Sīmavisodhanī

A treatise on the purification of monastic boundaries — one of the specialised manuals on the sīmā, the area from which every monk must assemble for a legal act of the Saṅgha. It is the question on which the validity of an ordination turns, which is why a literature grew around it.

No published source on file names this book. It documents itself better than most books that are named. Its author signs each of its five chapters — Upasampadā, Kappavināsa, Nibbāna, Samasīsi, Pakiṇṇaka — with the same line: Iti sāgarabuddhittheraviracite sīmavisodhane, thus in the Sīmavisodhana composed by the elder Sāgarabuddhi.

And it dates itself: the 2,131st year of the dispensation, about 1587/88 CE. The closing prose sets the whole scene — at Sīrikhetta, the city called Isinagara because a seer founded it a century after the parinibbāna, on a spur above the Erāvatī by the Kañcanavara great stūpa, in the reign of the king Satviva Mahādhammarāja who gave that stūpa. What prompted it was a real quarrel: an ordination had been performed on the river without the udakukkhepa, on a reading of the Vimativinodanī taken without proper attention to its grammar and sense. The author closes in the first person — Mayāyaṃ racito gantho, niṭṭhappatto anākulo, this book was composed by me, brought to completion, free of confusion — and prays Ciraṃ jīvatu no rājā, long live our king.