Manorathapūraṇī

After a famine scattered Sri Lanka's monks, they argued whether learning or practice keeps a teaching alive.

Pali, the original language

Original language: Pali

Overview

A great famine once struck Sri Lanka, the commentary tells, and Sakka, king of the gods, offered the monks a raft to carry them to safety across the sea; sixty of them turned back on the shore to guard the scriptures on the island. The story is told in the Manorathapūraṇī, Buddhaghosa's fifth-century Pāli commentary on the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the Buddha's discourses arranged by number from ones to elevens, where it explains how a teaching disappears. When the famine ended, seven hundred returning monks met the sixty at a monastery in Kallagāma, compared what each side had kept in memory, and found not a syllable different. The elders then argued over what the root of the Buddha's dispensation is. The monks who wore rag robes and lived by meditation said practice; the preachers said learning; each side quoted a discourse, and the rag-robe elders fell silent. The commentary's own image for the verdict is a herd: without the cow that carries the line, the line breaks, and without learning, a thousand meditators will not find the path. The commentary names five disappearances: of attainment, of practice, of learning, of the outward signs of a monk, and last of the Buddha's relics, which in a far future gather at the seat of his awakening and go up in a single flame. Of the five, it argues, the loss of learning is the root. Its closing verses say that it was written at the request of an elder named Jotipāla, with whom Buddhaghosa had once lived at Kañcipura, the South Indian city now called Kanchipuram, and that a second man, Jīvaka, asked for it while Buddhaghosa was living at the Mahāvihāra in Anurādhapura. Max Walleser began the five-volume Pali Text Society edition in 1924 and Hermann Kopp finished it in 1957. A note on its account of the disappearance of the teaching appeared in the society's journal in 2018.

Key concepts

What are the five disappearances of the teaching?

They are the stages in which the Buddha's dispensation fades from the world: first attainment, as no one reaches the path and its fruit; then practice, as discipline slackens; then learning, as the scriptures are forgotten; then the outward signs, as monks drift into lay clothes and lay livelihoods; and last the relics, which gather at the seat of awakening and vanish in a single flame.

What are learning, practice and penetration?

They are the three ways the teaching exists in people: pariyatti, learning, is the scriptures held in memory and study; paṭipatti, practice, is living and meditating by them; paṭivedha, penetration, is the direct realisation they lead to. The commentary makes learning the base of the other two, since practice survives only while the texts that describe it are kept, and penetration only while practice does.

What does it mean that the mind is luminous?

The discourse calls the mind luminous and stained by defilements that come from outside. Buddhaghosa reads "luminous" as purity, not light: the mind's resting state between active moments, the life-continuum, is free of greed and the other defilements. These are called visitors because they arise only later, in the active moments when the mind meets an object.

Who are the foremost disciples?

They are the monks, nuns and lay followers whom the Buddha names as first in a particular quality, one for each: first in faith, first in the monastic rules, first in teaching the Dhamma, first in speed of realisation, and so on through dozens of entries. The commentary turns the list into a set of life stories, each tracing the distinction to a wish made before an earlier Buddha.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

How a Teaching Disappears

A teaching can die out even while people still revere it. What keeps it alive, the people who practise it or the people who remember its words, is the question a famine forced on the monks of Sri Lanka.

Buddhaghosa's answer is learning. Practice, he argues, fades first, as monks stop reaching the path and stop correcting one another, but it can always be rebuilt while the texts survive, and nothing can be rebuilt once they are lost. That is why sixty monks stayed through a famine to guard the scriptures, and why, when the meditators in rag robes argued that practice was the root, the preachers won. Rules laid down early serve the same end, he adds, like a dyke built before a reservoir leaks.

teaching
monastic discipline
monastic life
knowledge
renunciation
faith
insight meditation

Enter a dialogue

The Foremost and Their Old Wishes

The Buddha names one disciple as foremost in each quality, in faith, in discipline, in teaching, in speed of awakening. The commentary asks how a person comes to be first in anything, and finds the answer lives ago.

For each name on the list of foremost disciples Buddhaghosa tells a story that begins under an earlier Buddha. Someone watches that Buddha honour a disciple as first in a quality, makes a wish to hold the same place, and then spends lives in giving and practice until the wish ripens. Paṭācārā becomes first among nuns in the monastic rules this way, Dhammadinnā first among nuns who teach. Excellence, on this account, is a vow kept across lifetimes, which makes it neither luck nor talent.

aspiration
arahantship
buddhahood
merit
generosity
karma
rebirth
spiritual attainment

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 2,787
distinct concepts: 1,601
by passages held, corpus-wide: #14

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
karma	rebirth	94
liberation	meditation	53
generosity	karma	51
liberation	rebirth	39
arahantship	liberation	31
arahantship	meditation	29
generosity	rebirth	28
karma	liberation	28
karma	meditation	23
meditation	rebirth	20
liberation	teaching	16
meditation	renunciation	15
liberation	renunciation	14
arahantship	renunciation	12
arahantship	karma	11
arahantship	teaching	10
generosity	renunciation	9
generosity	meditation	8
meditation	teaching	8
arahantship	rebirth	7
generosity	liberation	7
karma	renunciation	7
generosity	teaching	6
arahantship	generosity	4
rebirth	renunciation	4
karma	teaching	3
rebirth	teaching	3
renunciation	teaching	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

Manorathapūraṇī you are here PI
Pañcappakaraṇa-aṭṭhakathā
Five commentaries gathered as one work, ascribed to Buddhaghosa, completing the explanation of the Abhidhamma that the Aṭṭhasālinī and the Sammohavinodanī begin.
PI
Papañcasūdanī
Written for a monk Buddhaghosa had once lived with in a port town, probably in South India, and the home of his reading of the mindfulness discourse.
PI
Paramatthajotikā II
Ascribed to Buddhaghosa by tradition and doubted by modern scholars, a commentary that explains each discourse of the Suttanipāta by first asking what occasioned it.
PI
Sāratthappakāsinī
Made for the elder Jotipāla, and home of the "dry insight" gloss on the Susīma discourse that is still argued over.
PI
Sumaṅgalavilāsinī
Begins with history, the council that first recited the texts, before explaining the long discourses, the first collection in the canon's order.
PI
The Dispeller of Delusion (Sammohavinodanī)
Explains the Vibhaṅga, the Abhidhamma's second book: the middle of the three commentaries ascribed to Buddhaghosa, between the Aṭṭhasālinī and the one on the five remaining books.
PI
The Expositor (Aṭṭhasālinī)
The first of the three Abhidhamma commentaries ascribed to Buddhaghosa, said by a Sri Lankan chronicle to have been written in India, before he crossed to the island.
PI
The Illustrator of Ultimate Meaning (Paramatthajotikā I)
The smaller of two commentaries sharing one name, both ascribed to Buddhaghosa: this one explains the nine recitations that open the Minor Collection.
PI
The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga)
His one treatise rather than a commentary: the book his commentaries on the long and middle-length discourses send the reader to whenever meditation comes up.
PI

— or open another of their works