Of the several members of the Buddhist order who have borne the name ‘Buddhaghosa’ the one who flourished towards the latter half of the fifth century CE is the most renowned and influential. The reputation of this Buddhaghosa rests on his detailed and comprehensive synthesis of the doctrines enshrined in the classics of the Pali Canon, the body of literature that defines Theravada Buddhism.1 His commentaries on these classics are copious, treating not only of the broad scope of Buddhist doctrine but also of a wide range of social customs, folklore, and literary, commercial, cultural and philosophical matters. His best-known work, the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), has been described as ‘a compendium of all Buddhism in three books’.2 It comprises a comprehensive work of reference and analysis, and a complete manual of meditational practice.
Reliable information about Buddhaghosa’s life is scant. A few details have been culled from his own writings at points where he has mentioned in passing his sojourn in a particular place or a meeting with a particular person. There is also a thirteenth-century account, composed in thirty-three couplets, of his life and work.3 A third source is a life of Buddhaghosa, Buddhaghosuppatti, written in Pali in the middle of the fifteenth century by Maha Mangala, a Burmese bhikshu, or mendicant disciple.4 This last source has been described as ‘of a legendary and edifying character and of little independent value’.5 Along with the thirteenth-century account it must be read with caution, in the light of the fact that it was written many centuries after Buddhaghosa’s lifetime.
What does seem to be reasonably certain is that Buddhaghosa, after ordination into the Buddhist priesthood, travelled from India to Sri Lanka to live monastically and study the abundant Theravada literature which had been steadily accumulating there since missionaries began taking Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the first century after the Buddha’s death. This source material was written for the most part in Sinhala, the major language of Sri Lanka and, as part of his project, Buddhaghosa set himself and accomplished the task of translating much of it into Pali.6 He remained in Sri Lanka, living either in or near the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura, the royal capital, until the political peace of the area was destroyed by invaders. During his time in the monastery he seems to have astonished the monks with his wide learning and knowledge of texts, his prodigious memory and his unfailing intellectual energy.
Buddhaghosa’s significance as a commentator and synthesizer has to be understood in the historical context of the development of Buddhism. After the death of the Buddha a series of councils was called in order to establish and clarify the main elements of the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets, those remembered sayings and sermons of the Buddha and the established practices that had been memorized and collected together by his first followers and disciples.7 Inevitably, divisions of opinion erupted at the councils, chief among them a disagreement between the orthodox Elders, who maintained that buddhahood was achieved by a strict adherence to the discipline of laid-down rules of conduct, and a group of more unorthodox thinkers who held that buddhahood is potentially present in everyone and needs only to be nurtured in order to manifest itself. This latter, minority group detached itself from the Elders and eventually generated the numerous sects which became known as Mahayana Buddhism, or the Greater Vehicle. The Elders, or Theravadin, regarded Mahayana as an erroneous departure from the Buddha’s true teaching, or Dharma, but the Mahayanists declared their own doctrine to be an extension or development rather than a repudiation of Theravada doctrine and they gave the Buddhism of the Elders the name of Hinayana, or the Lesser Vehicle.8
As the division between these two groups became more sharply delineated, the Theravada ideal of the arhat, the person who by stringent self-discipline achieves a personal salvation, gave way in Mahayana teaching to the ideal of the bodhisattva, the self-denying and compassionate person who willingly delays personal salvation in order to love and serve all sentient beings. A further difference between the two groups concerns the question of the divinity of the Buddha. Theravada doctrine resolutely refused to regard the Buddha as God. Mahayana, on the other hand, invoked the concept of a transcendental Buddha, not identical with the historical Buddha, who is accessible through worship and prayer to all who need solace, mercy and support in the difficulties of life. Yet another area of contention between the two groups lay in the difference between the Theravada avowal that reality is the plurality of distinct things that we apprehend in ordinary perception, and the Mahayana rejection of pluralism in favour of a doctrine that asserted ineffable Emptiness (sunyata) to be the ultimately real.
