Chinese Buddhist gathas are written in unrhymed blank verse with four, five, or seven characters to a line. With few exceptions, each line of English in Robinson's translation corresponds to a single line of the Chinese. Being collective literature, gathas are concerned more with affirming a group's doctrine than with individual expression. All but the first three poems are Mahayana; that is, they deal with the course of the bodhisattva, the enlightenment being.