Theravada buddhist texts description

The app is meant to allow the user to read Pali Buddhist texts with side-by-side English translations, including the four main nikayas and the Dhp and Jataka commentaries as well as the Visuddhimagga.

Reading the Theravada Buddhist Pali Tipitaka, commentaries, and sub-commentaries in Pali. It is suitable for advanced students of the Pali language, as it does not include English translations. It does have several Pali-English dictionaries.



Buddhist texts are those religious texts which are part of the Buddhist tradition. The first Buddhist texts were initially passed on orally by Buddhist monastics, but were later written down and composed as manuscripts in various Indo-Aryan languages (such as Pali, Gāndhārī, and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit) and collected into various Buddhist canons. These were then translated into other languages such as Buddhist Chinese and Classical Tibetan as Buddhism spread outside of India.

Buddhist texts can be categorized in a number of ways. The Western terms "scripture" and "canonical" are applied to Buddhism in inconsistent ways by Western scholars: for example, one authority refers to "scriptures and other canonical texts" while another says that scriptures can be categorized into canonical, commentarial, and pseudo-canonical. Buddhist traditions have generally divided these texts with their own categories and divisions, such as that between buddhavacana "word of the Buddha," many of which are known as " sutras," and other texts, such as shastras (treatises) or Abhidharma.