Buddhaghosa

The task

Buddhaghosa travelled from India to the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, where commentaries on the canon had been preserved in Sinhala. He translated and edited these into Pali, producing commentaries on the Vinaya and on the major discourse collections that superseded and then replaced the Sinhala originals, which are entirely lost.

This makes him the filter through which Theravada reads its own canon. What survives of the earlier interpretive tradition survives in his redaction.

The Visuddhimagga

The Path of Purification is his own systematic treatise, organising the whole of the path under the three trainings of ethics, concentration and wisdom. It sets out forty meditation subjects with instructions for each, describes the stages of absorption and the insight knowledges in detail, and integrates Abhidhamma analysis throughout.

It is the standard manual of Theravada practice and doctrine, and the modern insight meditation movements draw their maps of practice largely from it.

Assessment

Buddhaghosa's authority is enormous and has been questioned on exactly that ground. His synthesis is systematic where the canon is various, and it fixes interpretations — on the stages of insight, on the relation of concentration to insight, on the technical vocabulary — that the discourses leave more open.

Modern scholars and some Theravada reformers have argued that the Visuddhimagga's scheme, particularly its account of the insight knowledges, is a commentarial construction rather than a canonical one. The point is not that it is wrong but that the distinction between canon and commentary is worth keeping in view when Theravada doctrine is described.

Life

Little is known. The traditional biography, composed centuries later, gives him a Brahmin origin in north India near Bodh Gaya and a conversion to Buddhism, and includes miraculous elements. The name means voice of the Buddha.