Compared with the early chapters which, in part, outlined a path towards nibbana, these chapters focus more on the suffering that might motivate one to follow the Dhamma, emphasizing The Importance of Exercising Self-Restraint in achieving detachment and enlightenment when confronted by the world’s ills. In particular, Chapters 9, 10, and 11 highlight destructive forces that are the source of suffering, like evil and physical decline. 

Verse 149 summarizes the Buddha’s motivation to seek enlightenment following his first encounters with suffering as a young man: “What delight is there, once you’ve seen / These dove-coloured bones / Cast away / Like gourds in autumn?” The sight of corpses carries particular weight in Buddhist mythology, functioning very similarly to the memento mori of European traditions. A corpse was the final thing that the Buddha saw outside his palace before deciding to become a renouncer, and while leaving his palace he is said to have seen the palace courtesans asleep in contorted positions as if they were lifeless corpses. Verse 149 thus invokes these important stories of the Buddha’s life, but imbues the dying with more beauty with the naturalistic simile. This tension between beauty and decay suggests that even though a person may feel pain because they know that they will die, death is, in fact, neither good nor bad.

Much like the ambivalence towards death established in Chapter 11, Chapter 13 encourages an ambivalence towards the world itself, invoking The Nature of Opposing Universal Forces. The Buddha tells listeners, “You should see the world / As a bubble, a mirage / If you look on it like this / The King of Death can’t see you” (v. 170). The metaphor of the “bubble” and the “mirage” illustrate the Buddhist worldview that material experiences are illusory, and that the physical realm is, in fact, empty. Our senses, which are deceptive, are what form attachments to the physical world. If one distrusts their senses and recognizes the material illusions, they will no longer feel the need to form passionate attachments to transitory things. Māra lurks over the text, a constant threatening reminder of the suffering that will ensue for those who do not take the Buddha’s teachings to heart. By personifying the abstract concepts of suffering, temptation, and death into one deity this way, the text concentrates otherwise diffuse fears into a concretely terrifying entity.



On the opposite side of the terrible consequences for not following the Dhamma are the extreme rewards that come with following it. The Buddha asserts, “Better than sole rulership of the earth / Or going to heaven / Or lordship over all the worlds / Is the fruit of Stream-Entry” (36). Ironically, although Buddhism discourages its followers from giving in to sensory pleasures, the Dhammapada uses sensory pleasures as metaphors for the awards of enlightenment. Here, achieving a higher-stage enlightenment (“stream-entry”) is likened to a delicious fruit. Luxurious food imagery also appears in Verse 181, wherein the enlightenment of the Buddhas is compared with a banquet amongst gods. 

This imagery is meant to be easily understandable, and it is ultimately supposed to undercut the potency of earthly pleasures by urging Buddhists to consider how much greater the rewards of enlightenment are in comparison to merely material joys. The irony of their usage gets at one of the core issues for any text that seeks to explain the Buddha’s teaching in plain language, as such texts seek to explain in the earthly form of language and literature a belief system that rejects earthly things. The Dhammapada does not seek to resolve this paradox, since its main goal is accessibility, and thus the text uses similes, symbols, and metaphors as a highly accessible way to explain the abstract concepts of the Dhamma.