Chapter 2. Buddhaghosa, the Visuddhimagga, and the commentarial tradition¶

The previous chapter closed by identifying Buddhaghosa's fifth-century work at the Mahāvihāra as the most decisive step in its scholarly tradition. It raised interpretive authority from guarding an authoritative text to producing authoritative commentary. This chapter examines who Buddhaghosa was, what he did and how, and the ways in which his commentarial tradition shaped Southern Theravāda Buddhism.

The discussion in 3.4 introduced Buddhaghosa from the perspective of Abhidhamma philosophy. This chapter does not repeat that material, but focuses on three matters: his life and the historical setting of his work, the structure and central contents of the Visuddhimagga, and the system of commentary he established.

I. Buddhaghosa after demythologization¶

As with most figures in Indian Buddhist history, biographical information about Buddhaghosa is scarce. What survives consists chiefly of narratives colored by myth.

The most widely circulated version comes from Chapter 37 of the Mahāvihāra chronicle, the Cūḷavaṃsa. Buddhaghosa was born into a brahmin family near Bodh Gayā in northern India and mastered the Vedas. After debating an elder, he converted to Buddhism. Once ordained, he heard that Sri Lanka's Mahāvihāra preserved a complete collection of old commentaries written in Sinhala, and sailed there. Upon his arrival, the elders asked him to write a treatise to test his qualifications, and he produced the Visuddhimagga. Only then, deeply impressed, did they permit him to enter the scriptural repository.¹

The narrative follows a conspicuous template: outsider → test → proof of qualification → admission → great achievement. This book treats it as a typical legend about a great figure, not as established history. The prefatory verses (gāthā) of the Visuddhimagga itself offer only a few autobiographical statements. He was born "near the country of Magadha" and was versed in the Tipiṭaka and commentaries.² Beyond this, his historical biography is almost blank.

The outline that can safely be stated is as follows:

• He was active around the fifth century CE, roughly two centuries before the seventh-century Xuanzang.
• His residence at the Mahāvihāra is established, and all his work was grounded in its tradition.
• His work was translation and compilation: he translated the old Sinhala commentaries (Sinhala aṭṭhakathā) preserved at the Mahāvihāra into Pali, reorganizing and expanding them.
• The Visuddhimagga was a new, independently composed treatise, not a translation.

Whether he came from India or was a native Sri Lankan remains disputed. This book's position is that his birthplace matters little for understanding his work. What matters is that he worked within the Mahāvihāra tradition and demonstrably commanded the systematic body represented by the four Nikāya commentaries and the Visuddhimagga. Even though the attribution of other commentaries assigned to him is uncertain, this group alone suffices to support the work of integration.

II. The major works formed an enormous project of compilation¶

Buddhaghosa's output was extraordinary. He completed at least the following works:

This amounts to commentary on almost every division of the Pali Tipiṭaka, together with an independent treatise on practice. It is far more than one or two people could complete in a year or two. The reliability of the attributions varies. The group comprising the four Nikāya commentaries and the Visuddhimagga is relatively secure. Greater doubts surround the Vinaya and Abhidhamma commentaries. Scholars have long debated whether all came from Buddhaghosa alone.³

The sources for these commentaries were the old Sinhala commentaries preserved at the Mahāvihāra. According to the Mahāvihāra's own tradition, the commentaries began with material Mahinda brought when he transmitted the Dharma to the island. Sri Lankan monks continued to add to them over several centuries. Buddhaghosa translated this Sinhala treasury into Pali, allowing it to circulate throughout the Theravāda world instead of being accessible only to Sri Lankans.

The work had enormous historical significance, but also an unavoidable cost. After Buddhaghosa completed his translations, the original Sinhala commentaries were almost entirely lost. No complete version survives in Sri Lanka or elsewhere, and only Buddhaghosa's Pali versions remain. He both translated these commentarial traditions and, to a considerable extent, reconstructed them.

III. The structure and contents of the Visuddhimagga¶

The Visuddhimagga is Buddhaghosa's most important work. It is his own independent composition, rather than a translation of commentary. It is also not confined to explaining a particular discourse or treatise, but systematically sets out the entire Southern Buddhist path of practice. A scriptural verse provides the organizing theme:

"With conduct as the foundation and concentration well developed, the wise untangle this knot."

