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DISPLAY‐DHAMMAPADA(6) display-dhammapada man page DISPLAY‐DHAMMAPADA(6)

NAME

display‐dhammapada

SYNOPSIS

display‐dhammapada [ARGUMENT] [TRANSLATION]

Augments fortune-dhammapada to use locale (de or pl), prints a specified or random verse from the Dhammapada, and includes translation notes.

DESCRIPTION

The Dhammapada is an anthology of 423 verses from the Kuddaka Nikaya part of the Theravada Pali Canon. It contains Buddhist ethical and spiritual precepts.

Translations available: 2 English translations (by John Richard or F. Max Muller), German, or Polish.

NOTE: Verses may have multiple paragraphs or numbers associated with nature of the Dhammapada.

ARGUMENTS

number [1-423] Print the given number verse.

all Print all the verses.

about Print translation notes.

TRANSLATIONS

Defaults to German or Polish locale, otherwise all other locale default to the English translation by Richards.

r | ‐r : Use Richard's translation (default).

m | ‐m : Use Muller's translation.

de | ‐de : Use the German translation (default for Polish locale).

pl | ‐pl : Use the Polish translation (default for German locale).

EXAMPLES

display‐dhammapada : Displays a random verse from Richard's translation.

display‐dhammapada -m : Displays a random verse from Muller's translation.

display‐dhammapada 1 : Displays verse 1 from Richard's translation.

display‐dhammapada m 32 : Displays verse 32 from Muller's translation.

display‐dhammapada all : Displays all verses (default Richard's).

display‐dhammapada about : Displays translation notes (default Richard's).

SUGGESTIONS

Not guaranteed to work as these rely on external programs.

To display a verse each time you log in on a console or open a terminal, put display‐dhammapada in your ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, or ~/.login, as appropriate for your shell.

To use display‐dhammapada with cowsay:

display‐dhammapada | cowsay ‐W 120 ‐t

To use display‐dhammapada with zenity

display‐dhammapada | zenity ‐‐text‐info ‐‐title="Dhammapada Verse" ‐‐width=600 ‐‐height=200

display‐dhammapada can be used with the KDE "amor" in the kdetoys package. Refer to the KDE documentation for details.

One can automatically attach Dhammapada verse in e-mail footer. To do this with mutt add set signature=display-dhammapada| in your ~/.muttrc file.

FILES

/usr/games/display‐dhammapada

/usr/share/display-dhammapada/dhammapada.about

/usr/share/display-dhammapada/dhammapada.m.about

/usr/share/display-dhammapada/dhammapada.de.about

/usr/share/display-dhammapada/dhammapada.pl.about

BUGS

Please report bugs on : https://gitlab.com/bodhi.zazem/display-dhammapada

SEE ALSO

fortunes-dhammapada fortune-mod

AUTHORS

display-dhammapada was originally written by Richard Cepas <rch@online.lt> and later modified by bodhi.zazen to be compatible with fortune.

Copyright GPL v3

Home Page: https://gitlab.com/bodhizazen.net/display-dhammapada

Richards' English translation of the Dhammapada: Copyright (C) 1993 John Richards, Pembrokeshire (UK), permission granted for use here. See http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/dhammapada.htm

Muller's translation of the Dhammapada: Public Domain, used here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

Polish translation (by Zbigniew Becker): Public Domain, as explained at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain See also http://mahajana.net/dhammapada/

German translation (by http://www.zeno.org - Contumax GmbH & Co. KG): Public Domain (Gemeinfrei, as explained at http://www.zeno.org/Zeno/-/Lizenz%3A+Gemeinfrei

January 2026 2.0