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). Read →
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. Read →
The receiving 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 →
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. Treating every question as if it deserved a flat yes/no is itself a source of distortion. 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." Read →
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 — "composed by poets, disciple-followers" — even today often carry more authority than the suttas themselves. 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 →
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.