Iti 89About Devadatta
Pāli / Sanskrit:Devadattasutta
Conquered by three forms of false Dhamma, Devadatta was incurably doomed to deprivation.
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– So It Was Said 89
The Book of the Threes Chapter Four About Devadatta
This was said by the Buddha, the Perfected One: that is what I heard.
“Mendicants, overcome and overwhelmed by three things that oppose the true teaching, Devadatta is going to a place of loss, to hell, there to remain for an eon, irredeemable. What three? Corrupt wishes … Bad friendship … When there is still more to be done, stopping half-way after achieving some trifling distinction. Overcome and overwhelmed by these three things that oppose the true teaching, Devadatta is going to a place of loss, to hell, there to remain for an eon, irredeemable.”
The Buddha spoke this matter. On this it is said:
This too is a matter that was spoken by the Blessed One: that is what I heard.
The “…” is an abbreviation carried over from the Pāli original itself, called peyyāla. The early canon was memorized and recited, so passages repeated verbatim from a preceding discourse were commonly contracted to an elision mark rather than written out in full. Venerable Thích Minh Châu's translation preserves this convention. Some texts therefore look short — but that is the canonical form, not missing content or a truncated translation. The elided passages can be read in full in the preceding discourses of the same chapter.
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