Paramatthajotikā I

The commentary on the Khuddakapāṭha, under the title Paramatthajotikā, “Illustrator of Ultimate Meaning”. The title is announced at the start, in prose where the four Nikāya commentaries would have used verse — the first sign that this book keeps different company from them.

Nobody knows who wrote it or when. The opening names neither an author nor the monk who asked for it, and it does not appeal to the older commentaries, or even to the Mahāvihāra, as Buddhaghosa's prefaces always do. No date can be given at all, and none is offered here: what the text does not say, this page does not supply.

Tradition put it among Buddhaghosa's works all the same, and Norman lists it there while adding that “there is some doubt about the last five” — the Dhammapada, the Jātaka, the Khuddakapāṭha, the Suttanipāta and the Apadāna (Norman 1983, p. 121). It opens, as the head of a set of commentaries should, with a short survey of the Tipiṭaka, an explanation of the word nikāya, and a mātikā setting out the method it will follow. Because the Khuddakapāṭha is itself assembled from pieces found elsewhere, much of this commentary repeats what stands in the commentary on the Suttanipāta.