Papañcasūdanī

The Papañcasūdanī is Buddhaghosa's commentary on the Majjhima Nikāya. This first volume takes the Mūlapaṇṇāsa, the first fifty suttas, and is the largest single volume of the four Nikāya commentaries in this set.

Buddhaghosa is the pivot of the whole commentarial literature: the Visuddhimagga and the commentaries on the first four Nikāyas are his. Almost nothing is known about the man. The chronicle brings him from north India, near Bodh Gayā, which looks like an attempt to seat him beside the cradle of Buddhism; he was almost certainly a Southerner, and he lived for a time at Kañcī.

On the date, the numbers split in two. The Mahāvaṃsa makes him a contemporary of king Mahānāma. On the received chronology Mahānāma reigned 409–431 CE; on Bechert's revision, 349–371 CE. Hinüber prints both and sends the reader to Gombrich's objection to the second. The outer limits are firmer than the inner ones. Buddhaghosa is absent from the part of the chronicle that closes with king Mahāsena, himself dated 334–362 CE or 274–302 CE on the same revision; and the Samantapāsādikā was already being translated into Chinese in 489 CE. From those two ends Hinüber sets the brackets at about 370–450 CE, and Norman arrives in the same century from the Chinese translation alone.

He was not composing freely, and he says so at the outset. The commentaries already existed in Sinhalese — the Mahā-aṭṭhakathā, the Mahāpaccarī, the Kurundī — and his work was to carry them into Pali so that the Mahāvihāra's reading could be followed outside the island.