Samantapāsādikā

The commentary on the Mahāvagga, the great division of the Vinaya.

Buddhaghosa is the pivot of the whole commentarial literature. 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, and he was almost certainly a Southerner who 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 409–431 CE, on Bechert's revision 349–371 CE, and Hinüber prints both while pointing to Gombrich's objection to the second. The outer limits hold better than the inner ones — he is absent from the part of the chronicle closing with king Mahāsena, and the Samantapāsādikā was already being translated into Chinese in 489 CE — so Hinüber sets the brackets at about 370–450 CE.

This volume belongs to the Samantapāsādikā, his commentary on the whole Vinaya. He states at the end that he wrote it in the twentieth and twenty-first years of king Sirinivāsa, which is 429/430 CE on the one chronology and 369/370 CE on the other. Before commenting on a single rule it sets out the Bāhiranidāna, the external history of the Vinaya, because the authority of the text has to be established before its meaning is discussed. The colophon names no author, and neither does the Chinese translation, which led Finot to argue that the book was still anonymous in 489 CE; the name Buddhaghosa is first attached to it by Vajirabuddhi.