From purification of conduct through purification of concentration to purification of wisdom, seven levels of "purification" (visuddhi) run through the treatise, forming a complete path from worldly life to liberation.²

First division: purification of conduct¶

Conduct (sīla) is the foundation of the treatise and its shortest division. Buddhaghosa deals chiefly with the disciplinary framework of monastics, bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs: Pātimokkha discipline, restraint of the sense faculties, purification of livelihood, and contentment in the use of requisites. He touches only briefly on lay precepts, which are not the treatise's focus.

The arrangement reflects the Visuddhimagga's purpose as a systematic guide for monastic practitioners. It assumes that its readers live within a fully constituted monastic institution.

Second division: purification of concentration¶

Concentration (samādhi) occupies nearly half the treatise and is its most detailed division. Buddhaghosa systematically arranges forty meditation subjects (kammaṭṭhāna), explaining how to choose one suited to one's temperament and gradually develop calm meditation (samatha) as far as absorption concentration (appanā-samādhi).

Contemplation of these subjects in calm meditation results in the four jhānas and four immaterial absorptions, eight attainments (samāpatti) in all. Buddhaghosa's descriptions of the individual jhānas correspond exactly to the comparative table of the four jhānas in 1.5. He describes the successive dropping away of five factors, applied thought, sustained thought, rapture, pleasure, and equanimity. He also describes the development of the "meditation sign" (nimitta) in particular detail. With mindfulness of breathing, for example, a practitioner first sees the "acquired sign" (uggaha-nimitta) and then the "counterpart sign" (paṭibhāga-nimitta). The counterpart sign is described as a clear, luminous image. It appears at the stage of access concentration and can serve as the object for further development of absorption concentration.⁴² This later provoked controversy. Critics maintain that the counterpart sign is Buddhaghosa's distinctive formulation and lacks such a clear description in early scriptures. In their view, it should not be presented as a universally applicable landmark of practice.

Third division: purification of wisdom¶

Wisdom (paññā) is the culmination of the treatise, covering the whole path from initial insight knowledge to final liberation. Its central framework is the seven purifications (satta-visuddhi):

The sixteen insight knowledges (vipassanā-ñāṇa) within the sixth purification are the most finely articulated material in this division. They begin with knowledge distinguishing mentality and materiality. They proceed through knowledge contemplating rise and fall, knowledge contemplating dissolution, and the intervening stages as far as equanimity toward formations. Next come conformity knowledge and change-of-lineage knowledge, followed finally by the breakthrough into path knowledge. Each step is described concretely, including the ten imperfections of insight (vipassanā-upakkilesa) that practitioners may encounter at different stages. Experiences such as illumination, rapture, tranquility, faith, and energy can be mistaken for attainment of a fruition. This sequence later became the standard map for Southern Buddhist insight practice, differently interpreted by modern meditation systems in Myanmar and Thailand, as discussed in 9.5.

Buddhaghosa's framework of seven purifications and sixteen insight knowledges systematically integrates the early scriptural tradition. Early scriptures contain scattered pieces of this material, but no such orderly sequence. Buddhaghosa assembled them into a practicable path. The achievement was clarity, and the cost was fixing what had previously been flexible.⁵

IV. Two philosophical positions that warrant examination¶

In the Visuddhimagga and his commentaries, Buddhaghosa gave Southern Buddhist philosophy a fairly explicit orientation. Two points proved particularly controversial in later periods.

First, calm meditation precedes insight meditation. Buddhaghosa's framework of seven purifications requires practitioners to reach the second purification, purification of mind, before developing insight knowledge. It requires at least access concentration, or even absorption. In his system, calm (samatha) is therefore a prerequisite for insight (vipassanā), and the initial step of calm cannot be skipped.

