Websites
Throughout this book I’ve referred to online resources as much as possible, rather than printed books, so that you, the reader, can more easily check out the original scriptures. Most of the references are to the website Access to Insight (accesstoinsight.org), which hosts a wide variety of the Pali scriptures. I highly recommend this as a place to start exploring the Buddha’s teaching.
I also recommend Sutta Central (suttacentral.net), a more recent and, at the time of publication, still-evolving site, which is currently less easy to use but offers a greater variety of texts and translations.
Books
The Dhammapada, which I’ve often cited in this book, is an excellent place to start exploring the Buddha’s teaching. Of the many translations available, I consider Gil Fronsdal’s excellent at being poetic and yet remaining faithful to the original text.*
Bhikkhu Bodhi is a superhero of modern translation. (I just found myself googling “Bhikkhu Bodhi action figure”—sadly without result.) His book, In the Buddha’s Words, provides an anthology of scriptural passages, arranged by theme. The selections are prefaced by essays that in themselves provide an excellent introduction to the Buddha’s thought. The publisher of that book (Wisdom Publications) offers other collections of Buddhist texts. These include The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, and The Suttanipata, which are all translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, and The Long Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Maurice Walshe. These titles are an excellent resource for the serious student.
Resources for Studying Pali
I spent two years studying Pali at university—which taught me about enough to be able to order a cup of coffee, translate some of the simpler discourses, or tell a householder that his goat has been eaten by jackals. In other words I’m no expert. But if you have the interest I’d highly recommend learning a little of the language.
A Pali-English dictionary will help you a little, but it’s very handy to know some of the grammar so that you can tell how words are related to each other. Like Latin, Pali is a language where the ending of a noun tells you whether that noun is doing something to you, you are doing something to it, whether you belong to the noun, are inside it, and so forth. Without grammatical context you’re, as I say, trying to pin the meaning on the tail of the scripture.
There are many resources available online or as books, but I’d recommend starting with Dr. Lily de Silva’s Pali Primer (Vipassana Research Publications, 1994) which introduces the grammar and vocabulary in the context of fun sentences that start very simple and gradually become more complex. It won’t get you translating suttas, but it’ll give you a flying start when you graduate to a more hard-core program of study.
* Gil Fronsdal, trans., The Dhammapada: A New Translation of the Buddhist Classic with Annotations (Boston: Shambhala, 2006).