The Aṭṭhakavagga, in modern English.

The Aṭṭhakavagga is sixteen short poems from Sutta Nipāta Book IV — one of the oldest preserved layers of the Pali canon. Some are monologues; others are dialogues, where the Buddha responds to deferential questioners, polemical opponents, and sectarian disputants. The voice is direct and image-heavy: snake's-head, lotus on the leaf, broken boat, fish in shallow water. There's almost none of the later doctrinal scaffolding the rest of the canon was organized into.

The collection has been translated into English several times — Sujato, Bodhi, Thanissaro, Fronsdal, Norman, Lee — and we read all of them. We'd have been happy to ship one. The ones we admired most aren't ours to license; the free ones are tuned for different audiences. So we made our own.

We wanted these poems to land in modern English the way they land in Pali. Plain, direct, image-preserving. For a reader who's sat with metta or with the breath but never opened a Pali dictionary.

We translated from the segment-aligned Mahāsaṅgīti Pali, line by line. Recurring terms are locked across all sixteen suttas — the same Pali word renders the same English word every time, so structural echoes between poems stay visible. Every verse was calibrated against all six prior published translations, and divergences are documented in a per-sutta choice-point note. In the dialogues, the Buddha's voice and each questioner's voice were rendered distinctly: Tissa Metteyya, Sāriputta, Māgaṇḍiya, and the sectarian disputants of the longer suttas each sound like themselves; the Buddha holds steady. Pali quotes are verified against the corpus; scholarly citations against the original sources. In an era when plausible-sounding citations are easy to fabricate, that discipline matters.

Every word choice has a reason. The full bibliography is at gotama.ai.