Chantig

 3. METTA SUTTA - The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

 This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:

Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.

Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.

Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!

Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.

Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.

This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.

In this transcription, Pali diacritical marks are represented using plain ASCII characters according to a convention widely used on the Internet by Pali students and scholars. Long vowels (those usually typeset with a bar above them) are doubled: aa ii uu . For consonants, the diacritic mark precedes the letter it affects. Thus, the retroflex (cerebral) consonants (usually typeset with a dot underneath) are: .r .t .th .d .dh .n .m .s .l . The guttural nasals (m or n with a dot above) are represented by "m and "n The palatal nasal is represented here as ~n .

Pronunciation

Paali is the original language of the Theravadin Buddhist scriptures, the closest we have to the dialect spoken by the Buddha himself. It has no written script of its own, and so every country that has adopted Theravada Buddhism has used its own script to transcribe it. In Thailand this has meant that Paali has picked up some of the tones of the Thai language, as each consonant and consonant cluster in the Thai alphabet has a built-in tone -- high, medium, low, rising, or falling. This accounts for the characteristic melody of Thai Paali chanting.

Vowels

Paali has two sorts of vowels, long -- aa, e, ii, o, uu, and ay; and short -- a, i, and u. Unlike long and shorts vowels in English, the length here refers to the actual amount of time used to pronounce the vowel, and not to its quality. Thus aa and a are both pronounced like the a in father, simply that the sound aa is held for approximately twice as long as the sound a. The same principle holds for ii and i, and for uu and u. Thus, when chanting Paali, the vowels are pronounced as follows:

a as in father
o as in go
e as in they
u as in glue
i as in machine
ay as in Aye!

Consonants

Consonants are generally pronounced as they are in English, with a few unexpected twists:

c as in ancient
p unaspirated, as in spot
k unaspirated, as in skin
ph as in upholstery
kh as in backhand
t unaspirated, as in stop
"m and "n as ng
th as in Thomas
~n as in canyon
v as w

Certain two-lettered notations -- bh, dh, .dh, gh, jh -- denote an aspirated sound, somewhat in the throat, that we do not have in English and that the Thais do not have in their language, either. The Thai solution to this problem is to pronounce bh as a throaty ph, dh as a throaty th, and gh as a throaty kh.

Paali also contains retroflex consonants, indicated with a dot under the letter: .d, .dh, .l, .n, .t, .th. These have no English equivalent. They are sounded by curling the tip of the tongue back against the palate, producing a distinct nasal tone.

The meters of Paali poetry consists of various patterns of full-length syllables alternating with half-length syllables.

Full-length syllables:

contain a long vowel (aa, e, ii, o, uu, ay); or
end with "m; or
end with a consonant followed by a syllable beginning with a consonant (e.g., Bud-dho, Dham-mo, Sa"n-gho).

In this last case, the consonant clusters mentioned above -- bh, dh, .dh, gh, jh, kh, ph, th, .th -- count as single consonants, while other combinations containing h -- such as lh and mh  count as double.)