This position has some grounding in early scriptures, but is not the only interpretation. Early scriptures also record "dry-insight practitioners" (sukkha-vipassaka), who can attain fruition through insight alone without first entering absorption. Buddhaghosa acknowledges this path in his commentaries, but his systematic presentation in practice gives greater prominence to calm preceding insight. This became one historical starting point of the subsequent dispute over calm and insight within Southern Buddhism. Twentieth-century Burmese meditation traditions, such as the Mahāsi tradition and Pa-Auk's method, developed differing interpretations. Some returned to a pure insight route, while others emphasized cultivating calm first. These differences can all be traced back to how Buddhaghosa is read.⁶

Second, the systematic use of own-nature (sabhāva) as a term of definition. Buddhaghosa's commentaries widely and systematically use the proposition that each dhamma has its own nature to define dhammas individually by their characteristics. The usage already appears in the canon. In her study of the Paṭisambhidāmagga, Ronkin regards that text as the first to use sabhāva to define dhammas.⁷ Buddhaghosa inherited an existing usage. His work extended it to the definition of all dhamma characteristics, making "each dhamma has its inherent characteristic, which constitutes its definition" the standard convention of Southern Buddhist commentary. The discussion in 3.4 has already identified the development. Own-nature is not widely used in the seven Southern Abhidhamma treatises, and the commentarial period strengthened its use.

Reading own-nature as a proposition about a mode of existence is a separate matter belonging to a different period. The same line of inquiry locates this step with the sixth-century commentator Mahānāma. In the Saddhammappakāsinī, his commentary on the Paṭisambhidāmagga, he analyzes sabhāva as sat-bhāva, existence or a state of being, thereby establishing the ontological reading.⁷ The step came about a century after Buddhaghosa and was taken by someone else.

The two uses belong to different levels. As a term of definition, own-nature means that a dhamma has its own specific characteristic, through which it can be distinguished from other dhammas in contemplation. The definition does not concern its mode of existence. As an ontological proposition, it means that a dhamma is, in itself, the very thing that it is, requiring nothing else to constitute itself. Buddhaghosa occupies the former position, having made the definitional usage standard. The conditions for reifying dhamma characteristics were left in place along with that convention, while later thinkers completed the ontological step. The connection between this development and the ontologizing tendency discussed in Essay III is one of conditions and consequences.⁸

This book regards this as a tension in Buddhaghosa's legacy that warrants further inquiry, but it cannot simply be called his error. Faced with a need for clear doctrinal definitions, he chose clarity, at the cost of a certain philosophical rigidity.

V. The commentarial tradition before Buddhaghosa¶

Understanding Buddhaghosa's work first requires a clear view of the commentary transmitted before his arrival. We need to consider its long history and extensive contents, as well as how little of it is directly visible.

Seven hundred years before Buddhaghosa. Roughly seven hundred years separate Mahinda's arrival in Sri Lanka in the third century BCE from Buddhaghosa's writing in the fifth century CE. Throughout that period, Sri Lanka's Mahāvihāra tradition both carried the Pali canon forward by memorization and continually produced interpretations of the scriptures in the local language, Sinhala. These Sinhala writings are collectively known as the old commentaries, Sinhala Aṭṭhakathā, or simply aṭṭhakathā.

Only the preface to the Samantapāsādikā explicitly lists and names its sources: the Great Commentary (Mahā-aṭṭhakathā), the Great Raft Commentary (Mahā-Paccari, literally "great raft," said to be named for its compilation on a raft), and the Kurundī Commentary, perhaps named after a place. These three works supplied the source texts for Buddhaghosa's integration. The old commentaries actually cited, however, extend beyond these three. The Samantapāsādikā alone cites six by name: the Kurundī most often, at about seventy places; the Mahā-aṭṭhakathā and Mahā-Paccari at about fifty each; the Andhra Commentary at about thirty-five; the Short Commentary at about ten; and the Raft Commentary once.³ According to the Mahāvihāra tradition, their origins can be traced back to the seeds of oral commentary Mahinda brought from India when transmitting the Dharma. Generations of Sri Lankan elders then supplemented and developed them.

The fundamental problem of historical evidence is that all three works are now lost, with no independent surviving copies. After Buddhaghosa completed his translations, there was no longer a need to preserve the Sinhala originals. They gradually disappeared over the following centuries. Everything available to us today is Buddhaghosa's Pali version. We can see those seven hundred years of accumulated commentary only through his eyes. The fidelity of his translation, the locations of his expansions, and those of his deletions and revisions cannot be independently established. He was both the translator of the old commentaries and, to a considerable extent, their reconstructor.

