A Free Translation That Outgrew the Line It Translated

Peter Harvey's survey of Buddhist teaching situates this opening verse inside a technical vocabulary that Muller's famous translation smooths over rather than reproduces. Dhamma in this line does not mean teaching or doctrine, its more familiar sense elsewhere in Buddhist usage, but refers to the momentary mental and physical states Buddhist psychological analysis, the Abhidhamma tradition, treats as the basic units experience is built from, arising and passing in rapid succession rather than persisting as a stable character. Manopubbangama dhamma is closer to mental states are preceded by mind than to Muller's broader all that we are, a difference between a precise claim about how one momentary state conditions the next and a general claim about thought shaping personality over a lifetime.

The freer translation is the one that escaped into wider English usage, quoted in contexts that have nothing to do with Buddhist psychology and often nothing to do with Buddhism at all. Harvey's account of the underlying doctrine, that mental states are followed by consequences the way a cart wheel follows the ox that draws it, describes something narrower and more specific than the popular saying, not a metaphor for positive thinking but a claim within a larger theory of how one moment of consciousness conditions the next, without any of the moments amounting to a fixed self.