Verbs I: The Present Tense
Nouns and pronouns tell you who and what. Verbs tell you what's happening — and in Pāli, a verb's ending alone tells you who's doing it, which means a complete sentence can be a single word. This lesson gives you the present tense, using passati, "sees," the verb Lesson 10 promised you.
Person and Number Live on the Verb
Just as Lesson 5 showed that a noun's ending, not its position, carries its grammatical role, a Pāli verb's ending carries the subject's person (I / you / he-she-it) and number (singular / plural) built in. One direct consequence: since passāmi already means "I see" all by itself, the pronoun ahaṃ from Lesson 9 is grammatically optional — Pāli sentences drop the subject pronoun constantly, adding it only for emphasis or clarity, the same way Spanish says "veo" rather than "yo veo." Reading Pāli therefore means learning to find the subject inside the verb ending itself, not just from a separate word nearby.
Dictionaries always cite a Pāli verb in its third person singular form — "he/she/it [verb]s" — because that is the form you meet stripped bare of any of the assumptions the other five forms make. Passati, "he/she/it sees," is therefore the form you'll always look up, even though "I see" or "they see" may be what a given sentence actually needs.
The Present Tense of passati, "to see"
Strip the citation form's -ti to get the present stem, passa-, then add one of six personal endings. This exact pattern — stem ending in -a, then -ati/-asi/-āmi singular and -anti/-atha/-āma plural — covers the largest class of ordinary Pāli verbs, including vadati ("speaks," which you already used correctly in Lesson 9's ahaṃ vadāmi) and hundreds of others.
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st ("I" / "we") | passāmiI see | passāmawe see |
| 2nd ("you") | passasiyou see | passathayou (all) see |
| 3rd ("he/she/it/they") | passatihe/she/it sees | passantithey see |
Pāli grammars traditionally list these in the opposite order — third person first, then second, then first — because that is the order the language's own indigenous grammatical tradition (going back to the same Sanskrit framework behind Pāṇini's grammar) always uses. You'll see paradigms printed that way elsewhere; the content is identical regardless of which order they're listed in.
hoti, "Is / Becomes": The Verb You'll See on Every Page
Pāli's ordinary verb "to be" follows the same six-ending pattern as passati, just with stem-vowel -o- in place of -a- throughout — a small, learnable variation rather than a new system.
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | homiI am/become | homawe are/become |
| 2nd | hosiyou are/become | hothayou (all) are/become |
| 3rd | hotihe/she/it is/becomes | hontithey are/become |
You've already silently read past several forms of this verb without them being named: hoti itself opened Sīlaniddesa's account of restraint ("iminā pātimokkhasaṃvarena upeto hoti," "he is possessed of this restraint by the Pātimokkha," Lesson 10's neighboring text), and it is simply the single most frequent verb in the entire Canon. Worth memorizing this table before any other verb besides passati.
A Note on deseti, "Teaches"
Lesson 6 used buddho dhammaṃ deseti, "the Buddha teaches the Dhamma," without commenting on its verb. You may now notice deseti doesn't match the passati pattern above — and it shouldn't: it belongs to a different, causative-flavored verb class (built by adding -e- to a root, roughly "to make known" from "to point out"), which this course covers on its own later. For now, simply recognize that not every verb ending in -eti is irregular in some unpredictable way — it's a whole separate, equally regular class, just not this lesson's class.
Simple Negation: na
Place the indeclinable na, "not," directly before the verb to negate a sentence — no change to the verb's own ending is needed.
Your First Original Sentences
Every word below has already appeared somewhere in this course. Read each sentence using only what you now know.
Practice: Building and Reading Sentences
- Translate into Pāli: "The monk speaks." (use vadati)
- Translate into Pāli: "We do not see the path." (use maggaṃ, the accusative of magga from Lesson 6)
- Translate into English: Te bhikkhū dhammaṃ vadanti.
- Translate into English: Ahaṃ Buddho na homi.
Check your answers
1. Bhikkhu vadati.
2. Mayaṃ maggaṃ na passāma.
3. "Those monks speak the Dhamma" / "...teach the Dhamma."
4. "I am not the Buddha." — a genuinely humble and grammatically ordinary sentence any Pāli speaker could say.
Continuing From Here
Lesson 12 adds the aorist — Pāli's ordinary past tense, and the one the Buddha's own sayings are constantly narrated in ("he said," "he saw," "he understood").