Of the many works which comprise the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canonical scriptures in Pali, none has had greater appeal to the Buddhist, whether monk or layman, than the Dhammapada. It is the favourite vademecum of the devout Buddhist. The reason for this is mainly the fact that it is a small work which contains in concise, epigrammatic form ‘the concentrated essence of the religion’.
The Tipitaka is a collection of the traditionally accepted canonical texts of the Theravada (also called Hinayana), the form of Buddhism which with local variations is dominant in South-East Asian countries—Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia—and is therefore known as the Southern School of Buddhism, which is one of the two main branches of the religion, the other being the Northern School, the Mahayana, which once flourished in India, whence it spread into Tibet, Nepal, China, Korea and Japan, in which countries it counts large numbers of adherents.