Pali study tips & resources

In the interests of getting some topics going here, let’s add in anything we’ve found helpful along the way of studying Pali.

For starters, I found this book by Glen Wallis a handy addition to the course material.
https://store.pariyatti.org/Buddhavacana–PDF-eBook_p_2596.html

It’s a free PDF download and has a selection of suttas, many very short, with a glossary after each sutta to help you with new Pali words. Then it has an English translation of each to check your comprehension against. The only problem is the PDF file is locked for printing, so you cannot print it out. Unless you’re clever enough to find a way around the password requirement. Who knows why a book intended for practicing translation cannot be printed out and written on. Anyway, you can work from a screen with it. Or, on the same website, you can pay for and receive a print copy.

Another handy book that you can order online, or else you can pick up a copy if on holiday in Sri Lanka, is called Paḷipāṭhāvalī. It’s a collection of abridged and simplified Pali texts for students to study. They range from suttas to Jātaka tales and stories from the commentaries. Being simplified, the texts are fairly easy to grasp and quite satisfying to get through. Here’s the book at their online bookstore:
https://www.online.buddhistcc.com/books/palipathavali-detail.html

While we’re at it, the Buddhist Cultural Centre bookstore in Colombo is huge and pretty exciting if you’re into these things. And with books priced at around US$1-5 each, you can go pretty crazy on buying stuff 😉

There’s also https://suttacentral.net/ which has a wealth of translations in various languages of much of the Suttapitaka. I’ve been advised to be careful of some aspects of the English translations, especially those by Ajahn Sujato who runs the site and whose translations dominate, but it’s still a useful resource for finding the Pali versions of suttas for testing out your comprehension after doing some of the OCBS lessons.

Ok, please do share what you’ve found. All the best!

Peter