These six teachings are rendered here in plain modern English — not as a scholarly translation, but as a plain reading of what the Buddha actually said. The goal is to make the foundational teachings accessible to a first-time reader without sacrificing the substance.
This is not a substitute for canonical translation. If you find a teaching here that moves you, the next step is to read the same passage as translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, or the collaborative team at SuttaCentral — three rigorous sources, all freely available.
What’s preserved: the structure, the repetitions, the key images, and the moments where the original itself does something striking — like the cosmic ending of the first talk, or the mother-and-only-child image in the Mettā Sutta. What’s stripped: archaic English (“thus have I heard”), unfamiliar terminology where a modern word does the same job, and the formal cadences that can put a contemporary reader to sleep.
Why six?
These six are the foundation. Every later teaching, every commentary, every Buddhist tradition — they all build on these. If you’ve read them, you’ve read what was there at the start.
The choice of six (and not ten or twenty) is deliberate: enough to understand the whole shape of the teaching without overwhelming someone new to it. The full site reads in about 45 minutes.
License
Everything on this site is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. Copy it, print it, translate it, distribute it, modify it. No permission needed; no attribution required.
This is in keeping with the Buddhist tradition of the dharma gift— the practice of freely sharing teachings without expectation of return.
Going deeper
For the original Pali texts and scholarly translations:
- SuttaCentral — modern collaborative translations and parallels across traditions, freely accessible.
- Access to Insight — Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s free translations, with extensive notes and commentary.
- In the Buddha’s Wordsand the four Nikāya volumes by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Wisdom Publications) — the most highly regarded modern translations, available in print.
For terminology, see the Glossary.