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Pali is an ancient Indian language of uncertain origin. It is related to several other old
Indian languages including Sanskrit which is perhaps the oldest Indian
language. Strictly speaking the language of Indus valley civilization is older but very
little writing in that language survives except for a large number of seals which
remain undeciphered.

The Pali language has become the vehicle for the preservation of ancient Buddhist
literature. The oldest collection of Buddhist discourses, known as the Pali Canon has,
and the term indicates, been preserved in the Pali language.

The following article on Pali is from the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


 







 (ISO 639-1: pi; ISO 639-2: pli) is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. It is
most famous as the language in which the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism (also
known as the Pāli Canon or in Pāli the Tipitaka) were written down in Sri Lanka in
the 1st century BCE. Pāli has been written in a variety of scripts,
from Brahmi, Devanagari and other Indic scripts through to a romanised (western)
form devised by T. W. Rhys Davids of thePali Text Society.



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—Ê 1 Language origins and development

—Ê 2 Lexicon
—Ê 3 Example of Pāli with English translation
—Ê - Pali Alphabets (Unicode)
—Ê [ Pali text in ASCII
—Ê 6 Setting up a font for Pali transliteration in Windows
—Ê r References
—Ê ‰ See also
—Ê 9 External links

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The word Pāli itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text", and this name for the
language seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pāli" (in
the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary
or the vernacular following after it on the Manuscript page. As such, the name of the
language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name
also varies, being found with both long "ā" and short "a", and also with either a
retroflex or non-retroflex "l" sound. To this day, there is no single, standard spelling
of the term; all four spellings can be found in textbooks.

Pāli is a literary language of the Prakrit language family; it is not now (and never was)
an informal, spoken language, in the sense of a mother tongue. Like the majority of
prose and poetic traditions of classical India, Prakrits are artifical languages, further
removed from daily speech than Shakespear's English was removed from the
vernacular of his contemporary England. Despite excellent scholarship on this
problem, there is persistent confusion as to the inter-relation of Pali to the vernacular
of ancient Magadhi.

Pāli was considered by early Buddhists to be linguistically similar to old Magadhi or

even a direct continuation of that language. Many Theravada sources refer to the Pāli
language as 'Magadhan' or the 'language of Magadhi'. However, Magadhi is an
Eastern Indian language whereas Pāli most closely resembles Western Indian
inscriptions. Oskar von Hinuber has speculated that Pāli may have originated as a
form of lingua franca or trade language used at the time of the Ashokan Empire. By
the time of the spread of Buddhism to Sri Lanka (by missionaries sent by
King Ashoka, according to Buddhist sources), Pāli was a significant enough literary
language that it had already been used to record the complete Tipitaka. After the Pali
Canon was transmitted to Sri Lanka, it continued to be preserved entirely in Pāli,
while the commentarial tradition that accompanied it (according to the information
provided by Buddhaghosa) was translated into Sinhalese and preserved in local
languages for several generations.

In mainland India, but ultimately it was supplanted by Sanskrit as a literary and

religious language following the formulation of Classical Sanskrit by the
scholar Panini. In Sri Lanka, Pāli is thought to have entered into a period of decline
around the [th Century (as Sanskrit rose in prominance), but ultimately survived. The
work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important
scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Visuddhimagga and the other
commentaries that Buddhaghosa compiled codified and condensed the Sinhalese
commentarial tradition that had been preserved and expanded in Sri Lanka since the
3rd Century.

Today Pāli is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and is frequently
chanted in a ritual context. The secular literature of Pāli historical chronicals, medical
texts, and inscriptions, is also of great historical importance. The great centers of Pali
learning remain in the Theravada nations of South-East Asia: Myanmar, Sri
Lanka, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Pāli scholarship in Northern India generally
ended with the rise of theSena dynasty, with an uncertain process of decline in
peninsular India, perhaps lasting the longest in Orissa, i.e., eventually ending (along
with Buddhist practice itself) with the fall of the last resistance to the expanding
Muslim empires on the subcontinent. Since the 19th century, various societies for the
revival of Pāli studies in India have promoted awareness of the language and its
literature, perhaps most notably the Maha Bodhi Societyfounded by Anagarika
Dhammapala.

