Paramatthadīpanī (Ledi Sayadaw's ṭīkā on the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha)

Two books in this collection are called Paramatthadīpanī, and they are nine hundred years apart. The other is Dhammapāla's, on seven books of the Khuddaka Nikāya, in the green layer. This one is Ledi Sayadaw's subcommentary on the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, and its colophon states its own place in the queue: the catutthasaṃvaṇṇanā, the fourth exposition of that manual.

Ledi Sayadaw is the Burmese scholar-monk of the turn of the twentieth century through whom Abhidhamma study and insight meditation reached a mass lay audience — the hinge between the monastery and the layman's practice hall.

Its importance is that it picked a fight. It took issue with the Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī, the twelfth-century subcommentary that had held the field unchallenged, and set off a controversy that ran for years; a later ṭīkā, the Abhidhammatthasaṅgahavinicchaya, was written to reconcile the two. Braun's reading is that the quarrel was about standing rather than doctrine: the corrections themselves are slight, and Ledi “never exploits his corrections as the thin end of a wedge” (Braun 2013, pp. 60–61). He later wrote his own commentary on it, the Anudīpanī, in 1916.

Its own date is unsettled in the sources on file, and the disagreement is left standing here rather than resolved. The life of the author prefixed to The Manuals of Buddhism says he wrote it in Pali in 1897 CE; the plate caption in Braun gives 1907 CE. The likeliest explanation is composition against printing, but nothing on file proves it.