The Ancient Buddhist Texts website is being prepared by Bhante Ānandajoti who has been resident in the East since 1987, mainly in Sri Lanka, India, and Malaysia. He ordained in the Theravāda tradition in 1995 and received higher ordination the following year.

Being already familiar with Indian languages from his stay in India, in his first Rains Retreat he began an intensive study of Pāḷi. For a couple of years he worked for the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project, correcting and re-editing the databases of the Sinhalese edition of the Canonical texts, and since then he has also studied Sanskritised Prākṛt and Classical Sanskrit.

Ānandajoti started Ancient Buddhist Texts in 2002 as a way of publishing material from the broader early Buddhist Tradition in the original languages. The website, which is still expanding, includes texts, translations, and studies from both the early and medieval periods, in Pāḷi, Sanskritised Prākṛt (BHS), and Classical Sanskrit, with a special emphasis on the collection and organisation of the texts, and also their grammar and prosody.

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A number of the texts on this website have been prepared from existing databases that were originally produced by the Sri Lanka Tipitaka Project. The final editing of the texts as presented here has mainly been done by one person working alone. Because of this it is possible that there are still proof-reading errors in some of the documents.

The work of correction and the preperation of new documents is still continuing, so if anybody reading this material has any corrections to make to it, or if you have any other comments on the documents or their presentation, please send a message to the following address: .

 

Hardcopy Publications

My policy from the start has always been to publish everything I do for free online first and only to allow hardcopy publications with the agreement that the work stays online. This has limited the number of works that have been published in hardcopy, but as my intention has always been to give Dhamma to people, and the site regularly sees around 25,000 pages read each month, I think I have achieved my objective. A few works have also been accepted by publishers and these are listed below.

 

 

last updated: 2016