Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Pali Text Society Buddhist translations (free)

Bhante Subhuti (hamericanmonk.org), Sayalay Aloka, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

How to walk the ancient Buddhist path?
The Pali Text Society has made its Monastic Disciplinary Code, Discourses, and Higher Teachings (Vinaya, Sutta, and Abhidhamma) books available for non-commercial use since 2013.

The sutra books have been extracted from the Buddhadust Website, which is still considered a “work in progress.” However, the work is good enough in its current state to reformat as eBooks.


Stephen Torrence and I (Ven. Subhuti) have done most of the work to reformat the Web pages into eBook versions. There were thousands of webpages requiring many scripts to remove the web content, which we did with Sigil, an open source project.

What if we heard about US life in Asia?
What's special about these books? These are the unabridged editions of the original PTS Sutta books, which were some of the first translations referenced by later translators.

"Unabridged" means the ellipses (…) used to represent missing repetitions have been expanded or “rolled out” with the missing repetitions added back.

It is cost effective to have the full text in electronic editions, as some people swear something is “lost” in translation if these repetitions are removed. Texts have been formatted on the Buddhadust site and grouped in a poetic way, which helps in sorting through the information while reading. 

Because these books are quite old, they are written in an old English religious style using older vocabulary.

Click for the preferred format (PDF, ePub, Mobi, AZW3) under the book to download it to any device. More

No comments: