Within the Buddhist tradition, the verses of the Dhammapada are regarded as the spoken words of Gautama Buddha, also known as Siddhartha Gautama. They are remembered as utterances given on many different occasions, preserved because they so concisely express key aspects of the path. In this sense, the spiritual authority behind the text is understood to be the Buddha himself, and the verses are revered as a direct echo of his wisdom.

From a more historical and textual perspective, however, the Dhammapada is not the work of a single literary author in the way that later texts might be. Rather, it is a compilation of early Buddhist verses and sayings that were transmitted orally within the monastic communities. These verses were gathered and organized by early disciples and followers, not as an original composition, but as a carefully curated collection of teachings already circulating in the living tradition.

Thus, the Dhammapada stands at an interesting meeting point between attribution and authorship. Spiritually and traditionally, its content is rooted in the Buddha’s own teachings, and that is how practitioners approach it: as a distilled voice of the Enlightened One. Historically, the actual shaping of the text—the selection, ordering, and preservation of the verses—was the work of anonymous early Buddhist practitioners and communities. In contemplating the Dhammapada, one is therefore engaging both with the remembered words of the Buddha and with the silent labor of generations of disciples who safeguarded and arranged those words for future seekers.