🌐 Web Reader — Learn the Buddha’s teachings in their earliest recorded form, with parallel Pāli and English texts.
💬 Contextual Tooltips — Build a deeper understanding with on-click explanations of Pāli text and key translated terms. Try them on this excerpt from AN 3.66 - Sāḷha sutta:
Taṁ kiṁ maññatha, sāḷhā, ime dhammā kusalā vā akusalā vāti.
What do you |think::presume, suppose, imagine, conceive [maññati]|, Sāḷha, are these |mental qualities::mental characteristics, traits [dhamma]| |wholesome::healthy, beneficial, useful [kusalesu]| or |unwholesome::unhealthy, unskillful, unbeneficial, or karmically unprofitable [akusala]|?
🫂 Embrace your independent learning journey — Bookmark discourses and highlight key passages to gradually build your personal collection of insights.
Status
These volumes of the Pāli Canon are currently being actively translated and unified with contextual tooltips, one discourse at a time. Completed translations available for reading and study:
Venerable Ānanda asks the Buddha about the purpose and benefit of wholesome ethical conduct. The Buddha explains gradual benefits of wholesome ethical conduct, starting with the immediate one of non-regret to the ultimate one of understanding and insight into liberation.
The Buddha shares his own journey of seeking the path to awakening, from leaving the household life, to studying under two meditation teachers, to attaining full awakening and an account of teaching the Dhamma to his first five disciples.
In In the Buddha’s Words, Bhikkhu Bodhi curates a rich anthology of discourses drawn from the Pali Canon that capture the full breadth of the Buddha’s teachings. Through these selected suttas, readers explore key themes such as impermanence, not-self, and the path to awakening, revealing how suffering arises and can ultimately be transcended. Each section is introduced with Bhikkhu Bodhi’s insightful commentary, which clarifies the practical application of the Dhamma in daily life. The book’s thematic structure provides a coherent roadmap to the Buddha’s profound insights, emphasizing their timeless relevance in overcoming the human predicament. In essence, In the Buddha’s Words serves as an invaluable guide for anyone seeking a clear and transformative overview of Early Buddhism.
The heart essence of the Buddha's original teachings
In Noble Truths, Noble Path, Bhikkhu Bodhi brings together key suttas from the Saṃyutta Nikāya that illuminate the essence of the Buddha's teaching - the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. Through these discourses, readers see how suffering arises, why it persists, and how it can be ended, culminating in Nibbāna. Each chapter, introduced by Ven. Bodhi, follows the structure of the Four Noble Truths, offering a clear roadmap to understand and overcome the human predicament. The book emphasizes the universal relevance of the Buddha's radical insights and guides us toward liberation from the cycle of rebirth, making it an invaluable resource for anyone seeking a concise yet profound overview of Early Buddhism.
By Bhikkhu Bodhi
Studying With The Words of The Buddha
“More than two thousand five hundred years have passed since our kind teacher, Buddha Śākyamuni, taught in India. He offered advice to all who wished to heed it, inviting them to listen, reflect, and critically examine what he had to say. He addressed different individuals and groups of people over a period of more than forty years.
After the Buddha’s passing, a record of what he said was maintained as an oral tradition. Those who heard the teachings would periodically meet with others for communal recitations of what they had heard and memorized. In due course, these recitations from memory were written down, laying the basis for all subsequent Buddhist literature. The Pāli Canon is one of the earliest of these written records and the only complete early version that has survived intact. Within the Pāli Canon, the texts known as the Nikāyas have the special value of being a single cohesive collection of the Buddha’s teachings in his own words. These teachings cover a wide range of topics; they deal not only with renunciation and liberation, but also with the proper relations between husbands and wives, the management of the household, and the way countries should be governed. They explain the path of spiritual development—from generosity and ethics, through mind training and the realization of wisdom, all the way up to the attainment of liberation.”
— Venerable Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s forward to In the Buddha’s Words
“The Buddha’s discourses preserved in the Pāli Canon are called suttas, the Pāli equivalent of the Sanskrit word sūtras. Although the Pāli Canon belongs to a particular Buddhist school—the Theravāda, or School of the Elders—the suttas are by no means exclusively Theravāda Buddhist texts. They stem from the earliest period of Buddhist literary history, a period lasting roughly a hundred years after the Buddha’s death, before the original Buddhist community divided into different schools. The Pāli suttas have counterparts from other early Buddhist schools now extinct, texts sometimes strikingly similar to the Pāli version, differing mainly in settings and arrangements but not in points of doctrine. The suttas, along with their counterparts, thus constitute the most ancient records of the Buddha’s teachings available to us; they are the closest we can come to what the historical Buddha Gotama himself actually taught. The teachings found in them have served as the fountainhead, the primal source, for all the evolving streams of Buddhist doctrine and practice through the centuries. For this reason, they constitute the common heritage of the entire Buddhist tradition, and Buddhists of all schools who wish to understand the taproot of Buddhism should make a close and careful study of them a priority.”
— Bhikkhu Bodhi in In the Buddha’s Words
“It was, and is, my attitude towards the Suttas that, if I find anything in them that is against my own view, they are right, and I am wrong.”
— Venerable Ñāṇavīra Thera
“AT PRESENT, ALL THAT IS LEFT of Buddhism are the words of the Buddha.”
— Venerable Ācariya Mahā Boowa in Arahattamagga ArahattaPhala
“Therefore, Ānanda, dwell with yourselves as your own island, with yourselves as your own refuge, with no other refuge; dwell with the Dhamma as your island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other refuge.
Whoever, Ānanda, now or after my passing, dwells as an island unto themselves, with themselves as their own refuge, not dependent on another as a refuge; with the Dhamma as their island, with the Dhamma as their refuge, not dependent on another as a refuge; they, Ānanda, will be the foremost of those who are keen on the training.”
The Words of the Buddha project is dedicated to restoring the Buddha’s teachings by unifying existing translations of the Pāli Canon into a clear, consistent, and accessible resource.
The project is founded by Siddharth Kothari, a practitioner of the Buddha’s teachings since 2022. Siddharth is also the creator of the Reddit community r/WordsOftheBuddha ↗ and Buddha GPT - Buddhism Dhamma Companion for ChatGPT ↗. He has a major in Computer Science and previously founded ReactiveSearch, a search developer tools business.
I have been reviewing and translating 1-2 suttas daily since March, 2024.
The Words Of The Buddha project then got its start on July 1, 2024 from an inspiration when Siddharth was on a retreat at the Papae meditation centre near Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand.
Roadmap
Unification Goals
Faithful reproduction from the source texts with a line-by-line fidelity between Pali and English texts. The Pali to English meanings are informed based on Digital Pali Dictionary ↗ as well as available English translations.
Preservation words in their original form that are representative of people, a way of practice, a significant term or a place: e.g. bhikkhu, jhāna, Nibbāna, Sāvatthi, etc.
Provide context with tooltips for key terms that can benefit from a broader understanding.
Preserve causality sequence when inferable from the Pāli texts of how things have come to be, how they change and how they fade away, e.g. wearing away of the mental defilements instead of destruction of the taints.
Preserve repetitions in the Pāli texts to maintain the original structure and rhythm of the teachings.
Reading experience
Reading mode with a focus on the text and minimal distractions.
Display Pāli text side-by-side or interleaved with English translations.
Platform
Website
Search by sutta title, keyword or text
Bookmarking
Highlights
Annotations
User sign-in and personal study space
Improve Discovery
Sutta index by similes
Sutta index by key persons
Sutta recommendations by mental qualities
Recommended reading paths
License: Free To Use
Translations are in the public domain and are available for free to use with no rights reserved by the author.