Buddhaghosa’s consolidation of Theravada teaching is entirely faithful to the basic tenets of Buddhism as propagated by the Elders. Thus he treats at length of the task, taken by Buddhism to be incumbent on everyone, to seek salvation in the context of impermanence, change, the cycle of decay and renewal, and the belief that life is a continual flux that takes place in accordance with a universal causality. He rejects, just as Buddhism in general rejects, the idea of an individual, immortal soul and fosters instead the buddhistic belief in the unity and interdependence of living things and the possibility of a harmony, achievable by means of compassion, that is able to supersede the suffering that permeates much of human existence. Equally important in his work is an emphasis on the essential practicality of Buddhism that is evident in the Buddha’s enunciation of the Four Noble Truths. These Truths are: that suffering is everywhere; that misplaced desire is the cause of suffering; that its cure lies in removal of the cause; and that the cause may be removed by following the Noble Eightfold Path, the guide to life offered by the Buddha when he exhorted his followers to engage in right beliefs, right thought, right speech, right conduct, right vocation, right effort, right attention and right concentration.9 Buddhaghosa’s concern is always to set out the exact means to achieve understanding and, eventually, enlightenment and accession to nirvana, the condition of being which is at once a negation of all ordinary conditions and yet wholly positive in its sublimity and unsurpassed bliss.
Debate about the concept of nirvana, its coherence or incoherence and its significance in Buddhist thought and practice, is unending among Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. It has been described as
not endless space not infinite thought, nor nothingness, neither ideas nor non-ideas. Not this world nor that is it . . . nor death, nor birth . . . It is the ending of sorrow. There is . . . an Unbecome, Unborn, Unmade, Unformed . . . there is release.10
But the literal meaning of nirvana is ‘blown out’, in the sense in which a fire goes out when its fuel is exhausted, and from this meaning some commentators have argued that to attain nirvana is to sever connections with the ordinary things of life and to become indifferent to ordinary human tasks and difficulties.
The negative interpretation of nirvana outlined above is one that Buddhaghosa, in his promulgation of authentic Theravada doctrine, is much concerned to deny. He maintains that the ‘blowing out’ or ‘extinction’ meaning of nirvana must be taken metaphorically and that it should not be regarded as a state of ‘nothingness’. He distinguishes between the Path or way to nirvana and nirvana itself. The Path, he holds, can be described, but not the destination. He says: ‘it [nirvana] can only be reached, not produced, by the Path . . . it transcends the intrinsic nature of matter . . . being attainable through special insight effected by strong effort’11 This account of nirvana is consistent with the actual life and conduct of the Buddha who, in the forty-five years he lived after his enlightenment, did not withdraw from the ordinary activities of daily living but spent his time in the midst of people, teaching them and sharing his thoughts with them, treading a middle way between extreme asceticism and the pursuit of pleasure, and refraining from making definitive pronouncements concerning the nature of nirvana. It is to this examplar, provided by the Buddha, of continuing participation in the life of the world rather than to any subsequent theorizing about nirvana that Buddhaghosa adheres in his doctrinal exegeses.
In Buddhaghosa’s best-known work, The Path to Purification, the purity that is sought and to which the Path leads is nirvana itself. Buddhaghosa first systematically examines the nature and constituents of Virtue, raising a series of questions which he proceeds to answer in painstaking detail, and exploring a range of possible meanings for almost every word used in the canonical sources. In the course of his analyses, and in presenting anecdotal examples or illustrations of the points he wants to make, he provides a vivid picture of the social customs and sensibilities of his society and a mass of definitions of mundane as well as lofty concepts. Some of the distinctions he draws are fine almost to the point of triviality. For example:
Disparaging is contemptuous talk. Reproaching is enumeration of faults such as ‘He is faithless, he is an unbeliever’. Snubbing is taking up verbally thus ‘Don’t say that here’. Snubbing in all ways, giving grounds and reason, is continual snubbing. Or, alternatively, when someone does not give, taking him up thus ‘Oh, the prince of givers!’ is snubbing; and the thorough snubbing thus ‘A mighty prince of givers!’ is continual snubbing.12
For the dedicated bhikshu, such minutiae provided precise and certain instruction for the conduct of meditation concerning what is to be avoided in the search for virtue.
