Pali Resources
Friday May 18, 2007
The list of resources below is for those who are beginning to learn Pali, rather than for big-shot international scholars with professorships coming out of their ears. It is an attempt to bring together some of the materials that I have found useful whilst taking my first steps with the language.
If you have any suggestions to add to this, I will have a look at them and make any changes that I think are useful.
Books
There are lots of books out there. Perhaps the clearest and closest to a ‘teach yourself’ book is Lily da Silva’s Pali Primer, available for free online (see link below), but hard to get hold of in paper format. That aside, here are a few more that may be useful:
A New Course in Reading Pali
Introduction to Pali
Pali Buddhist Texts
Pali Grammar for Students
Fonts
First off, you’ll probably want a Roman Pali font, so you can type in the extended Roman alphabet often used for writing Pali. I tend to use Times Extended Roman, which is attractive and can be found here.
There is also a good range of fonts at the Association for Insight Meditation. See their fonts page.
Although I’ve not tested them, I’m told that the public domain DejaVu fonts also support Romanised Pali. Find them here.
Some people recommend Times Norman for writing Pali. Heaven knows why. It messes up my line breaks. Horrible.
Typing Pali
Now you’ve got your fonts installed, you don’t want to spend hours fiddling with the character map to actually type the stuff, do you? So you need to get hold of a Pali keyboard tool. The one here works on windows, and is the one that I use. It is very good indeed, and cuts down on a lot of the hassle of fiddling with cutting and pasting. Most letters in the extended Pali Roman set are accessed by using Ctrl + Alt + the nearest equivalent in the Roman alphabet, so to get a long ‘i’ (written ī), you simply press Ctrl + Alt + i. How much easier could it be? I’m still looking for a way of inputting Pali easily on my linux laptop, however.
If this keyboard doesn’t work for you, the Association for Insight Meditation, once again, have another Pali keyboard, still in the beta stages. Pay them a visit here and give it a go.
Dictionaries.
The Pali Text Society’s dictionary is archived online here. Those Victorians knew how to be thorough.
Nyanatiloka’s Manual of Buddhist Terms is helpful too.
The Dictionary of Pali Proper Names is good as a Who’s Who, but also has place names as well. See if you can find out how many characters in the Pali texts met their end by being mown down by cows in bad moods. Cows in those days were obviously much grumpier than today.
Grammar and Reference
There’s some excellent stuff out there. Lily da Silva’s Pali Primer is available online, and although the formatting isn’t beautiful, it does a good job at setting out the basics.
Another invaluable resource is the Pali Primer Guide, which is available as a PDF, and which summarises the grammatical rules from da Silva’s Pali Primer, and includes the glossary from the book.
Those folks at Buddhanet also have a range of resources and e-books, which can be found here, including a load of Pali learning materials in PDF format.
Texts and Readers
The digital Pali reader is worth taking a look at. It runs in your browser, and is a very handy resource. It is a bit rough, ready and not beautiful, but it seems to do a very good job.
Also one to watch is the Pali reader which has a lovely interface, although it is still in a beta version, and is a bit buggy at the moment. But do keep a watch on this one, or if you are in any way technically inclined, download it an submit any bugs that you find to help the author out.
There’s an online database version of the Pali Canon here. I’ve not tried this yet, but it is searchable and may be handy.
Miscellaneous.
For vocabulary learning, jMemorize, a flash-card learning program is great. You’d need to import your own Pali word list via excel or Open Office or something like that. I’m planning to sort out my own word-lists for this one, and when and if I get round to it, I’ll post a download link here on thinkBuddha.
Dear Wil,
Thanks for the excellent page, and for the Pali references. I’ve studied Pali and Sanskrit for four years each, and can comment a bit on Steven Collins’ Pali Grammar for Students. It’s my opinion that this book is the best Pali grammar available in English, period. However, there is one caveat: it assumes a certain level of Sanskrit knowledge. This is to a certain extent unavoidable. Pali grammar is often not really comprehensible except in its relationships to Sansksrit grammar (despite the fact that Pali is much more simple). Full disclosure dictates that I mention that Steven Collins, who is one of the anglophone world’s foremost scholars of Buddhism (see his “selfless persons,” and “Nirvana and other Buddhist felicities”) is my teacher and dissertation advisor. Regardless, it is most certainly a better introduction that the Gair, which I also attempted to use early on.
As for fonts, did you try the Pali Text Society’s fonts? . Thanks again for all your blogging. I’ve been watching and enjoying for about a year now!
— Erik Davis · May 18, 02:00 PM · #
Thanks for the comment, Erik. I’ve read Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities – a long time ago – and found it excellent, and it is partly on account of this that I thought it worth mentioning the Pali grammar. I may get a copy. Sanskrit, however, I’ll be steering clear of for the time being!
I’ll check out the PTS fonts. And thanks for the feedback on the site.
Best wishes,
Will