In Europe, the Pali Text Society has been a major force in promoting the study of Pāli
by Western scholars since its founding in 1‰‰1. Based in the United Kingdom, the
society publishes romanised Pāli editions, along with many English translations of
these sources. The Pali Text Society was in part founded to compensate for the very
low level of funds allocated to Indology in late 19th century England; incongruously,
the English were not nearly so robust in Sanskrit and Prakrit language studies
as Germany, Russia and even Denmark --a situation that many would say continues to
this day. Without the inspiration of colonial holdings such as the former British
occupation of Sri Lanka and Burma, institutions such as the Danish Royal
Library have built up major collections of Pāli manuscripts, and major traditions of
Pāli studies.

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Pāli shares common etymologies for virtually every word in the language with the
other Prakritic "Middle Indo-European Languages", e.g., the Jain Prakrits. The
relationship to earlier Sanskrit (e.g., Vedic language) is less direct and more
complicated; the Pāli language's resemblance to Sanskrit is often exaggerated by
comparing it to more recent Sanskrit poetry --i.e., the latter being influenced by Pāli
and centuries of other Middle-Indo-European language development. Historically,
influence between Pāli and Sanskrit has been felt in both directions. This is
demonstrably true (e.g.) in the instance of Ashvaghosa, a Pāli-educated Buddhist
monk, who became the first author of the Sanskrit kavya genre of poetry, highly
influential on Sanskrit poetics thereafter. Likewise, in Sanskrit philosophy, post-
Buddhist schools such as Shankara's Vedanta have been directly influenced both by
Buddhist Philosophy and argumentation, with concomitant effects in the use of the
language itself.

Post-Canonical Pāli demonstrates some direct adoptions of technical vocabulary from

Sanskrit, and a few loan-words from local languages where Pāli was used (e.g. Sri
Lankans adding Sinhalese words to Pāli). These usages differentiate the Pāli found in
the Suttapitaka from later compositions such as the commentaries and folklore Jataka,
and comparative study (and dating) of texts on the basis of such loan-words is now a
specialized trade unto itself.

The fact that Pāli was not exclusively used to convey the teachings of the Buddha is
demonstrable from the existence of a number of secular texts, such as books of
medical science/instruction. However, western scholarly interest in the language has
been (for obvious reasons) focused upon religious and philosophical literature.

Within the context of religious writings, similar-sounding words to those found in

Sanskrit can have significantly different meanings than those of Pāli. The active re-
definition and re-invention of the religious meanings assigned to certain key terms
(such as dharma/dhamma) was an active aspect of philosophic debate for many
centuries, and the Buddhist, Jains, and various schools of Hinduism all had
competitive notions of the value and significance of these terms.

The philosophy of early Mahayana Buddhism found in Sanskrit and the Buddhism
recorded in Pāli are, in many respects, mutually opposed; however, historical sources
indicate that these were not the only schools, nor the only languages, that participated
in the debates within the Buddhist fold. There is no extant Buddhist literature of the
Prakrit language Paisaci, but this and other languages were associated with particular
philosophical approaches to Buddhist doctrine (and particular sectarian affiliations) in
recorded history.

Needless to say, there is a still further gulf between the philosophy of early Buddhism
and contemporaneous Brahmanical thought of the Middle Indic period, including
beliefs about the respective sacred languages themselves. While Sanskrit words were
thought to inhere as a part of the thing they described, Pāli words were thought to
have only conventional significance. Sanskrit, Pāli, and the Jain Prakrits, were all
represented as the language spoken by the gods in the popular literature of the
respective religions, and various claims as to the supernatural origins or supernatural
efficacy were assigned to these languages by their proponents. Unto this day, it is
believed in many Theravada cultures that taking a vow in Pāli has a special
significance, and, as one example of the supernatural power assigned to chanting in
the language, the recitation of the vows of Angulimala are believed to alleviate the
pain of Childbirth in Sri Lanka. In Thailand, the chanting of a portion of
the Abhidhammapitaka is believed to be beneficial to the recently departed, and this
ceremony routinely occupies as much as seven working days. Interestingly, there is
nothing in the latter text that relates to this subject, and the origins of the custom are
unclear.

