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Tripitaka is for the ordinary too

Buddha intended his teachings for everyone. They say that this is why he spoke the commoner's language Maagadhi instead of the reconstituted language of the elite, Sanskrit. 'tripitaka' (in Sanskrit) or 'tipitaka' in Pali is believed to contain the largest collection of reports on what Buddha said at various times. The monks called it 'paali' (Sanskrit: rows) referring to long rows of text on Palm leaves. In a sense, 'Pali' for Buddhists, is like 'Gospel' (good news) for Christians. However, in the West, Pali came to mean the entire language Maagadhi and is the standard name used today everywhere in the world.

Preservation of Buddha's words
The story behind the creation of Tipitaka is fascinating. Three months following Buddha's death, a dispute arose about practices of monks. As a result, they gathered and held a mass meeting and listened to recounts by respected elders on various happenings and agreed by consensus regarding each narrative. They divided themselves into groups called 'nikaaya' (Sanskrit: group), took responsibility to preserve separate collections of the discourses, and to pass them down the generations.

In the ancient world, the way they passed down knowledge was by learning episodes of events by heart, perhaps in the form of verse for easy retention. Buddhists traditionally recite in groups, which reinforces accuracy obviously by the process of statistical sampling (much like sampling in CD audio replay). This tradition is still practiced by Buddhist monks.

The monks who dispersed around the world gathered from time to time and had conferences called sangaayanaa (Sanskrit: reciting together) and compared what they had to verify accuracy of the information. This desire to preserve accuracy rather than to embellish or reinterpret is exemplified by the opening statement by unassuming venerable Ananda: "evá me suþá" (Thus have I heard). It epitomizes humility, an essential virtue in Buddhism. Ananda was Buddha's cousin, record keeper and personal attendant. Please read further on the history of the Tipitaka at:
Chattha Sangayana and Buddhist Councils.

Writing it all down
Some years after Buddha's death, Buddhism was brought to Sri Lanka and it flourished there. About 92 BC there had been a prolonged famine in Lanka and the monks feared that they would forget the oral tradition of Buddhism and gathered at a place called Alu Lena and committed it to writing -- a thousand or more discourses. This is by far the biggest literary project ever undertaken by man. The monks probably had to extend Brahmi (Old Sinhala) set of letters to cover the entire phoneme inventory of the Maagadhi language. The idea was exactly that of modern time-capsule.

Given the large volume of the information, it had taken many months to complete. It is said that at times some monks were so weak that they had to recite while lying down. The scribe monks boiled and prepared the palm leaves and inscribed the Ancient Sinhala letters into them. The palm leaf books made were carefully segregated into three baskets, Tri (Sanskrit: three) Pitaka (Sanskrit: basket): the first contains Rules for monks (Vinaya), the next has general advice for all (Sutra) and the third on the deeper (metaphysical) teachings (Abhidhamma). This conference is considered by the Theravadins as the fourth Buddhist Sangaayanaa.

PTS Transliteration scheme
Currently Pali is written using the Pali Text Society (PTS) transliteration scheme. Unfortunately, it has had a deleterious effect on the Pali pronunciation especially in sound confusion in d and t pairs and nasalizing. However, it is not the fault of the original designer, but just that the state of letterpress printing industry in the 1800s was not conducive to do anything better.

A computer friendly form to record
We have devised a Latin character alphabet (Romanized Sinhala) out of the Classic Sinhala 'hodiya' (Sinhala: Chart of Phonemes). It comprises both Sanskrit and Pali and borrows Thorn (þ) and Eth (ð) from Old English to overcome the t and d confusion. The nasalizing of vowels such as in English sounds, 'ung', 'ing' are signified by the acute accent (á, í, ú, é and ó). Romanized Sinhala is computer friendly and could be directly typed (using US-International keyboard), freely copied, text-searched or emailed. Most importantly, it could be displayed in the Classic Sinhala script (by means of a smartfont) so that it could be directly compared to the original Palm-leaf books letter-to-letter.

