Summary

Buddhaghosa was a Buddhist scholar-monk of the 5th century ce who belonged to a branch of the Theravāda school in Sri Lanka known as the Mahāvihāra. He has long been celebrated in the Sri Lankan Theravāda-Mahāvihāra tradition as the paradigmatic saint-scholar. In the first half of the 5th century, Buddhaghosa compiled his most important treatise, the Visuddhimagga (The Path to Purification). Outlining how the practitioner might overcome mental afflictions and attain nibbāna (nirvāṇa in Sanskrit), the Visuddhimagga offers a systematic explanation of Buddhist thought and practice in terms of the triad of conduct, meditative concentration, and wisdom. Buddhaghosa then went on to compile commentaries on the first four Nikāyas, which are collections of the Buddha’s discourses contained in the Pāli canon, and possibly commentaries on other texts too. In these commentaries, he provided exegeses of words and concepts in Buddhist canonical literature. Just after the beginning of the cultural and linguistic hegemony of the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” across South and Southeast Asia, Buddhaghosa wrote in Pāli, another Middle-Indo Aryan language. According to Buddhaghosa, Pāli was the only language suitable for the transmission of Buddhist scriptures. Buddhaghosa also established the definition of the Pāli canon on the basis of the argument that five hundred elders had fixed the divisions of buddhavacana (which literally means “the word of the Buddha”) at the First Buddhist Council. The oldest extant biography of Buddhaghosa confirms that the Mahāvihāra treated Buddhaghosa’s commentaries like canonical texts.