About
Who We Are
What Early Buddhism and the Pali Canon are, and the training that shapes practice here — the Five Precepts and the Noble Eightfold Path.
What "Early Buddhism" means
Buddhism is old and wide. Over two and a half thousand years it grew many branches. Early Buddhism is the trunk: the teaching as it appears in the oldest surviving collections, before the later schools and systems. We hold no argument with the branches. We simply work from the trunk.
What the Pali Canon is
The Pali Canon is the oldest complete record of the Buddha's teaching, preserved in the Pāli language. It has three parts:
Vinaya — the monastic discipline
The rules and cases that govern monastic life.
Sutta — discourse
The talks and conversations, thousands of them, on every part of the path.
Abhidhamma — the systematic analysis
A later, technical arrangement of the same material.
Most of what you will hear at a weekend talk comes from the sutta collections, because that is where the Buddha speaks to ordinary people about ordinary difficulties.
We do not reproduce sutta texts on this website. Translators do that work better than we could, and their sites carry the full context. Our reading guide links out to dhammatalks.org and Access to Insight.
Verify — do not venerate blindly
In one well-known discourse the Buddha spoke to the Kālāma people, who were confused by competing teachers. He did not tell them whom to believe. He told them to look at whether a teaching, when put into practice, leads to harm or to welfare — and to judge by that.
That is the spirit of this community. We stand behind our claims, and we ask you to test them rather than accept them. Come and see — ehipassiko — come and see for yourself.