[Aaron757]

he he, I guess if you want to be generous you could say I'm going for fluency We have the president of PTS (Pali Text Society) here as visiting faculty this semester, so it's a good time to be ambitious.

Pali's got an amazing technical vocabulary for everything under the sun involving mind, meditation and getting from this side of the river to the other I think the main reason for its precision is that there were actual enlightened people making these words, and using them. It's amazing to get glimpses in the Pali canon of the way the vocabulary was formed. A lot of the key words were current in brahmanical ritual/religious discourse and were adopted by Buddha/Buddhists but used in completely new ways - virtually redefined.

The buddhist usages then became the standards and were re-adopted into pan-indian religious discouse. Yoga sutras is 90% Buddhist, in vocab and concept. So is Advaita Vedanta. There's no doubt there were tidal wave repercussions from the rise of Buddhism.

Poor Latin just missed the boat.

The "Buddhist Dictionary" is the handy reference for buddhist terms, by Nyanatiloka. It's available free online (the original is german "Buddhistisches Woerterbuch" by Verlag Christiani, his "christian" name i guess). In enlgish, Thanissaro bhikkhu has done an amazing job rendering pali experimentally into idiomatic english and some of it is brilliant (dukkha = stress!!) all online too at the accesstoinsight website.

The real perk of studying Pali texts in the original though is that a lot of them are literally saturated with enlightenment vibrations. Like when an empath gets a nasty email, the emotional blast is sometimes overwhelming. Pali texts I find are often remarkably filled with strong dhamma vibrations, presumably from whoever composed them. These texts may be considered anonymous, but they had real authors - many of whom must have been real beacons of light amongst humanity. And their touch is often times still there in the words they used.