About

The Pali Translation Project will be a collaboration between the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and SuttaCentral. SuttaCentral is the most important online resource for accessing the Pali canon, and contains translations of almost the entire Pali canon.

The Pali Canon

Despite heroic efforts from many great translators over more than 140 years, the Buddhist Pali Canon has never been fully translated into English, though it is relatively close to being completed. However, many translations are either not available freely online, in keeping with the spirit of freely given teachings, or they are in facsimile form of printed texts, not easily searchable online. Some translations are also of poor quality and contain numerous errors.

The Commentaries

There is a vast and important Pali commentarial tradition augmenting the Pali Canon, but it also has never fully been translated into English.

The Dream

We will complete the full translation of the Pali Canon and Commentaries, combine these with the open-source, freely available translations already available, and make the entire completed work freely available online and freely searchable, such that, at long last, it is all available in its entirety for all future generations. We will also publish archive-quality print versions to increase longevity. We will do this in collaboration with SuttaCentral.

Historical Significance

Just as the King James version of the Bible finally made the entire key text of Christianity available to the English speaking world, just so this project will complete work that has been ongoing over more than a century, like a final relay race runner crossing a historical finish line. We are indebted and profoundly grateful to all the translators who have worked so hard to get us this close and all the generous patrons who have supported their work. This project and those who made it possible will hopefully be remembered for hundreds of years as the project that completed a truly historic milestone in the history of religious literature.

What this will take

The remaining texts to be translated number approximately 10,000 pages in Pali. Additionally, approximately 10,000 pages will need a mix of retranslation and corrections, as the original translations are of insufficient quality for this project. We believe their translation, editing, assurance of quality, typesetting, and online publication will require approximately £5.3 million/$7.3 million, about 20 translators, and about 10-15 years. Works will be made available as the work is accomplished.

Help Finish the Job

• While we already have a significant team of accomplished translators, we need more to accomplish this in reasonable time and still do high quality work. If you are a skilled Pali Translator interested in helping with this historic project, please contact us.
• In the spirit of dana, if you have the resources to financially support this non-profit work, please contact us.