Buddhaghosa

Buddhaghosa is the reason Theravada Buddhism has the systematic shape it does. An Indian-born scholar-monk of the fifth century who worked at the Mahavihara, the Great Monastery of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, he undertook to translate and organize the old Sinhala commentaries on the Pali Canon into Pali, the tradition's shared scholarly language. His masterwork, the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), is a comprehensive manual of doctrine and meditation, structured on the threefold scheme of virtue, concentration, and wisdom (sila, samadhi, panna), and it remains the single most authoritative summary of Theravada practice, still studied in monasteries today.

Through his commentaries on the canonical texts he effectively fixed the orthodox interpretation of the tradition for the following fifteen centuries. Little is known of his life beyond a semi-legendary account in the Mahavamsa chronicle; his significance is textual and enormous. Where the Buddha's teaching survived as scattered discourses, Buddhaghosa gave it an architecture.

Very little about Buddhaghosa's personal life can be established with confidence. The Mahavamsa and Culavamsa, the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition that mentions him, gives only a brief notice of his arrival and work, and a much later and more elaborate hagiography, the Buddhaghosuppatti, adds legendary material, including tests of his scholarly ability set by Sri Lankan monks skeptical of a foreign arrival, that most scholars read as later devotional embellishment rather than history.

What can be assessed more directly is his stated method of work: Buddhaghosa presents his major commentaries as translations and reworkings into Pali of earlier Sinhalese-language commentarial material, referred to as the Sihala Atthakatha, said to preserve exegesis going back to the earliest generations of the tradition in Sri Lanka. This creates a genuine evidentiary problem for assessing his originality, because the Sinhalese source material he claims to be summarizing does not survive independently for comparison, so scholars cannot fully separate what Buddhaghosa preserved faithfully from older tradition and what he shaped, selected, or added himself in the course of producing what became the standard Theravada commentarial corpus. His enormous influence on how Theravada Buddhism reads its own scriptures is not in doubt, but the precise relationship between his commentaries and their lost sources remains, by the nature of the evidence, unresolvable rather than merely under-researched.