Paramatthajotikā II

The commentary on the Suttanipāta. It begins by saying only that it will write a commentary on the Suttanipāta — no author, and no title of its own.

The name Paramatthajotikā was attached later, and probably only because large parts of this book overlap with the commentary on the Khuddakapāṭha, which carries that title. The overlap misled the scholarship for a while: Norman once argued that the two had a common author and later withdrew the view, and Hinüber's judgement is that they are on the whole so different that “it is difficult to imagine a common author” (Hinüber 1996, p. 129, §255). No date can be given, for the text supplies nothing to date it by.

It makes no appeal to the old Aṭṭhakathā, yet it plainly draws on older material, and it opens with a table of contents of the Suttanipāta that measures the text at eight bhāṇavāras. Norman lists it among the works traditionally ascribed to Buddhaghosa while noting that “there is some doubt about the last five” — the Dhammapada, the Jātaka, the Khuddakapāṭha, the Suttanipāta and the Apadāna (Norman 1983, p. 121).