BodhgayaNews

Buddhist Studies: resources for studying Pali Texts

Melbourne, Peter Friedlander, November 2007. A great way to start investigating the Buddhist traditition is by looking at translations of Buddhist texts, the original Pali of the texts and the ways in which Pali words are translated. Three useful links which take you to resources for this are as follows.

AccesstoInsight a website with an amazing collection of Pali suttas in translation, and extensive materials from the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy's publications.
The Pali Text Society' Pali English Dictionary: a remarkable resource that allows you to search, for both Pali and English terms, and see how they are used in Pali Buddist Texts. For instance, a search for 'hope', combined with selecting the option to search for 'words containing' the term, brings up the 26 occurences of this term in the dictionary.
Pali Canon: Online Database: (also as of 14 March 2008 a mirror at www.bodhgayanews.net/pali.htm) a searchable version of the original text of the Pali canon. It allows you to search to for words in the canon. For instance, using the 'advanced search' page, and searching for 'hetu' in canonical works/Sutta Pitaka/Digha Nikaya, you can find the 70 references to this word in the Digha Nikaya.

I hope to add further links later to other sources at a later time, for other Buddhist literatures, such as those for Mahayana texts, but even just these three sources are enough for a life time, or perhaps several life times, of study.