Buddhaghosa’s writing is unfailingly penetrating in respect of every topic he examines. When he turns to the subject of Concentration he deals comprehensively with numerous forms of meditational practice including a step-by-step method for remembering and dwelling on each moment of one’s past life and previous incarnations. The bhikshu who succeeds in these practices, he writes,
immerses himself in voidness and eliminates the perception of living beings. Since he does not entertain false notions about wild beasts, spirits, ogres, etc., because he has abolished the perception of living beings, he conquers fear and dread and conquers delight and aversion.13
The result of engaging in this intense concentration at the highest level is that a person achieves Direct Knowledge of a complex and transforming kind, and ‘arrives at blissful perception and light perception’. Buddhaghosa continues:
that same perception should be understood to be called ‘perception of lightness’ too because it is liberated from hindrances and from the things that oppose it . . . But when he arrives at that state, his physical body too becomes as light as a tuft of cotton. He goes to the Brahma World thus with a visible body as light as a tuft of cotton wafted by the wind.14
Such a person has obtained Supernormal Powers and although to enter the Brahma World is not to achieve complete release, it marks arrival at a significant stage on the path leading to nirvana.
The scope and comprehensiveness of Buddhaghosa’s scholarly ordering and analysis of Theravada thought are not easily made clear in a short essay. Historians and commentators, even when they have disagreed about the details of his life or the attribution to him of certain works, are unanimous in acclaiming his six major commentaries as masterly and his philological and exegetical discrimination as unsurpassed in Buddhist literature. His influence on subsequent commentators was profound and far-reaching. He set the highest standards concerning accuracy, authenticity and respect for the texts he studied and there can be no doubt that his systematic organization and presentation of Theravada teaching have guaranteed its dissemination and widespread acceptability. His aim was always to understand and transmit the Buddha’s teaching in its purest and most illuminating form.
1 Theravada Buddhism is the ‘Teaching of the Elders’. It differs doctrinally from the less orthodox Mahayana Buddhism developed by such thinkers as Hui-neng.
2 T.W. Rhys Davids, ‘Buddhaghosa’, in J. Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Edinburgh, T. and T. Clarke, 1908– 1926, and New York, Scribner, 1951.
3 There is a translation of this account of Buddhaghosa’s life in Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification, trans. Bhikkhu Nyanamoli, Vol. I, Berkeley, CA, and London, Shambala, 1976, pp. xxi, xxii.
4 A precis of this account, described as a ‘popular novel’, is given in The Path of Purification (see note 3 above), pp. xxiv-xxvi.
5 In Mircia Eliade (ed.), ‘Buddhaghosa’, Encyclopaedia of Religion, London and New York, Collier Macmillan, 1987, p. 886.
6 Pali is ‘the text language’, that is, the language traditionally known as Magadhi which from around the first century BCE was developed for the presentation of Theravada scriptures. In 1881 the Pali Text Society was founded by T.W. Rhys Davids. It has published most of the Pali Canon in the Roman alphabet.
7 The Baskets have distinct subject-matters. The first, the Vinayapitaka, treats of the discipline and history of the Buddhist Order. The second, the Suttapitaka, contains discourses and sayings attributed to the Buddha. The third, known as the Abhidhammapitaka, covers the philosophical and psychological aspects of Buddhist doctrine. (These are the Pali names for the Baskets.)
8 Because the term ‘Hinayana’ means ‘Lesser Vehicle’ it has a derogatory tone and is therefore rarely used nowadays to refer to Theravada Buddhism.
9 For a more detailed account of these important elements of Buddhism see R.C. Zaehner (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Living Faiths, Hutchinson, London, 1978, pp. 263–292.
10 See Keith Ward, Images of Eternity, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987, pp. 59, 60.
11 op. cit., p. 61.
12 The Path of Purification, pp. 30, 31.
13 op. cit., p. 405.
14 op. cit., p. 442.
Buddhaghosa’s works fill over thirty volumes in Pali Text Society editions. His major commentary is:
Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), 2 vols, trans. Bhikkhu Nyanamoli, Berkeley, CA, and London, Shambala, 1976
the Buddha, Vasubandhu, Hui-neng
Conze, E., A Short History of Buddhism, London, Allen & Unwin, 1979
Dasgupta, S., A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols, Vol. I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1922
Law, B.C., Buddhaghosa, Bombay, Royal Asiatic Society, 1946
Ward, Keith, Images of Eternity, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987, ch. 3