The Pāḷi Language

The Pāḷi Language


The earliest complete Buddhist Cannon is preserved in the Pāḷi language. There are also texts of significance written in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Gandhari, Chinese, Tibetan, as well as fragments in Khotanese and Uighur

Binh Anson‘s BuddhaSasana Web page, The Home of Pāḷi, offers several articles that provide an excellent overview of Pāḷi’s relationship to early Buddhism.

Although there are no easy paths to learning Pāḷi, there are numerous online resources.

Check out Ancient Buddhist TextsGrammar and Prosody section. It includes Ānandajoti Bhikkhu‘s A Guide to the Pronunciation of Pāḷi, which is a reasonable place to start.

Another good starting point is Access to Insight’s Pāḷi Language Study Aids. Tipiṭaka.net has three pages of resources Pāḷi, Pāḷi Keyboardand Pāḷi Synthesis

There are numerous places online that allow downloading of fonts with the appropriate Pāḷi diacritical markings. See, for example, Coping with Diacritics, Dhammadanā.org‘s Fonts page, and the South Asia Language Resource Center‘s Fonts Resources page. 

The Pāḷi Tipiṭaka website provides some very helpful instructions for typing  Pāḷi characters (with appropriate diacriticals) in Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. In a Windows environment, download the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (for issues with Windows 10 see the discussion here). Then, simply install the appropriate file from the Pāḷi Keyboard Web page.

The excellent Library section of A Handful of Leaves includes

and, among its many links to articles, the following papers by K.R. Norman:

Nayanatiloka – Buddhist Dictionary, Manual of Terms and Doctrines is a quite useful reference. 

In the Pāḷi Toolbox of Buddha Vacana, there is a search engine for the Concise Pāḷi-English Dictionary

Access to Insight has A Glossary of Pāḷi and Buddhist Terms.

Buddha Vacana has a Glossary of Pāḷi terms

Dhamma Sāmi‘s website, Dhammadanā.org has a Pāḷi English Glossary

dhammatalks.org‘s, talks, writings, and translations of Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, includes his Pāḷi-English Glossary.

Buddhism-dict.net has three items of interest:

For broader reference material that also includes Pāḷi terms, see:

Glen Wallis’ workbook, Buddhavacana: A Pāḷi Reader, is freely available as a PDF download from Pariyatti, where it is characterized as follows:

Buddhavacana (trans. “the word of the Buddha”) is a comprehensive Pāḷi reader intended to enable a student to move directly into reading the Pāḷi Nikayas. Author Glenn Wallis has selected sixteen suttas, each comprising a section of the book. After each sutta are blank pages where the student can write down their own rendering; a word-by-word guide to the sutta, with brief grammatical annotations; and at the end of the whole book, polished translations by Wallis himself of all the suttas offered for study.

From its Preface we read:

This Reader has three related goals. First, it aims to encourage the study of Buddhist canonical literature in Pali (pāḷi). … Second, the sixteen texts that comprise the Reader were chosen to provide the student with a reliable overview of Siddhattha Gotama’s teachings. … Finally, in including the texts that it does, the Reader aims to help create critics of Buddhism as it begins to take root in the West. Our word “critic” comes from the Greek term for someone who discerns and judges with care. So, it is hoped that modern-day Buddhist practitioners would carefully dissect, probe, and question tradition, and not simply accept the views of believers and teachers past and present.

 Buddha Vacana, The words of the Buddha is a website with side-by-side Pāḷi-English versions of suttas

…dedicated to those who wish to understand better the words of the Buddha by learning the basics of Pāḷi language, but who don’t have much time available for it. The idea is that if their purpose is merely to get enabled to read the Pāḷi texts and have a fair feeling of understanding them, even if that understanding does not cover all the minute details of grammatical rules… 

Their Suttas word by word section features over sixty suttas where simply hovering over a Pāḷi word will pop up its translation. It can then be seen in context with the adjacent English translation of the entire sutta.
Toronto Mahavihara‘s website has a PDF of A. P. Buddhadata‘s New Pāḷi Course, Book 1 (7th ed.)
Buddhist eLibrary‘s Pāḷi section (Home > eBook Library > Theravāda Texts > Pāḷi Studieshas PDF files of the following items:

Two texts by Wilhelm Geiger are also available online:

Eisel Mazard’s Resources for Learning Pāḷi is quite helpful and includes three Pāḷi textbooks

Bodhi Monastery has  A Course in the Pali Language using the textbook, A New Course in Reading Pāḷi: Entering the Word of the Buddha by Gair and Karunatilleke and Ven. Nayanatiloka’s Pāḷi Dictionary. It is structured around a series of 34 audio lectures and features the following Pāḷi grammatical tables designed by Bhikkhu Nyanatusita (editor of the Buddhist Publication Society):

I am delighted to note that Introduction to Pāḷi by Ajahn Brahmali (based on the book of the same name by A.K. Warder) is being presented in 23 parts on the Wisdom & Wonders website. In addition to video and audio files, it provides access to the following resources:

Bhikkhu Bodhi offers A Course in the Pāḷi Language (34 lectures) and Pariyatti Learning Center has Introduction to Pāḷi and Exploring the Path – Pāḷi Course.

Arrow River Forest Hermitage‘s Pāḷi Tutor Web page provides:

as well as links to: 

The Internet Archive contains both volumes of G. P. Malalasekera’s massive Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names. It contains descriptions of Pāḷi Suttas as well as individuals who appear in Pāḷi literature.

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