The transmission of Buddha’s teaching followed many tracks as it spread east and west. We find texts in a variety of languages— Prakrit, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, as well as many modern languages. This website, however, will focus primarily on Pāḷi as the transmission medium of most interest. We will mostly use Pāḷī words in all our web pages except where Sanskrit has been used in the original scholarly works.
There have been debates, of course, on whether Pāḷi was really the dialect spoken by the Buddha himself or was, perhaps, the later dialect of Magadha which was probably the language of Asoka Maurya’s empire. Regardless of this, Pāḷi became the medium for the purist and most primitive strain of Buddhadhamma—that of the earliest Buddhism found in Burma, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos.
The Pāḷi Canon
The Pāḷi Tipiṭaka is now available online in Unicode fonts. You may need to install some fonts and make some changes to your system to view the site correctly. This digital version of the Pāḷi Canon was diligently created by the Vipassana Research Institute from the authentic volumes of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana, the Sixth Council held in Rangoon Burma in the mid 1950s. For more on the story of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana, you can read the ongoing reports of the conference from the 1950s and 1960s journal The Light of the Dhamma.