A free reference for the world
The commentaries, in English, in the open
No complete English translation of the Pali commentaries has ever existed. We have made one, and we are giving it away — free to read, free to search, free to cite, for anyone, for good.
What is missing from the world is not another rendering of the suttas. It is the literature the tradition reads them through. We are putting that into English, checking it with scholars who read the original, and publishing it so that a student in Yangon and a professor in Heidelberg reach the same page by the same link.
The work, today
- Commentary volumes
- 47
- Paragraphs
- 118,640
- Translated
- 47 of 47
- Sub-commentaries
- 6 of 22
- Confirmed by review
- 0
Free to read and cite. No paywall, no login to read, no institutional subscription. That is the point of doing it.
What this adds to the world
It does not exist yet
Buddhaghosa, Dhammapāla and their successors wrote a body of prose several times the size of the canon they were explaining. Individual volumes have reached English — the Visuddhimagga, parts of the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī, the Dhammapada stories. The literature as a whole never has, in any language outside the tradition.
Almost every English reader of a sutta is already reading it through decisions these books made — which sense of a word is meant, who is speaking, what a compound resolves to. Those decisions are quoted constantly and consulted rarely, because outside a small number of specialists nobody can read them.
It will be citable
A reference is only useful if a reader can check it. Every paragraph keeps its Pali beside it and the page numbers of the printed editions, so a citation resolves to an exact place in the received text, not to a paraphrase. Every revision is dated and kept, so a citation made this year still means something in ten.
It will be searchable, and free
The whole corpus, open to full-text search, at no charge, without a login and without an institutional subscription. Nothing here is sold, licensed or held back. The translation is released for anyone to read, quote and build on.
Why we are asking you
This is not work for our Trust. A Trust cannot use a reference library; scholars, students, translators and monastics can.
We are asking specialists to help make it right because once it is right it belongs to everyone — including the people who will disagree with us.
Dhammacakka Research Center is the academic unit of Dhammacakka Foundation Trust, a public charitable trust registered under the Indian Trusts Act, 1882, at Sarnath — where the first discourse was given. The Trust holds Indian income-tax recognition under sections 12A and 80G.
Where the translation stands
All forty-seven volumes of aṭṭhakathā — on the four great Nikāyas, on the Khuddaka collection, on the Abhidhamma and on the Vinaya — now exist in a complete English draft. Work continues on the three layers behind them.
| Layer | Volumes | Paragraphs | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aṭṭhakathā — the commentaries | 47 | 118,640 | Complete in draft |
| Ṭīkā — the sub-commentaries | 22 | 28,832 | Ongoing — 6 volumes drafted |
| Anuṭīkā — the sub-sub-commentaries | 3 | — | Ongoing |
| Pakaraṇavisesa — the treatises | 83 | — | Ongoing |
| Total | 155 | 147,472 | Nothing yet confirmed by review |
Volume counts follow the printed Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, one volume per bound book. Paragraph counts are given where the text has been ingested. The full catalogue lists every volume.
How we work
Every paragraph keeps its Pali beside it, with the page references of the printed editions, so a reader can check any rendering against the source without leaving the page. Nothing is presented as settled.
Reviewers write against the paragraph itself. A comment stays attached to the line that provoked it, under the name of the scholar who made it, and every revision that follows is dated and kept.
Read Pali?
We are looking for scholars who can read the commentaries in the original and are willing to tell us where we have gone wrong.