Www.thebuddhaswords.net is now freely available offline and online

The Watercooler
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We’re pleased to announce that another way to imbibe the teachings of the Buddha is now available both online and for free download and use on all major platforms. It uses web technology to present the Buddha’s teachings in a format that enables easy access and portability between devices from smart phones to PCs and Macs.

It differs from Sutta Central by limiting the scope to the best available, copyright free, translations of Theravada teachings with English translations only. As such, the entire site occupies around 130Mb. Bhante @Sujato’s translations of the Nikayas are the backbone of the site. Thanks Bhante!

The live version can be found at: www.thebuddhaswords.net where you will find download and installation instructions if you’d like it on your device. The image below shows it installed on a PC.

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Features:

  • Translations are free of onerous copyright restrictions
  • Doesn’t need an internet connection if installed on your device.
  • Can search in either English or Pali offline
  • The whole site is free to copy, edit and share if the copyright wishes of the various translators are met
  • Mobile friendly - works well on all but the smallest screen sizes.
  • Can display English and Pali side by side with the click of a button
  • Shows variant readings
  • Includes a Pali lookup when hovering over a Pali word
  • Includes a study guide (In the Buddha’s Words with Bhikkhu Bodhi’s notes and links and Open Source translations)
  • Includes a cross reference table for finding PTS style references
  • Lots more :slight_smile:

Thanks to @blake for his input into this project in the early days.

Thanks mainly to Venerable Upatissa. If it wasn’t for him, his energy, his coding skill and his presence, the work of aligning the English and Pali on each of Bhante Sujato’s 3,700+ pages of translations would have been waaay too daunting. :anjal:

We hope that this is a benefit to you as you walk the Noble Eightfold Path.

Please report any errors and make suggestions via the email address on the Contact Page of the site. Thanks!

The “Buddhas Word’s Team” (both of us :grinning: )

29 Likes
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Thanks 666tomanderson, that looks very cool and easy to navigate. I’m pleased to see Bhikkhu Bodhi’s notes well integrated into the site.

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Hi @mikenz66 . It is unfortunate that, because of copyright restrictions on Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translations of the Nikayas, we were unable to use Bhikkhu Bodhi’s notes except in the version of In the Buddhas Words (called on our site the “Study Guide”) that was made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License in 2005.

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Is there a link to that?

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Dear Venerable @Khemarato.bhikkhu. The copyright information for Bhikkhu Bodhi’s introductions to each chapter of In the Buddha’s Words quoted above can be found in the Internet Archive of Wisdom Publications website

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Well done @666tomanderson. Wonderful news to see this project continue its trajectory onwards and upwards! :rocket:

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Hello all … thebuddhaswords.net site has now been made into a Progressive Web App (PWA) which makes installation and keeping up to date SO much easier. With later versions of the Android Operating System, the security has been tightened so that only the apps which wrote the files could access them. That is not just a flat tyre, that is “car burnt to the ground”. :fire:

PWA’s are great technology which Sutta Central (of course) also employs.

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