The verses now known as the Dhammapada arise from a very early stratum of Buddhist teaching, reaching back toward the time when the Buddha’s words were still carried primarily in living memory. Many of these short, pithy sayings are understood to have circulated orally among the early communities, reflecting a period close to the Buddha’s own lifetime in the 5th–4th centuries BCE. Yet the text did not appear all at once as a single, unified book. Rather, it coalesced gradually, as different clusters of verses were gathered, arranged, and eventually fixed into a recognizable collection.

Scholarly study generally places the formation of the Dhammapada as a compiled text in the centuries following the Buddha’s passing. The Pali version, which later became the most widely known, is usually dated to the period between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century BCE, with some scholars extending the window to the 1st century CE. By that time, the verses had been shaped into something close to their present arrangement, as part of the broader effort to codify the early Buddhist canon. From this vantage point, the Dhammapada as a collection is roughly 2,000–2,300 years old, while the oldest layers of its content reach back another few centuries.

The existence of multiple recensions—Pali, Gandhari, and Sanskrit—suggests that these verses were cherished and transmitted in several early Buddhist communities, each preserving and organizing them in its own way. The earliest firm manuscript and inscriptional evidence appears somewhat later, around the first centuries of the Common Era, indicating that by then the text was already well established. This layered history means that the Dhammapada can be seen both as a window into the earliest Buddhist wisdom and as the fruit of a long process of reflection and preservation. Its age, therefore, is not a single date carved in stone, but a span of centuries in which spoken teachings slowly crystallized into a revered scripture.