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(
 (   

Manopubbangamā dhammā, manosetthā manomayā;
Manasā ce padutthena, bhāsati vā karoti vā,
Tato nam dukkhamanveti, cakkam'va vahato padam.
Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him
like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
Translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita
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!"
#
Historically, the first written record of the Pāli canon is believed to have been
composed in Sri Lanka, based on a prior oral tradition. The transmission of written
Pāli has retained a universal system of alphabetic values, but has expressed those
values in a stunning variety of actual scripts. This is confusing to many westerners,
who tend to assume that one script is ineluctably tied to one set of phonemes.

Early Pāli inscriptions made during the reign of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka were
composed in the Ashokan Brahmi script; in Sri Lanka, Pāli texts were recorded
in Sinhala script. Other local scripts (most prominentlyBurmese and Thai) have been
used to record Pāli, and a standardized system of romanization was introduced in the
19th Century to permit Westerners to study Pali with greater ease. In modern times,
Pāli texts have also been reproduced in the Devnagari and Mongolian scripts to permit
wider study.

The following grid of Romanized phonetic values should be compared to the

corresponding alphabetic grids of the Burmese, Sinhalese, Cambodian, and other
writing systems used to express the Pāli language.

—Ê aāiīuūeo
 —Ê k kh g gh â
—Ê c ch j jh ñ
—Ê â âh â âh â
—Ê t th d dh n
—Ê yrlvshâ
—Ê â

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$%%
The Velthuis scheme was originally developed in 1991 by Frans Velthuis for use with
his "devnag" Devanagari font, designed for the TEX typesetting system. This system
of representing Pali diacritical marks has been used in some websites and discussion
lists:

—Ê Long vowels are doubled: aa, ii, uu .

—Ê Other diacritics precede the letters marked by them, so:
oÊ semi-vowels: .r .l
oÊ retroflex consonants: .t .th .d .dh .n
oÊ retroflex sibilant: .s
oÊ palatal sibilant: "s
oÊ palatal nasal: ~n
oÊ guttural nasal: "n
oÊ niggahita (pure nasal): .m
oÊ visarga: .h

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$
 
  

This is one way to set it up. The TrueType font Normyn.ttf is available for download
on the web. Extract the files from the ZIP file to a chosen folder, then go to
StartĺSettingsĺControl Panel and open the Fonts folder. Click on Fileĺ"Install
New Font...". The Add Fonts dialog box pops up. In the Folders list box find and
select the chosen folder, then select "Normyn (TrueType)" in the "List of fonts" list
box, then click OK.

After the font has been set up, go to a wordprocessor such as Microsoft Word to set up
the shortcut keys for the characters with diacritical marks in the Normyn font. In the
case of Word, select the Normyn font in the font combo box, then go to menu item
InsertĺSymbol. The Symbol dialog box pops up. Under the Symbols tab, select
Normyn in the Font combo box: under it should be a grid of characters.

For each desired character in the grid, select it by clicking on it, then click on the
"Shortcut Key..." command button: the Customize Keyboard dialog box pops up.
Pressing the desired shortcut key combination makes it show up in the "Press new
shortcut key:" text box. Click the "Assign" command button, then click on "Close"
and repeat this for each desired character. When done, close the Symbol dialog box.

The following is an example of a set of shortcut key assignments:

  
 "


 
  &c'


a macron 61[‰ Alt+A &#2[r;

n tilde 61[9 Alt+Ctrl+N ñ

i macron 6162 Alt+I ī

d dot-under 61622 Alt+D &#r693;

n dot-over 61626 Ctrl+N &#rr[1;

l dot-under 6163- Alt+L &#rr3[;

t dot-under 616-2 Alt+T &#rr‰9;

m dot-over 616[[ Alt+M &#rr-[;

u macron 616r2 Alt+U ū

n dot-under 616‰6 Alt+N &#rr[1;

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(




See entries for "Pali" (written by scholar K.R. Norman of the Pali Text Society) and
"India--Buddhism" in c

 


 
, (Sawyer
ed.) ISBN ‰ -316r-

The standard text for studying Pali in the English-speaking world remains A.K.
Warder's  , published by the Pali Text Society. (3rd ed. published
1991, ISBN ‰6 1319r1). Some students find Warder to be too complex for
individuals with limited linguistic background. Lily de Silva's 
 is often
recommended as a more gentle introduction to the language (1st ed. published by
Vipassana Research Institute Publications, 199-, ISBN ‰1r-1- 1-X)