Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā

A subcommentary on Moggallāna's own pañcikā — the third storey of the second school's grammar. The name given in the text is Abhayārāmasāmi.

No date has been established for it, and none is guessed here; what can be said is that it is later than the work it explains.

Moggallāna founded the second school of Pali grammar, and the date of his work is fixed by a political event: his colophon says it was written in the reign of Parakkamabāhu, after the king had purged the Saṅgha of heretical monks — about 1165 CE. He lived at the Thūpārāma at Anurādhapura.

What made his school worth founding is that he took Pali more seriously as a language than his predecessors had. He treats it more exhaustively and with a better sense of its character, differs considerably in arrangement and terminology, and notices things the others had walked past — the existence of short e and o, for one. He was nonetheless a borrower: the earlier Pali grammars stand behind him, and so do the Kātantra, Pāṇini and above all Candragomin.