by Brian F. Taylor (Author)
Buddhist Pali chants with English translations for use by students in Meditation Retreats.
Pali is an Indo-Aryan language, current in Northern India at the time the Buddha was teaching and used by him.
It is the language in which his teaching is preserved in the Tipiṭaka, the sacred texts of Theravada Buddhism.
It was an oral language. It had no alphabet of its own.
The Buddha's teachings were not written down until the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka in 29 BCE, in Sinhala script approximately four hundred and fifty-four years after the death of Gautama Buddha.
Pali was also written in Brahmi script as in the rock-cut edicts of Asoka in north-central India, dated to 250-232 B.C.
Pali has been transliterated into the alphabets of many languages.
I have used the Roman transliteration used by the compilers of the first Pali Dictionary for the Pali Text Society.