Papañcasūdanī

The discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, became in the twentieth century one of the main texts of the insight-meditation movement. Its classic commentary is found in the Papañcasūdanī, Buddhaghosa's commentary on the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha's middle-length discourses, composed in Pāli in the fifth century at the Mahāvihāra in Anurādhapura, Sri Lanka. Its closing verses name the monk who asked for it, Buddhamitta, with whom Buddhaghosa had once lived at a port town the verses call Mayūradūtapaṭṭana, whose site is unknown; the Pāli scholar Oskar von Hinüber thinks it very likely lay in South India. The same verses call the Majjhima the collection that destroys the doctrines of others, and the commentary argues as much as it glosses. On the mindfulness discourse it first asks why the Buddha taught it among the Kurus, and answers that a kind climate kept the people of that country sound in body and mind, able to take in a deep teaching. It then reads the sutta's opening claim, that this is the ekāyana, the "one-going" path, in several senses at once: a single road with no fork, a road travelled alone, the road of the one Buddha who opened it; and it rejects a reading some teachers held, that the word means a path one travels only once. The Pali Text Society edited the whole commentary in five volumes between 1922 and 1938, the work begun by J. H. Woods and D. Kosambi and finished by I. B. Horner, and Soma Thera's English translation of the mindfulness section, The Way of Mindfulness, has been kept in print by the Buddhist Publication Society of Kandy through many editions.