UPMSP High School Pali key terms

The Middle Indo-Aryan language in which the Theravāda Buddhist canonical texts are preserved, closely related to Sanskrit but showing simplified consonant clusters and case endings.

The threefold collection of Theravāda canonical texts, comprising the Vinaya Piṭaka, Sutta Piṭaka and Abhidhamma Piṭaka, traditionally regarded as closed and authoritative.

The basket of monastic discipline, containing the Pātimokkha rules, their explanations and narratives about how each rule came to be laid down.

The basket of discourses, made up of five nikāyas of dialogues and sermons attributed to the Buddha and his leading disciples.

The basket of higher doctrine, presenting systematic analysis of mental and material phenomena through matrices, categories and question-and-answer methods.

A collection or division of the Sutta Piṭaka; the five are Dīgha, Majjhima, Saṃyutta, Aṅguttara and Khuddaka.

The minor collection of the Sutta Piṭaka, including such works as the Dhammapada, Udāna, Itivuttaka, Sutta Nipāta, Theragāthā and Jātaka.

A famous anthology of 423 verse sayings on ethics and mental training, arranged in chapters and widely memorised in Theravāda countries.

A birth story recounting a previous life of the Buddha; in Pāli, verses are canonical while the prose commentary is later.

A commentary explaining canonical Pāli texts word by word and doctrine by doctrine, largely compiled by Buddhaghosa and later commentators.

A fifth-century commentator from India who worked in Sri Lanka and wrote the Visuddhimagga and many Pāli commentaries on the canon.

Buddhaghosa's comprehensive manual of Theravāda doctrine and meditation, structured around virtue, concentration and wisdom.

A dialogue between King Milinda and the monk Nāgasena, famous for its similes and philosophical argument; its canonical status varies by tradition.

The learned monk whose answers to King Milinda's questions form the Milindapañha, illustrating doctrine through vivid comparisons.

The core list of monastic rules recited fortnightly by monks and nuns, forming the heart of the Vinaya and the basis of communal confession.

The community of ordained followers of the Buddha, the third of the three refuges and the recipient of many Vinaya regulations.

The three refuges of Buddha, Dhamma and Saṅgha, recited in the standard formula beginning Buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi.

A word with several senses: the Buddha's teaching, a mental or physical phenomenon, and the quality of lawfulness underlying reality.

Suffering, unsatisfactoriness or unease, the first noble truth, ranging from gross pain to the subtle instability of conditioned experience.

Impermanence, the characteristic that all conditioned phenomena arise and pass away and cannot provide lasting satisfaction.

Non-self, the teaching that no stable owner or controller is found within experience; phenomena are not self and do not belong to a self.

The four noble truths: suffering, its arising, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation, the framework of the Buddha's first sermon.

The noble eightfold path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration, culminating in liberation.

One of the five aggregates-form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness-into which experience is analysed to show non-self.

Consciousness, the aggregate of knowing or awareness arising in dependence on a sense faculty and its object.

The six sense bases-eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind-together with their objects, forming the meeting points where contact arises.

Contact, the mental factor arising when a sense faculty, an object and consciousness meet, serving as a condition for feeling.

Feeling tone-pleasant, unpleasant or neutral-arising with experience; distinguished from emotion and analysed as an aggregate and a link in dependent origination.

Dependent origination, the twelve-link formula explaining how ignorance conditions formations and so on through to birth, ageing and death.

Ignorance, specifically not knowing the four noble truths and the characteristics of existence; the first link of dependent origination.

Craving or thirst for sense pleasures, for existence or for non-existence; the second noble truth and a principal cause of renewed becoming.

The final goal of Theravāda practice: the cessation of craving, aversion and delusion, described as the unconditioned and as the end of suffering.

Calm or tranquillity meditation, developed by focusing on a single object to suppress the hindrances and attain absorption states.

Insight meditation, the cultivation of direct seeing into impermanence, suffering and non-self in bodily and mental processes.

Concentration or collectedness of mind, the eighth factor of the path and the faculty developed through tranquillity practice.

A meditative absorption characterised by deep unification of mind, attained in a graded series of four (or more) stages.

The four foundations of mindfulness-body, feelings, mind and mental qualities-taught as the direct path to purification and realisation.

A stanza or verse, the standard unit of Pāli poetry; verses are counted in feet (pāda) and measured by syllables and their weight.

A quarter-line or metrical foot of a verse; most Pāli stanzas contain four pādas, each with a fixed syllable count.

The most common Pāli metre, of eight syllables per pāda, used throughout the Dhammapada and other verse collections.

A grammatical case or inflectional ending; Pāli nouns and pronouns decline in eight cases across three numbers.

Grammatical gender, of which Pāli has masculine, feminine and neuter; gender determines the set of endings a noun takes.

Grammatical number-singular or plural in Pāli-shown by the ending attached to a stem after its gender is known.

The phonetic combination or elision that occurs when words meet in a sentence, affecting how the written text is divided into words.

A compound word formed by joining two or more stems into one; knowing whether a compound is determinative, copulative or otherwise guides translation.

A simile or comparison, a favourite teaching device in Pāli prose and verse, often introduced by words such as viya, iva or yathā.

A figure of speech or ornament of style; in Pāli poetics it covers simile, metaphor, repetition and related rhetorical devices.