Buddhism
The early Buddhist discourses, preserved in Pali as the teaching of the Buddha and his community.
What it is
These texts were carried orally for several centuries before they were written down, in a language close to the one the Buddha is thought to have spoken. They were shaped for memory: repeated phrasing, numbered lists, verses that keep their form when recited in company. The collections offered here are the short ones, sayings and brief discourses rather than the long expositions.
Their subject is largely practical. They describe how craving and aversion arise, what attention does to them, and how a person might act differently as a result. The register is closer to instruction than to prayer, and much of it is addressed to lay people rather than to monastics.
Where these words come from
Dhammapada
Sayings of the Dhamma · Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato
423 verses · CC0
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Sutta Nipāta
Anthology of Discourses · Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato
73 discourses · CC0
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Udāna
Heartfelt Sayings · Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato
80 discourses · CC0
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Itivuttaka
So It Was Said · Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato
112 sections · CC0
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How a passage reaches you
What you write is read for its sense and its feeling, then matched to a place in this canon: a collection, a verse, a discourse. The words themselves are never composed for you. Our code fetches them from the edition above and shows them with the translator named, and a reference it cannot find there is dropped rather than filled in.