realized One: ascribing a meaning to him he did not state, or denying one he did. Read →
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. This is an important aspect of the Dhamma, and one of the criteria that, for example, helps establish that anicca should not be translated as "impermanence."1 Read →
How the Dhamma disappears 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 — "composed by poets, disciple-followers" — even today often carry more authority than the suttas themselves. Read →
SN 16.13 (Saddhammappatirūpaka Sutta) — where SN 20.7 shows how the true teaching fades, this shows why: it does not disappear while no counterfeit of it (saddhammappatirūpaka) has arisen in the world — as counterfeit gold appears, true gold vanishes. Read →
AN 5.156 (parallel: AN 4.160) — discourses learned with words and phrases misplaced, where the meaning goes astray. Read →
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. Read →
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 Dhamma is not sung
AN 5.209 (Gītassara Sutta) — five dangers for one who recites the Dhamma in a drawn-out, singing voice (āyatakena gītassarena): he is charmed by his own voice, others are charmed by it, householders take offence — "the ascetics sing just as we do", one who aims at a beautiful voice breaks his samādhi, and the next generation follows the example. Read →
The four truths in depth — Hatthipada
As in MN 28: the footprints of all animals fit into the elephant's, and everything skilful fits into the four noble truths. Hatthipada shows how the suttas themselves define every word of the truths: click a word and its definitions open ("Katamā ca, bhikkhave, X?" … "idaṁ vuccati X"), their words click again, as deep as you go. Only the Pāḷi of the four nikāyas and the suttas' own formulas; the translation is a reference.
Open Hatthipada →Read the passages
The "Read →" links next to each principle above open that sutta directly in the window here, in Pali and translation, scrolled straight to the relevant line:
See also
- Principles of Translation — how these criteria shape word-level translation choices.
- Rationale — the detailed reasoning and examples behind those principles.
- Hatthipada — the four truths and every word of them by the suttas' own definitions.
- Dataset — this reading as open data (CC BY 4.0): the project's Russian translation with the Pali, and where the suttas define each term; also on GitHub and Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23491473).