The Internet for opening it up
The Internet being the Great Equalizer provides us the means to present Tipitaka in the best form of utility that we could provide it in. Doing the best to achieve it is our collective homage to Buddha and those monks who first wrote down the Tipitaka. Open-source Pali means opening up the oldest available text of Buddhism for scholars as well as the casual self-learner. We believe that if we could provide the Pali text with each phrase having its 'tooltip' meaning, the reader would be able to make his or her own personal interpretation of a statement. Test the following sample in blue by hovering the mouse over the words.

evá me suþá:
eká samayá bhagavaa saavaþþhiyá viharaþi jeþavane anaaþhapiµdikassa aaraame. aþha kho aççaþaraa ðevaþaa abhikkanþaaya raþþiyaa, abhikkanþavaµµaa kevalakappá jeþavaná obhaaseþvaa, yena bhagavaa þenupasañkami, upasañkamiþvaa bhagavanþá abhivaaðeþvaa ekamanþá atthaasi. ekamanþá thiþaa kho saa ðevaþaa bhagavanþá gaaþhaaya ajjhabhaasi:

A translation:

Thus have I heard:
During a certain period of time, the Blessed One was staying in Sraavasti city at the Anaatha-pindika temple in the Jeta-vana forest. One late night a deva (deity) descended to the forest illuminating the entire forest with beautiful colors. And then this deva approached the Blessed One, saluted him with respect and stood on one side of him. Having stood there so, the deva addressed him thus in verse:

Listen:

Dual-script Sinhala
The same Pali text above could be viewed in the glory of the Sinhala script that it was originally written in if the browser you are using is Firefox. It supports the features of the Open Type implemented through SVG standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. If you are reading this page using Firefox, the same text would be displayed below using an automatically downloaded Sinhala smart font.

[If you are using the Firefox browser, the following would display in properly rendered Sinhala-script. Otherwise, it would be either in disjointed Sinhala letters or in Latin letters.]

evá me suþá:
eká samayá bhagavaa saavaþþhiyá viharaþi jeþavane anaaþhapiµdikassa aaraame. aþha kho aççaþaraa ðevaþaa abhikkanþaaya raþþiyaa, abhikkanþavaµµaa kevalakappá jeþavaná obhaaseþvaa, yena bhagavaa þenupasañkami, upasañkamiþvaa bhagavanþá abhivaaðeþvaa ekamanþá atthaasi. ekamanþá thiþaa kho saa ðevaþaa bhagavanþá gaaþhaaya ajjhabhaasi:

Navigating the Tipitaka
Tipitaka has multilevel divisions that make even the person familiar with it to get lost in it. With this concern in mind, we designed a very intuitive navigation system for the web site. One of our goals is also to show Tipitaka in the glory of its original script, Classic Sinhala, hopefully with options to see it in most complex touch-letter style or in simpler contemporary Sinhala orthography. Pali text rendered in the Sinhala script has the advantage that it could be conveniently verified by a Pali scholar for its language and compared to the original text for authenticity. If you can see the Sinhala script, the font used is a proof-of-concept rough design of the Sinhala script.

Which version of Tripitaka?
There is no doubt that there are many versions of Buddhist discourses that have evolved in isolation in various parts of the world. Some were lost, and some are being discovered such as the ones that Washington University announced recently. What we are mainly concerned with here is the set that was collected and transliterated into the Latin script in the 1800s by Rhys Davids (PTS version) and the set written in the Sinhala script at the 6th Sangaayanaa held in 1956 (BJT text). Buddhists especially in Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar consider the Tripitaka compiled in 1956 to be the most reliable of all text collected from older manuscripts.

More recently, Ven. Mettavihari compiled a Tripitaka set comparing BJT and PTS and some other obscure manuscripts found in Sri Lanka. He published this work at www.metta.lk/. We are taking that set and programmatically transliterating the text from PTS Latin alphabet to Romanized Sinhala alphabet using a Microsoft Word macro. There is a two-fold purpose here: 1. Convert the text to standard Unicode characters 2. Make it possible to display the same text in either Latin letters or Sinhala letters.

Please write with comments, corrections or if you wish to help.

Thank you.

JC Ahangama
Project Coordinator
Email: jc@LANandWAN.com