Sahassapadāni

The world the Buddha walked through — drawn, and named.

Pāli is the language of the oldest surviving record of the Buddha's teaching. For most people it stays locked behind grammar tables and dictionaries. This book opens it another way.

Every chapter is a full-page engraving of the world those texts describe — a village at dawn, a river crossing, a forest, a monastery, a market, a festival, a sickroom — and everything in the picture is numbered.

Turn the page, and each number is named and explained. Explained in Pāli. Not translated. Each word is defined using only words you have already met, so the language teaches itself, picture by picture, the way you learned your first one: by looking, then by reading.

The pages are Pāli from cover to cover, and that is all you will need. Every one of the 1,273 words comes straight from the Buddhist scriptures — the vocabulary the texts themselves use, in the order a reader meets the world.

A companion to Pāli Bhāsā, the natural-method course in Pāli.

Inside this edition

• 29 full-page engraved plates, 24 numbered things on each
• 1,273 words, every one defined in Pāli
• A closing reference of the small words that hold the texts together
• Tables of the noun and the verb
• A map of the sixteen great countries of the Buddha's India
• A complete index