Abhayagiri's parallel tradition. Abhayagiri also had its own commentarial tradition, which took a different direction from the Mahāvihāra's. As the previous chapter discussed, it was more receptive to new currents of thought from India. The openness also left traces in commentary. According to Faxian, the texts circulating at Abhayagiri already included the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya and Mahāyāna scriptures. Its interpretive frameworks were correspondingly more diverse. This parallel tradition was interrupted by the Mahāvihāra's forced unification in the twelfth century, and almost no trace of it can now be found.

We return to the Mahāvihāra's old commentaries. Their precise form can no longer be established. What is certain is that they resulted from several centuries of accumulated local transmission and contained interpretations integrated with Sri Lankan culture and contexts.

Buddhaghosa's translation of them into Pali had two effects. It brought a local tradition into a common Pali framework that could cross geographical and linguistic boundaries, allowing Sri Lankan commentary to become the shared inheritance of the entire Theravāda world. At the same time, it removed these traditions from their original local linguistic setting. Thereafter they could be known only through their Pali versions.⁹

The Mahāvihāra's commentarial tradition continued after Buddhaghosa, with several important successors:

• Dhammapāla (Chinese: Fahu, 法护; around the fifth to sixth centuries) supplied commentaries on several texts Buddhaghosa had not covered, including the Udāna, Itivuttaka, Theragāthā, and Therīgāthā in the Khuddaka Nikāya. He also wrote a subcommentary (ṭīkā) on Buddhaghosa's own Visuddhimagga, producing a three-level structure: scripture → commentary → subcommentary. A section devoted to the perfections in his commentary on the Cariyāpiṭaka was Southern Buddhism's first treatise to address the bodhisattva path as a distinct subject. It drew on the Mahāyāna Bodhisattvabhūmi while removing its Mahāyāna markers, as discussed in Section I of 9.4. His Chinese name must be distinguished from those of two other figures: the Yogācāra Dharmapāla (Hufa, 护法; around the sixth century) and the logician Dharmakīrti (Facheng, 法称; around the seventh century). These are three different people whose names have long been confused in the Chinese translation tradition.
• Buddhappiya is mentioned in a Vinaya commentary. He may be the South Indian grammarian of the same name, but both his date and identity remain uncertain. If they are indeed the same person, he may be counted as a successor in Pali grammar and literature.
• Anuruddha, around the eleventh to twelfth centuries, wrote the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, further condensing the Abhidhamma systematized by Buddhaghosa into a compendium suitable for memorization, as discussed in 3.4.

The Chinese diagram labels this commentator Facheng (法称), c. fifth–sixth centuries. The English diagram uses Dhammapāla. The chapter names the commentator Fahu (法护, Dhammapāla) and explicitly distinguishes him from Facheng (法称, Dharmakīrti).

Once this three-level structure of canon, commentary, and subcommentary was established, studying Buddhism in the Southern tradition largely meant studying these three levels. A traditional Southern Buddhist bhikkhu usually begins with compendia and selected passages, reaching canonical texts and commentaries later. Although the canon is normatively the highest authority, in practice it is often understood through Buddhaghosa's eyes.¹⁰

VI. What did Buddhaghosa shape?¶

Buddhaghosa accomplished several things in the history of Southern Buddhism that together defined the concrete meaning of "Southern Theravāda."

He established a common language of interpretation. Converting the old commentaries from Sinhala into Pali transferred interpretive authority from a local tradition into a global Pali framework, in the sense of encompassing the Theravāda world of that time. Thereafter Theravāda scholars in different regions shared Pali as the scholarly language in which they wrote and read commentaries. Vernacular explanations, Sinhala sannaya and Burmese nissaya, were a further, later layer whose source texts remained the Pali commentaries. Buddhaghosa's project brought about this common framework.

He supplied an official map of the path. The Visuddhimagga's system of seven purifications and sixteen insight knowledges became the standard reference for subsequent Southern Buddhist accounts of practice. It offered practical guidance as well as a theoretical framework, allowing practitioners to use the map to check their progress step by step. Its detail and clarity explain its enduring vitality, and also the cost of fixing the path in this form.

