Saddhammappakāsinī

The commentary on the Paṭisambhidāmagga, under the title Saddhammappakāsinī.

This is the first commentary in the whole layer whose author signs his own name. Its closing verses carry an unusual amount of information for their date and became the model for the Niddesa commentary's: “For the first time the name of the author is mentioned: Mahānāma”, a monk of the Mahāvihāra living in a cell donated by a minister (Hinüber 1996, p. 143, §291).

The date is given in a riddle, and the two standard readings differ by sixty years. The colophon dates the work by a death rather than a reign. Hinüber renders it “when king Moggallāna was dead for three years”, takes the king to be Moggallāna II, and reads 559 or 499 CE. Norman gives the same phrase as “in the third year after the death of king Moggallāna” and reports Warder's reading, which takes it as Moggallāna I and yields 516 CE. Mahānāma makes no clear reference to Dhammapāla and probably comes before him. The book works hand in glove with the Visuddhimagga and the Abhidhamma commentaries: it opens by defining paṭisambhidā from the Visuddhimagga and then enlarging the definition out of the Vibhaṅga commentary.