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 Sutra. 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 Words and the four Nikāya volumes by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Wisdom Publications) — the most highly regarded modern translations, available in print.
For terminology, see the Glossary.
How this was made
The English was translated from the original Pali by Claude (Anthropic's AI), then edited line by line by Alex Miller. The Chinese was translated from the Pali by Claude too, and edited by Yan Zhang. The audio is an ElevenLabs voice; the art and logos are Gemini, recolored and partially reworked by hand.
The site, the mobile app, and the scripts that build the ebooks and generated the narration were all written by Claude too.
We tell you plainly because you deserve to know what you're reading and hearing.
We don't take lightly what these tools mean for the people whose craft they touch. But we could never have made this ourselves — translating the suttas means reading Pali, and neither of us can. The tools made possible a free gift that was otherwise beyond us, offered in the spirit of the old dharma gift: freely given, asking nothing back.
What's here is a starting point, not a final word.
Cover design by Alex Miller and Ellen Shapiro.
There’s a longer, more personal account — the 3 a.m. start, the back-and-forth with the Pāli, the flight — on its own page.