Reading the Buddha's Discourses in Pali - Bhikkhu Bodhi
Available from Amazon
Preface
THE INTENTION BEHIND the present book is to help students of Early Buddhism learn to read the texts of the Pāli Canon in the ancient Indian language in which they have been preserved, the language known as Pāli. The book is based on a weekly course in Pāli that I have been conducting over the past several years at Chuang Yen Monastery in upstate New York. The course is meant for students who have completed the earlier courses I gave on the basics of Pāli grammar and the reading of the Buddha’s discourses in Pāli, the former based on Lily de Silva’s Pāli Primer, the latter on James Gair and W. S. Karunatillake’s A New Course in Reading Pāli. In the subsequent weekly course that I developed we read and analyzed suttas from the major chapters of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. In each class I took a sutta (or portion of a longer sutta), explained the meaning of each word and the grammatical forms involved, and then gave a literal translation of each sentence, followed by a more natural English rendering.