Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project

In association with the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project SLTP the Journal of Buddhist Ethics is pleased to act as the primary distributor for the first public domain electronic version of the Pali Canon.

Description
(Note: these files are written in Pali. They are not English translations)

The input of the entirety of the words of the Buddha and his immediate disciples, as preserved in the Sri Lankan version of the Pali "Tripitaka," was completed at the "Sri Vajiragnana Dharmayatanaya," Bhikkhu Training Center, Maharagama, Sri Lanka in 1994. The texts, consisting of an estimated thirty-five million characters, were keyed in over a period of three years, commencing in 1991. The edition used as the basis for this was the Buddha Jayanti Tripitaka Series in fifty-eight volumes, published under the patronage of the government of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) during the 1960s and 1970s. The project was carried out under the auspices of Venerable Madihe Pagnnaseha Mahanayake Thera, Head of the Amarapura branch of the Buddhist Sangha in Sri Lanka, with financial sponsorship from the Chandraratne family.

During the initial phase of the project a special Microsoft DO based computer program was also developed to search for and view passages of the texts, in both Sinhala and Roman scripts.

The semi-proof-read data has been placed on the JBE websites in text format, for downloading to both Macintosh and Windows computers. It is freely available for non-commercial purposes as public domain material under the terms of a GNU license.

Fonts

The texts are encoded (for both Macintosh and Windows) in accordance with the diacritic font for Pali, designed by Professor K.R. Norman. You will need to install this font to view and print the text.

• If you use a Mac you should download the archive NORM.SEA.HQX.
• If you use a PC you should download the file tm-norm.zip.

Click below to download the font you require from the main JBE site in the UK.

Data Files
(Note: these files are written in Pali. They are not English translations)

These files contain the text of the canon. The key to the files is as follows:

Pali Canon

Digha: Dīgha Nīkaya

Majjhima: Majjhima Nīkaya

Anguttara: Anguttara Nīkaya

Samyutta: Samyutta Nīkaya

Khudd: Khuddata Nīkaya (In three parts, with thanks to John Richards)

Vinaya: Vinaya

Abhidh: Abhidhamma

Other Pali Texts:

A number of later Pali texts are also now being made available for downloading. They include three paracanonical and two commentarial works, sixteen historical and ten grammatical texts, as well as six others of miscellaneous content.

Paracan: Paracanonical and Commentarial texts

History: History

Grammar: Grammar

Misc (Mac only): Dictionaries, Poetry, Rhetoric, Lay Ethics, and Cosmological

Dictiona (Win95 and Win31): Dictionaries

Poetry (Win95 and Win31): Poetry

Rhetoric (Win95 and Win31): Rhetoric

• There are separate versions for the Macintosh and PC. The files have been archived to speed download time. Click below for the appropriate platform:
  • Macintosh (UK)
  • Windows95 (UK)
  • Windows3.1 (UK)

Utilities

Text analysis and concordance programs are available, and general information on these is available from the Indiana University. A short guide to CONC (a concordance program for the Mac) is available from the Indiana University, with fuller information here. Search utilities for the Mac are currently available from the JBE site in the UK. Search utilities for Windows are available from the JBE site in the UK.

Important note

Proofreading of these texts is not yet complete. They are made available at this preliminary stage as a service to scholarship and in the hope that the material may even at this point be valuable for many purposes. References to the page numbers of the Pali Text Society's edition has been completed.

We hope to update the files regularly as proofreading and editing proceeds at SLTP (see below) where further projects are also in hand.

SLTP

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