Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī

The Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī, “The Crossing Over of Doubt”, Buddhaghosa's commentary on the two Pātimokkha recitations. In the Pali corpus it shares one file with the recitations themselves, which precede it; the recitation text is canonical and stays in Treatise volume 1, and the commentary is printed here as its own volume in the Aṭṭhakathā layer.

The recitation text has its own line of descent, and this commentary is the proof of it. The Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī comments on an introduction that the Suttavibhaṅga's version of the same rules does not carry, which “guarantees a tradition of this text independent from the Suttavibhaṅga” (Hinüber 1996, p. 110, §222). The rules were being recited and copied in their own right, not only inside the Vinaya.

The commentary names no author. It was written at the request of an otherwise unknown monk Sona, and its closing verses name the Sīhaḷa- and Porāṇa-aṭṭhakathā as its sources; the Burmese edition titles it in full Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī-pātimokkhavaṇṇanā. Norman counts it among the works generally accepted as Buddhaghosa's, which puts it at 370–450 CE. It is a working handbook rather than a treatise, about a quarter the length of the Samantapāsādikā and free of its theoretical discussion. And it does two things no other Vinaya book does: it numbers all the rules, and it uses the aṅgas, the key words that carry the essential content of a rule so it can be held in memory.