Pali Study Group
The Reader
This site includes a built-in reader for our selection of suttas, with translator footnotes and four reading themes, which you can switch between via the 4 circles in the top right corner. This website can be installed like an app, enabling a better reading experience.
How it works
Open a section. Tap a footnote marker to read the note without losing your place. Swipe down to dismiss.
The selection
The selection of suttas, introductions to them, and translator footnotes all come directly from the excellent anthology, "In the Buddha's Words" by Bhikku Bohdi.
The Pali Cannon is a massive body of work, roughly 27 times larger than the english bible.
It's simply too much for a newcomer to navigate through in a edifying way without a guide; the anthological work of Bhikku Bodhi is being used here to make our time studying this body of work significantly more edifying than it would be otherwise. His work is incredible and we owe it a great debt; this study group may very well have not been possible without it.
That being said, the scope of his anthology is simply too large for us to effectively go through as a group; some editorial decisions have been made as to what to keep. This leads to some strange moments in the introductions he has written that we have included in the reader, like when he mentions chapters that are not included in our selections from his anthology.
We considered editing the introductions to scrub out these confusing mentions but ultimately decided not to; to do so felt too disrepectful.
If your curiousity is peaked by what is mentioned, we highly encourage you to pick up a copy of the complete anthology yourself.
Meetups
Group schedule TBD