He established a hierarchy of commentarial authority. In practice, the three-level structure of canon, commentary, and subcommentary means that understanding Pali scriptures does not result from a direct encounter between reader and text. It passes through the mediation of Buddhaghosa and others such as Dhammapāla. The mediation is not transparent, since it carries the Mahāvihāra's position, the context of fifth-century Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhism, and Buddhaghosa's own preference for systematization.

This book's position is that Buddhaghosa's commentarial undertaking was one of Southern Buddhist history's most important projects of systematization. Its strengths and weaknesses both lie in that systematization. He gave Southern Buddhism cohesion and the capacity to spread, allowing Sri Lanka's tradition to become a common source for the entire Theravāda world of Southeast Asia. He also fixed the interpretive framework of one period and one fraternity, the Mahāvihāra, into a layer of authority that later generations could hardly bypass. Today's Southern Buddhism is, to a considerable extent, Southern Buddhism as Buddhaghosa saw it.

VII. The Khuddaka Nikāya, its contents, dates, and the boundary between canon and commentary¶

Buddhaghosa's commentarial undertaking cannot be discussed without considering the texts he commented on. The fifth of the five Nikāyas of the Pāli Sutta Piṭaka is the Khuddaka Nikāya, the "Minor Collection," the most heterogeneous group of texts, spanning the longest period and most liable to misreading.

Composition and contents. The standard Pali tradition includes fifteen works, with slight differences among Theravāda regions. Burmese editions additionally include four works in this collection: the Compendium of Discourses, Guide, Explanation of the Piṭaka, and Questions of King Milinda.

The Burmese tradition also includes the Nettippakaraṇa (Guide), Peṭakopadesa (Explanation of the Piṭaka), and Milindapañha (Questions of King Milinda). In Sri Lanka and Thailand, the last is regarded as paracanonical rather than canonical.

The enormous chronological span. The differences in date among these fifteen texts far exceed those within the first four Nikāyas. Portions of the Suttanipāta, such as the Rhinoceros Discourse, the Aṭṭhakavagga, and the Pārāyanavagga, and the core layers of the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā, have archaic language and may be historically very close to the Buddha's time. The Apadāna, Buddhavaṃsa, and Cariyāpiṭaka, by contrast, belong to the canon's late strata. Scholars generally date them only relatively, to roughly a century or two around its commitment to writing, already three or four centuries after the Buddha. Their grouping in one Nikāya was an administrative decision of the ancient recitations, not a statement of homogeneity in contents or date.¹¹

The crucial distinction: canonical Jātaka and commentary. The Jātaka is among the best-known and most frequently misunderstood groups of texts in the Khuddaka Nikāya. The canonical Jātaka consists primarily of verses (gāthā), arranged in 547 numbered entries. The number of verses varies, and some entries are long. The associated prose narratives are preserved chiefly in the Jātaka-aṭṭhakathā. Some numbered entries contain only cross-references, so 547 is neither a count of individual verses nor a count of complete, separate stories.³ This commentary is traditionally assigned to Buddhaghosa. Scholars have reservations about that attribution, but the prevailing view is that it is a Mahāvihāra compilation from around Buddhaghosa's time, not an earlier canonical text.

The distinction is essential to understanding what constitutes the Pali canon, rather than merely an academic nicety. The complete plots of birth stories widely circulated in the Buddhist world, such as Prince Sudāna's gift of his children in the Sudāna birth story, Jātaka no. 547, the Vessantara Jātaka, come from commentary rather than the canonical verses themselves. Readers of the Jātaka are usually already reading commentary without knowing it.

Appendix: examining the sources of several Khuddaka stories popular in the Chinese-speaking world¶

As Southern Buddhism has spread in the Chinese-speaking world, narratives labeled as stories from the Pali scriptures have circulated. Their actual sources deserve clarification.

Mustard seeds to save a child: the story of Kisāgotamī. This story is extremely popular in Chinese Buddhist circles. A mother loses her child and carries the body around seeking medicine. The Buddha tells her to find a mustard seed from a household where no one has ever died. She searches the whole city in vain. She finally understands death's universality, and her grief is transformed. Eventually she enters the monastic order and attains fruition.

