26 Facts About Buddhaghosa

Buddhaghosa was a 5th-century Indian Theravada Buddhist commentator, translator and philosopher.

Buddhaghosa worked in the Great Monastery at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka and saw himself as being part of the Vibhajjavada school and in the lineage of the Sinhalese Mahavihara.

Buddhaghosa is generally recognized by both Western scholars and Theravadins as the most important philosopher and commentator of the Theravada, but is criticised for his departures from the canonical texts.

Name Buddhaghosa means "Voice of the Buddha" in Pali, the language in which Buddhaghosa composed.

Biographical excerpts attached to works attributed to Buddhaghosa reveal relatively few details of his life, but were presumably added at the time of his actual composition.

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Largely identical in form, these short excerpts describe Buddhaghosa as having come to Sri Lanka from India and settled in Anuradhapura.

Mahavamsa records that Buddhaghosa was born into a Brahmin family in the kingdom of Magadha.

Buddhaghosa is said to have been born near Bodh Gaya, and to have been a master of the Vedas, traveling through India engaging in philosophical debates.

Only upon encountering a Buddhist monk named Revata was Buddhaghosa bested in debate, first being defeated in a dispute over the meaning of a Vedic doctrine and then being confounded by the presentation of a teaching from the Abhidhamma.

Impressed, Buddhaghosa became a bhikkhu and undertook the study of the Tipitaka and its commentaries.

On finding a text for which the commentary had been lost in India, Buddhaghosa determined to travel to Sri Lanka to study a Sinhala commentary that was believed to have been preserved.

In Sri Lanka, Buddhaghosa began to study what was apparently a very large volume of Sinhala commentarial texts that had been assembled and preserved by the monks of the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya.

Buddhaghosa sought permission to synthesize the assembled Sinhala-language commentaries into a comprehensive single commentary composed in Pali.

Buddhaghosa's abilities were further tested when deities intervened and hid the text of his book, twice forcing him to recreate it from scratch.

Buddhaghosa went on to write commentaries on most of the other major books of the Pali Canon, with his works becoming the definitive Theravadin interpretation of the scriptures.

Some scholars thus conclude that Buddhaghosa was actually born in Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh and was relocated in later biographies to give him closer ties to the region of the Buddha.

Buddhaghosa was reputedly responsible for an extensive project of synthesizing and translating a large body of ancient Sinhala commentaries on the Pali Canon.

Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga is a comprehensive manual of Theravada Buddhism that is still read and studied today.

Maria Heim notes that, while Buddhaghosa worked by using older Sinhala commentarial tradition, he is "the crafter of a new version of it that rendered the original version obsolete, for his work supplanted the Sinhala versions that are now lost to us".

Buddhaghosa writes and theorizes on texts, genre, registers of discourse, reader response, Buddhist knowledge and pedagogy.

Buddhaghosa considers each Pitaka of the Buddhist canon a kind of method that requires different skills to interpret.

Some scholars have argued that Buddhaghosa's writing evinces a strong but unacknowledged Yogacara Buddhist influence, which subsequently came to characterize Theravada thought in the wake of his profound influence on the Theravada tradition.

Buddhaghosa is unlike nearly every other Buddhist philosopher in that he discusses episodic memory and knows it as a reliving of experience from one's personal past; but he blocks any reduction of the phenomenology of temporal experience to the representation of oneself as in the past.

Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga includes non-canonical instructions on Theravada meditation, such as "ways of guarding the mental image, " which point to later developments in Theravada meditation.

Buddhaghosa concludes that Buddhaghosa did not believe that following the practice set forth in the Visuddhimagga will really lead him to Nirvana, basing himself on the postscript to the text which states the author hopes to be reborn in heaven and wait until Metteyya appears to teach the Dharma.

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Meanwhile, Maria Heim holds that Buddhaghosa is the author of the commentaries on the first four Nikayas, the Samantapasadika, the Paramatthajotika, the Visuddhimagga and the three commentaries on the books of the Abhidhamma.