The Pali Course

Jatakas constitute one of the genres of Buddhist literature. In narrative form, they relate events which are then identified as episodes in the former lives of the historical Buddha. Traditionally, theses stories enjoyed great popularity within the Buddhist community, and some of the more famous Jatakas were frequently depicted in works of art.

I decided to introduce my students to Pali literature rather by way of stories than trough the reading of doctrinal texts because I basically feel that languages have their own lives and should be handed on in a lively way. Most unfortunately, though, the common method of teaching ancient tongues -and, alas, not only those!- with its endless emphasis on grammatical rules etc. seems to fail chronically to foster appreciation of the beauty of language in the learner's mind.

Add to this the difficulties faced when trying to make an Indian language palatable to Chinese students -the mechanisms of expression provided by their mother tongue (in my case mostly Hokkien, Mandarin or Hakka) differ vastly from those of, say, middle-Indian idioms like Pali. Lacking moreover practically any experience in teaching the venerable language of the Theravada canon, I was understandably enough more than hesitant when the institute administration asked me last year (1998-1999) to conduct the Pali course!

The students, however, showed sufficient enthusiasm to encourage me to offer the present course as a supplement to the introduction in which I tried to instil a basic feeling for the meaning expressed by the linguistic forms and conventions of Pali. Now more time is devoted to the reading and relishing of traditional narrative literature itself.

This page was last updated on August 20th, 2000.

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