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The present work offers a
translation of the Itivuttaka, a collection of 112 short discourses of the
Buddha in both prose and verse. The text belongs to the Pali Canon of the
Theravada school, being placed between the Udana and the Sutta Nipata. It was
previously translated by F.L. Woodward and published together with his
translation of the Udana in Minor Anthologies of the Pali Canon, Vol. II
(London, 1935).
According to the commentarial tradition,
the suttas or discourses of the Itivuttaka were collected by the woman
lay-disciple Khujjuttara from sermons given by the Buddha while he was staying
at Kosambi. Khujjuttara was a servant of Samavati, the consort of King Udena.
She had become a stream-enterer after meeting the Buddha and subsequently
converted the women of the palace headed by Samavati to the teaching. She used
to go regularly to listen to the Buddha and then later repeated what she had
heard to the other women. The collection of these sayings became the
Itivuttaka. It is said that the emphatic statements at the beginning and end of
each of the suttas, reproduced here only in the first and last, were made by
Khujjuttara to stress that they were the Buddha's words and not her own.
Whether or not this story is true,
the Itivuttaka is the only book in the Pali Canon that introduces and concludes
its suttas in this fashion, and it is from the opening statement that the title
is derived: "This was said (vuttam) by the Lord... so (iti) I
heard" -- hence Itivuttaka, "The So-was-said" or
"Sayings."
These "Sayings" are
grouped into four unequal sections arranged, like the Anguttara Nikaya,
according to the number of items they contain, from one to four. Besides these
four sections -- The Ones, The Twos, The Threes, and The Fours -- the text is
further subdivided into vaggas, groups of roughly ten suttas. But to
simplify the presentation, in this translation these sub-groupings have been
ignored. Only the four main sections have been retained and the suttas numbered
from 1 to 112, as in the PTS edition. A number of the suttas and verses are
also found in other parts of the Sutta Pi[dagger]aka, especially the Anguttara
Nikaya, but many are unique to this collection.
In translating the Itivuttaka I have
attempted to follow the text as closely as possible and to produce an exact and
literal rendition. With the verses, however, while remaining faithful to the
meaning, I occasionally found it necessary to depart from the syntax of the
Pali. Although I did not attempt to produce a metrical translation, by
transposing lines and words and controlling the number of syllables in the
line, I aimed at producing a readable and rhythmic English rendering of the
original Pali verse.
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