This site hosts a series of plain language renditions of the Pali suttas. The suttas ("discourses" or "sayings") are the oldest surviving texts in an Indic language containing the teachings of the historical Buddha. Here, they are found in a plain English style and a simple format that makes them easy to read. The goal is to make these texts more accessible than other translations already available while also retaining all the main ideas they contain. For a thorough Introduction to the methodology of these translations, see below. Method Translating any text is filled with many choices, pitfalls and challenges. In translation studies, there is generally two main approaches to translating a text, formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence . Most translations can be placed somewhere on a spectrum between one extreme of radical “word for word” metaphrasing and the other extreme of totally free paraphrasing. English translations of the Buddhist Sutta Pit