Traveler's Guide to the Buddha's Path

by Eric Van Horn

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Terminology

Because the Buddhist canon that I use is in the Pāli language, I usually use Pāli terms. However, some Sanskrit Buddhist terms have become common in the English language, and it seems rather affected not to use them. The two most obvious examples are the words "nirvāṇa", which is "nibbāna" in Pāli, and "Dharma", which is "Dhamma" in Pāli. For the most part I use the commonly known terms. But if it seems awkward to have the Pāli terms in quotes or in certain words (like Dhammacakkapavatanna) and use the Sanskrit terms in the main text, I use the Pāli words.

I try to avoid technical terms in the beginning of the guide until you can get used to them. However, if there are terms with which you are unfamiliar, they should be in the glossary in Appendix A.

Internet Conventions

There are many references to resources that are on the Internet. This is always a problem because hyperlinks are notoriously unreliable. Thus, I have adopted a convention of putting Internet search keywords in the text as well as a hyperlink to the resource. For example, a reference to Thich Nhat Hahn's gāthās ("poems") is "thich nhat hanh gathas here and now". If links are supported and the link is not broken, clicking on the search keywords will open that resource. If you are reading this in a context where Internet links are not supported, or the link is broken, you can still find the resource by doing a search using the keywords. If you use the search keywords the resource should be the first one in the search result list.

The other case is when an article is sighted. It will look like this:

- [Sayadaw U Silananda, "The Benefits of Walking Meditation"]

Again, if your reader does not support hyperlinks, or the link is broken, searching on the author's name and the article name should get you to the article.