Buddhaghosa in Two Ideas
the essentialsThe Path of Purification
Morality, concentration and wisdom — the whole Theravāda path in one systematic work.
Forty meditation subjects
From the breath and the elements to loving-kindness and the foulness of corpses — each matched to a temperament.
Buddhaghosa (“Voice of the Buddha”, 5th century CE) was the most important commentator of Theravāda and the Abhidharma Buddhism. According to the Sri Lankan chronicle Cūḷavaṃsa, he was a Brahmin from near Bodh Gayā in India who converted to Buddhism and travelled to Anurādhapura in Sri Lanka, where he studied the Sinhalese commentaries on the Pāli Canon at the Mahāvihāra monastery and translated them into Pāli, editing and systematising them. Most of the commentaries (aṭṭhakathā) on the Pāli Canon that survive are attributed to him.
His masterpiece is the Visuddhimagga (“The Path of Purification”), a comprehensive manual of Theravāda doctrine and practice organised around the threefold training of morality (sīla), concentration (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā). It describes the precepts and ascetic practices, the forty meditation subjects (kammaṭṭhāna) — the ten kasiṇas (coloured discs, elements, light, space), ten foulnesses (stages of a corpse), ten recollections (of the Buddha, death, the body, the breath and others), four divine abodes (loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity), four formless states and others — matched to different temperaments; the meditative absorptions; the supernormal powers; and finally the stages of insight into the aggregates, dependent origination and the three marks, leading to the four stages of awakening. It remains the authoritative statement of Theravāda orthodoxy.
Curiosities
did you know?- Tradition says the Sri Lankan elders tested him by giving him two verses to expound; he wrote the Visuddhimagga — and when the gods hid the manuscript, he wrote it twice more, and all three copies matched word for word.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can meditation be mapped like a science?
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