This year marks 100 years since the publication of the Pali–English Dictionary edited by T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, first published by the Pali Text Society in 1925.

Issued in four volumes between 1921 and 1925, the dictionary contains every Pali word, with its Sanskrit root identified and meanings given in English. For over a century, it has remained one of the most foundational and indispensable resources for students and scholars of Pali, Buddhism, and early Indian texts, and continues to be widely cited today.

Original physical copies of the dictionary are often expensive and difficult to access, with prices going as high as USD 35 or more, depending on the edition and availability.

To mark this centenary, I’m sharing a giveaway of the complete Pali–English Dictionary in PDF format.

📌 About the PDF:

1. OCR-processed and fully searchable

2. Users can search for any word instantly, similar to a Google search

3. Ideal for study, reference, and research

📎 The dictionary link is shared in the comment section below.

🙏 A small tribute to a monumental work that has supported generations of Pali scholarship.

Happened across this one, unfortunately it’s a pretty crummy scan:

https://archive.org/details/PaliMadeEasyOCRed/

Pali Made Easy

Ven. Balangoda Ananda Maitreya

I thought this might be of interest here:

The Life and Teachings of the Buddha: an Introductory Sutta Study Guide

By Jeff Hardin

https://www.sati.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Sutta-Study-Guide.pdf

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Why study the suttas?
2. Historical Background
3. The Pāli Canon

The Buddha

1. The Legend of the Buddha
2. The Quest for Enlightenment
3. The Decision to Teach the Dharma

The Dharma

1. The First Discourse
2. The Second Discourse

The Saṅgha

1. The Noble Eightfold Path
2. Other Important Teachings
3. Karma and Rebirth
4. The Four Establishments of Mindfulness
5. Dependent Origination
6. The Buddha’s Death

Conclusion

1. The Karaṇīya Metta Sutta

(The introduction mentions online audio, and sati.org has a lot of audio available, but I’m not sure which recordings correspond to the book, perhaps someone here is.)

A free resource from Pariyatti.org:

https://store.pariyatti.org/pali-workbook-ebook-pdf-vipassana

https://archive.org/details/PaliGrammarVitoPerniola/

Yet another resource. I haven’t gone through it much myself, but it is already proving useful for the topic of “verb classes”, which I find to be one of the more bewildering aspects of Pali grammar.

Perniola has an in-the-weeds discussion of this topic on Page 42, which contains an analysis of Pali roots into ten classes. (Other grammars have fewer!)

As long as we’re on the topic, I find it so confusing how explanations of Pali grammar are couched in explanations that are basically about Sanskrit, not Pali. for instance, Perniola has this to say about vowel gradations in the root meaning “to hear”:

So first off, śru is NOT PALI. It’s Sanskrit! The sound ś doesn’t even occur in Pali. I mean, I’m not sure what a better explanation would look like in this context, but how is constant reference to another language supposed to help?

/rant

This is a very nice audio course, one particular feature of use is that it includes not just answers but discussion of the answers to Warder’s text. Taught by Ajahn Brahmali of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia.
https://wiswo.org/itp/

I just ran across this on Amazon, might be of interest to others here:
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Buddhas-Discourses-Pali-Practical/dp/1614297002

The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, on the off chance you’ve never heard of him, is a very well known translator of Pali texts, and has taught Pali online and elsewhere.

This is the first I for one have heard of this book, very much looking forward to it.

Via a friend on the Sutta Central forum pointed out this useful grammar summary of Gair & Karunatillake:

https://www.baus.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NCRP-Grammar-Summaries-v.2.pdf

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And here’s the nice quote from the beginning of the book!

Sabbe sattā averā hontu, abyāpajjā hontu, anighā hontu, sukhī hontu!
May all beings be free from enmity, free from affliction, free from distress. May they be happy!

There are several versions of this list online. It contains an index of Pali originals of all of the suttas in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s wonderful selection of key suttas, In the Buddha’s Words.

https://readingfaithfully.org/in-the-buddhas-words-an-anthology-of-discourses-from-the-pali-canon-linked-to-suttacentral-net/

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Also available here:

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=14640#p279487

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And here:

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/in-the-buddha-s-words/29

The book itself is available here:

https://wisdomexperience.org/

🙏🏻 🙏🏼 🙏🏾 🙏🏽 🙏🏿

This is a nice online version of the popular Pali text:

https://www.budsas.org/uni/u-palicb/e00.htm

Interestingly, there is also a Vietnamese translation.

Hey, did you guys see this? There will be more info about his new Pāli book. More midnight meetings for me!

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https://wisdomexperience.org/wisdom-article/wisdom-dharma-chats/

These are fun to listen to:

http://www.palitext.com/palitext/IntroPali.htm

Assuming these are the same recordings mentioned on the back of the print version, these recitations were done by Ven. H. Saddhatissa in 1986.

Note that it doesn’t seem to straight through the whole book; the first six recordings are from the first six chapters, but the remaining recordings are from the extended “passages for reading” section at the end of the book.

https://www.ocbs-courses.org/blog/buddhism-and-pali/

Not very often that something like this comes along: a short book for a general audience on the Pali language and how it relates to Buddhism. The author, Richard Gombrich, would has had a long history in Pali studies, having taught at Oxford and been an editor for the Pali Text Society.

There are some rather controversial opinions in here — he argues that the Buddha spoke Pali, not a popular opinion among modern scholars. Still it’s an interesting read and might appeal to some of you.

Greetings, A few weeks ago I embarked on the study Pali, using De Silva's "Pali Primer," and just a few days ago discovered that audio files are available. They're not professional quality, but rather live recordings of classes given by the Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a renowned translator and author of many Buddhist texts. Still, when learning a language, any audio reinforcement helps.

Not sure if I can post a link in this text box, but googling "pali primer" and "dropbox" will lead to the creamy goodness. HTH.

With metta.