This figure does appear in the canon. Kisā Gotamī has verses recounting her awakening in the Therīgāthā 10.1, but they contain no mustard-seed episode. The complete mustard-seed story actually comes from two commentaries: the Dhammapada-aṭṭhakathā compiled by Buddhaghosa, where it supplies the narrative background to Dhammapada verse 114, and Dhammapāla's Therīgāthā-aṭṭhakathā. Both are fifth- to sixth-century texts belonging to the commentarial generation of Buddhaghosa, not to the early canon.¹²

The case exemplifies an extremely common pattern in Southern Buddhist literature, in which the canon names a person and commentary supplies the full story. Readers know the narrative as a story, but if they ask which Pali discourse contains it, the correct answer is that the person appears in the canon while the story itself belongs to commentary.

Giving children to a yakṣa, and a gift well given. In the story, a bodhisatta hands his children to a brahmin, who is actually a yakṣa in disguise. The yakṣa devours them on the spot. The bodhisatta feels no regret and instead rejoices, "What a fine gift I have made!" He then vows, "Through this merit, may I radiate light in a future life in just this way."

The story has an identifiable Pali commentarial source. Its protagonist is Maṅgala, one of the twenty-four past Buddhas, and the yakṣa is called "Hard-Tooth" (Kharadāṭhika, literally "rough-toothed"). The source should be the commentary on the Buddhavaṃsa, the Madhuratthavilāsinī, whose Chinese title means "Explanation of Nectar-like Meaning." Its author is the great elder Buddhadatta, traditionally regarded as Buddhaghosa's contemporary. The commentary explains how the physical characteristics of each past Buddha resulted from great gifts in previous lives. Maṅgala's brilliant bodily radiance is traced to precisely this gift and the vow made at the time.¹³

The story's source can therefore be characterized as follows. It is part of Pali commentarial literature, belonging to the commentarial layer of the Buddhavaṃsa, one text in the Khuddaka Nikāya, and is comparable in character to the Jātaka commentary. It is not part of the Pali canon itself. In its original setting, the practitioner on the bodhisatta path is Maṅgala in a former life, a bodhisatta, and is not given the title "Buddha." This distinction needs to be clear.

Controversy among practitioners. The story of Maṅgala's gift has long caused considerable unease within Southern Buddhism and wider Buddhist discussion. The particular concern is his declaration that it was a gift well given, as he watched the yakṣa devour his children without the slightest displeasure and instead felt joy throughout his body.

The controversy can be approached from several directions. In terms of the ethics of practice, some teachers place such birth stories among extreme achievements accessible to bodhisattas only after immeasurable aeons of cultivation. They are not models for ordinary practitioners to imitate now, but show how far the perfections can be taken. Other voices directly question which aspect of the Buddhist ideal of liberation is represented by the attainment of a father who feels no pain as his children are eaten. Critics approaching the story psychologically argue that complete emotional calm when one's closest kin suffer calamity is clinically closer to dissociation or emotional numbness than to healthy equanimity (upekkhā). Calling such a state the bliss of giving may blur the boundary between mature nonattachment and a pathological severance of feeling.

As a literary genre, the Jātaka commentary contains many stories of extreme bodhisatta sacrifice: giving away one's eyes in King Sivi's birth story, offering one's body to a tiger in some traditions, and giving away one's wife and children in the Sudāna story and others. Some scholars criticize the genre for conveying an aesthetic of extremity that does not fully accord with early canonical teachings. Early scriptures describe giving according to the basic principle that others should not suffer as a result. An obvious tension separates that principle from giving children to a stranger of unknown background.¹⁴

This book presents the controversy without adjudicating it. The story belongs to the commentarial layer, the Buddhavaṃsa commentary, and to a narrative setting concerned with the past-life merit that produced the characteristics of past Buddhas. It does not represent the early canon's normative account of giving. The commentarial tradition has its own historical and regional contexts. It and the early canon are two different layers of material and cannot be used interchangeably.

VIII. Modern controversy over Buddhaghosa's attainments¶

A claim circulating in recent critical discussions within Southern Buddhism is that Buddhaghosa may have lacked experience of meditative concentration. Some go further and suggest that he may have had no spiritual attainment at all, making the Visuddhimagga's practical guidance unreliable. This claim deserves serious examination by historical methods.

