Buddhist Pali chants with English translations for use by students in Meditation Retreats. Pali is an Indo-Aryan language, current in Northern India at the time the Buddha was teaching and used by him. It is the language in which his teaching is preserved in the Tipi¿aka, the sacred texts of Theravada Buddhism. It was an oral language. It had no alphabet of its own. The Buddha's teachings were not written down until the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka in 29 BCE, in Sinhala script approximately four hundred and fifty-four years after the death of Gautama Buddha. Pali was also written in Brahmi script as in