The Words of the Buddha

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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.

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.

"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."

"AT PRESENT, ALL THAT IS LEFT of Buddhism are the words of the Buddha."

"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."

About

I have been reviewing and translating 1-2 suttas daily since March, 2024.

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 ↗️ (opens in a new tab) 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 may benefit from a broader understanding, e.g. Greed (lust, desire, attachment), aversion (ill-will, hatred, resentment), and delusion (assumption making tendencies, absence of close examination and verification)
• Preserve causality sequence when inferable from the Pāli texts of how things come to be be, how they change and how they fade away, e.g. wearing away of the taints 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.
• Allow a side-by-side or line-by-line Pali view.

Platform

• Website
• Search by sutta title, keyword or text
• Bookmarking
• Highlighting and Annotating

Improve Discovery

• Sutta index by similes
• Sutta index by key persons
• Natural language search
• Recommended reading paths

License: Free To Use