Papañcasūdanī

The second volume of the Papañcasūdanī on the Majjhima Nikāya, covering the Majjhimapaṇṇāsa, the middle fifty suttas.

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.

One rule governs all four of these commentaries, and he states it at the opening of each: what the Visuddhimagga has already settled will not be said again here, “for the Visuddhimagga stands between and in the midst of” the four collections (Norman 1983, p. 122). The four Nikāya commentaries and that one manual are meant to be read as a single apparatus.