Where the criticism comes from, and what it claims

This criticism emerged chiefly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with Bhikkhu Sujato among its representatives, against the background of modern Theravāda disputes about how to understand jhāna. Its substantive question is whether a theoretical shift separates the Visuddhimagga's description of jhāna from the Pali Nikāyas' descriptions. The former requires deep absorption concentration (appanā-samādhi) and uses the counterpart sign (paṭibhāga-nimitta), an inwardly luminous image, as an object for developing absorption.¹⁵

The line of criticism stops at the divergence between the commentarial tradition and the discourses. It does not extend to Buddhaghosa's personal realization. Polak even explicitly opposes assigning responsibility to Buddhaghosa. The judgment that Buddhaghosa did not write from firsthand experience has a much earlier source and a different subject. Mrs. Rhys Davids made it in 1914, but confined her judgment to the Visuddhimagga's chapter on supernormal powers. Her reason was that Buddhaghosa narrated examples of such powers with a tone of accustomed belief, but never cited his own experience or that of contemporaries as evidence.¹⁶ The two claims concern different things. The former identifies discrepancies between descriptions of jhāna and the discourses. The latter says that the writing on supernormal powers does not seem grounded in firsthand experience. Joining the former's premise to the latter's conclusion produces an inference such as "If the description diverges, perhaps he had no such experience at all." That step does not appear in the scholars just named. What follows examines the latter claim.

What the historical sources say, and what they do not

First, no ancient or medieval text records that Buddhaghosa lacked meditative concentration or spiritual attainment. The absence is a negative finding, but an important one, and is the part of the question that historical inquiry can most readily answer.

Chapter 37 of the Mahāvaṃsa, which recounts Buddhaghosa's arrival, emphasizes his learning (paṇḍita, a learned man) and his work of textual compilation. It says nothing about his meditative achievements. The silence does not imply that he lacked them. The chronicle never approaches him from that angle. In its narrative, he is a scholar and commentator, not a meditation master.

In his own prefatory verses to the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa speaks of his mastery of the Tipiṭaka and commentaries and his birth near Magadha. He neither claims nor denies any attainment. His autobiographical statements offer no evidence in either direction.

The conclusion is that the historical record is silent about Buddhaghosa's personal practice. It supplies neither material supporting the criticism nor material refuting it.

Problems with the critical inference itself

The crucial step in the criticism moves from a discrepancy between the text's descriptions and the Nikāyas to the author's lack of experience. At least two aspects of this step are logically questionable.

First, a commentator's task is to integrate a tradition, not to report personal experience. Buddhaghosa translated several centuries of old Sinhala commentary into Pali and systematized it into a framework. He followed theories accumulated within the Mahāvihāra tradition, which had their own course of development and need not align exactly with the scriptures at every point. Someone with actual experience of meditative concentration could write commentary within a traditional framework without introducing personal experience as evidence.

Second, a gap between a textual model and the original scriptures reveals a theoretical choice, but cannot establish the author's state of practice. Commentarial interpretations can have many sources: accumulated tradition, the needs of doctrinal systematization, a synthesis of a community's practical experience, and personal insight. Inferring the absence of one possibility from the presence of another lacks sufficient logical support.

Where the substantive dispute lies

This book holds that the dispute is substantively about the relative merits of two interpretive models of jhāna, not a personal question about Buddhaghosa that historical evidence can settle. Interpretive differences between the Nikāyas' descriptions of jhāna and those of the commentarial tradition do warrant close examination. The textual question is legitimate and important, and clarifying the difference can help present-day practitioners judge which route to follow. Turning it into an inference about Buddhaghosa's personal experience of jhāna conflates two matters. The resulting personal question cannot be settled by historical methods, and conflating the two can easily divert the discussion.

The next chapter examines Southern Buddhism's geographical expansion, tracing how Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos each received this tradition and contributed elements of their own in the process.

Further reading¶

• Bhikkhu Bodhi (general ed.), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: The Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Ācariya Anuruddha. Onalaska: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2000.
• Rupert Gethin. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. The book discusses the early sources for the seven purifications and their relation to Buddhaghosa's systematization.

References¶