Atthasālinī

The commentary on the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, the Atthasālinī — the door into the Abhidhamma, and the book most often read before the Abhidhamma itself.

Buddhaghosa is the pivot of the whole commentarial literature. Almost nothing is known about the man: the chronicle brings him from north India near Bodh Gayā, which looks like an attempt to seat him beside the cradle of Buddhism, and he was almost certainly a Southerner who lived for a time at Kañcī. On the date the numbers split in two. The Mahāvaṃsa makes him a contemporary of king Mahānāma: on the received chronology 409–431 CE, on Bechert's revision 349–371 CE, and Hinüber prints both while pointing to Gombrich's objection to the second. The outer limits hold better than the inner ones — he is absent from the part of the chronicle closing with king Mahāsena, and the Samantapāsādikā was already being translated into Chinese in 489 CE — so Hinüber sets the brackets at about 370–450 CE.

The three Abhidhamma commentaries were designed as one work in three parts — the Atthasālinī on the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, the Sammohavinodanī on the Vibhaṅga, and the Pañcappakaraṇaṭṭhakathā on the remaining five books. The design is visible in the text: each part opens “after the Dhammasaṅgaṇī (etc.) has been explained …”, and the closing verses of the last part describe the whole as the commentary on the seven treatises. The Mahāvaṃsa says that Buddhaghosa wrote the Ñāṇodaya and then this commentary before he ever went to Ceylon — which, if true, makes this the earliest of his surviving books.