Forest Path - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

233
A note on the transliteration of Thai words
Thai words are notoriously difficult to transliterate. A choice must
be made between being faithful to the spelling or to the pronunciation.
Most systems settle for a compromise between the two. In this
book we have adopted the official Thai system, which gives precedence
to the spelling. Thus, for instance, ‘a’ is used to represent both
the short ‘a’ sound and the long ‘a’ elsewhere variously rendered as
‘à’, ‘ah’ or ‘ar’. A soft ‘t’ sound is rendered as ‘th’ in this system so as
to allow ‘t’ to be used for the harder ‘dt’ sound which English lacks.
Similarly a soft ‘p’ sound is rendered as ‘ph’ leaving ‘p’ to stand for
the harder ‘bp’ sound for which we have no direct equivalent. The
letter ‘u’ is pronounced in this system as in the English ‘put’ rather
than ‘cup’. We have been inconsistent in certain cases, e.g. ‘Luang
Por’ and ‘Tan’, where there is an established Romanized spelling.
GLOSSARY
Ajan (Thai):
ànàpàna-sati:
anattà:
a¤jalã:
arahant:
ariya sàvaka:
arom (Thai):
teacher, from the Pàli ‘àcàriya’.
mindfulness of breathing; breathing as a focus for
meditation.
not-self, voidness of separate self, emptiness of a
soul-entity.
a gesture of respectful greeting where the hands are
held with palms joined at heart level.
an enlightened disciple of the Buddha, the fourth
and last stage of the Buddhist path.
‘Noble beings’; those who have hearkened well to
the Dhamma.
feeling, atmosphere; mental object (derived from the
Pàli àrammaõa).