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 Texts‘ Grammar 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 Keyboard, and 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
- A.P. Buddhadatta Mahāthera — Concise Pāḷi-English Dictionary.
- A.K. Warder — Introduction to Pāḷi
- Pāḷi Text Society, T.W. Rhys Davids & William Stede (Ed.) — Pāḷi-English Dictionary
and, among its many links to articles, the following papers by K.R. Norman:
- On Translating from Pāḷi
- Pāḷi Philology and the Study of Buddhism
- The Origin of Pāḷi and its Position among the Indo-European Languages
- The Pāḷi Language and the Theravādin Tradition
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:
- Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (login with name ‘guest’ & no password)
- CJKV-English Dictionary
- Muller’s Resources for the Study of East Asian Language and Thought
For broader reference material that also includes Pāḷi terms, see:
- Wikipedia’s Glossary of Buddhism.
- Bhante Shravasti Dhammika‘s Guide To Buddhism A to Z (with Alphabetical Index, Subject Index, and Abbreviations list).
- A Handful of Leaves provides access to a PDF file of the massive, two-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism.
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…