Abhidhammāvatāra, Nāmarūpapariccheda, Paramatthavinicchaya, Saccasaṅkhepa

Four handbooks in one volume, and the heading names only the first. The Abhidhammāvatāra in twenty-four chapters, the Nāmarūpapariccheda in thirteen, the Paramatthavinicchaya in twenty-nine as printed here, and the Saccasaṅkhepa in five — which is why the book closes Saccasaṅkhepo niṭṭhito. They belong to a set of seven short Abhidhamma texts that Burma treats as a unit and calls the “little finger manuals”.

Three ascriptions, and two quite different kinds of date. The Abhidhammāvatāra, “Introduction to the Abhidhamma”, is Buddhadatta's, by its own closing verses; with the Rūpārūpavibhāga it is the earliest surviving attempt to sum the Abhidhamma up, and tradition makes Buddhadatta a contemporary of Buddhaghosa — 400–450 CE. The Nāmarūpapariccheda and the Paramatthavinicchaya are given to Anuruddha, whose date is uncertain and is usually put at 900–1100 CE. The Saccasaṅkhepa is not: its closing verses name no one, and the tradition gives it to Ānanda in the Saddhammasaṅgaha of about 1400 CE in Siam, but to his pupil Dhammapāla in the Burmese Maṇisāramañjūsā of 1466 CE and in the Gandhavaṃsa (Hinüber 1996, p. 164, §351).

The Paramatthavinicchaya is the fullest of the four: the whole Abhidhamma in 1,146 verses, in 39 chapters by Hinüber's count, where the edition printed here divides it into 29. Its closing verses are unusually forthcoming — Anuruddha a South Indian from Kāverīnagara in the kingdom of Kāñcī, living at Tanja, with the Mahāvihāra named and Saṅghavisettha as the monk who asked for the work. The Nāmarūpapariccheda covers only part of the subject, in 1,845 verses, and rests on the older commentaries, “following the way of exposition of those who dwell in the Mahāvihāra”; only its colophon names Anuruddha. The Abhidhammāvatāra is written in mixed verse and prose, each chapter closing in triṣṭubh where the rest of the literature would use śloka.