About This Library
Objective
To make the profound vipassanā-style discussions of the late Mr Lasantha
Manohara — and others who participated in them — more accessible to a wider
audience.
Why This Archive Exists
The original recordings live on YouTube, where they must be streamed online
and cannot be easily downloaded. This archive makes the recordings downloadable,
and accompanies each one with a full Sinhala transcript and a detailed English
summary — so that a person can read and reflect offline, on any device, at their
own pace.
The Tripiṭaka
The full Pāli–Sinhala Buddhist canon — the Buddha Jayanti Tripiṭaka — is now
available here under ත්රිපිටකය · Tripiṭaka, as a companion
to these discussions. Because the talks turn on close reading of Pāli phrases, the
Pāli is shown beside its Sinhala translation, unaltered, for readers to check for
themselves.
Source Material
All content is sourced from the following YouTube channels. We are grateful
to their creators and maintainers:
Acknowledgements
- Mr Lasantha Manohara — for his profound reflections and his effort to be a kalyāṇa mitta to many.
- Those who recorded and shared — the people who made and maintained the recordings and YouTube channels listed above.
- Dr Vipula Wanigasekera — through whom these recordings were discovered, and whose ongoing discussions continue to illuminate what Mr Lasantha pointed to.
YouTube channel
- Buddha Jayanti Tripiṭaka — the Pāli–Sinhala canon in the
Tripiṭaka section is from
tipitaka.lk, keyed and proofread
under the Sri Lankan government's Buddha Jayanti edition and digitised by the
Path Nirvana Foundation. Used under
CC BY-ND 4.0
and reproduced unmodified.
Tools and Services
- Google AI Studio — Sinhala transcription (Gemini)
- Anthropic — Claude chat, Cowork, and Claude Code for summaries, site design, and development
- US investors and the public — whose capital subsidises the AI tools that made this archive possible at near-zero cost
- Cloudflare — site and audio hosting (Pages and R2)
- GitHub — source repository and deployment pipeline
- YouTube — original content hosting
- 4K Video Downloader — audio extraction from YouTube