Līnatthavaṇṇanā (Abhidhamma anuṭīkā)

The anuṭīkā on the Dhammasaṅgaṇī — Dhammapāla explaining Ānanda explaining Buddhaghosa explaining the Abhidhamma. Four storeys, and this is the fourth.

The anuṭīkā layer exists for the Abhidhamma alone, and the tradition says so in its own words rather than leaving it to be inferred from silence. The Sāsanavaṃsappadīpikā defines the term: a book is called an anuṭīkā “because it explains the unclear meanings of the Mūlaṭīkā”. Since Mūlaṭīkā is the proper name of Ānanda's Abhidhamma subcommentary, the layer is tied to the Abhidhamma by definition. The Cūḷagandhavaṃsa uses the two words contrastively in a single breath when it lists Dhammapāla's output: ṭīkā on the four Nikāya commentaries, anuṭīkā on the Abhidhamma commentary, ṭīkā on the Netti commentary.

Every date attached to Dhammapāla is a bracket, not a year. He quotes Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya, and Bhartṛhari can perhaps be placed at 450–510 CE, which puts Dhammapāla after 500 CE and younger than Buddhaghosa. The upper end is far weaker: no reliable limit has been found, and the first firm date is that Sāriputta was reading him in the 1100s. Hinüber says the date “remains uncertain”, and notes that the tradition makes him Ānanda's pupil while marking that link “perhaps” at its first mention (Hinüber 1996, p. 166, §356, and p. 169, §§365–366).

These are Dhammapāla's subcommentaries on Ānanda's, under the title Līnatthavaṇṇanā: the first on the Atthasālinī, the second on the Vibhaṅga, the third and last covering the Pañcappakaraṇa. Hinüber's account of the sequence is that the Mahāvihāra added subcommentaries to the Abhidhamma commentaries first, and that the Suttanta subcommentaries followed, “which form a unit together with the first anuṭīkās on the Abhidhamma commentaries” — Ānanda writing the one set and Dhammapāla the other. His authorship of these is shown from inside the corpus: the Paramatthadīpanī cross-refers to the Pañcappakaraṇa-anuṭīkā.