India · fl. 5th c. CE
Buddhaghosa
Theravāda commentator who systematised doctrine in Sri Lanka
Working at the Mahāvihāra in Anurādhapura, he wrote the Path of Purification, a map of Theravāda ethics, meditation and Abhidhamma analysis that is still its standard handbook.
Life and thought
Buddhaghosa was a 5th-century Indian monk who came to Sri Lanka and worked at the Mahāvihāra monastery in Anurādhapura, the seat of Theravāda orthodoxy. According to the later chronicle Cūḷavaṃsa, he was a Brahmin convert from northern India. He rendered the old Sinhala commentaries on the Pali scriptures into Pali, condensing them, so that the Theravāda canon came to be read through his explanations; scholars now think some commentaries traditionally ascribed to him are by others.
His great independent work, the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), organises the whole path under three headings: virtue, concentration and wisdom. It gives practical instructions for forty meditation subjects, from coloured discs to the contemplation of death, and then analyses the person, in Abhidhamma fashion, into momentary mental and physical events, so that the meditator can see impermanence, suffering and non-self directly. It remains the standard handbook of Theravāda Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and modern insight-meditation movements still draw on it.