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WorkBuddhaghosa

Sumaṅgalavilāsinī

Buddhaghosa's guide to the Buddha's long discourses, from the sixty-two speculative views of the first to the last journey.

by Buddhaghosa2,390 passages held

  • Pali, the original language
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Overview

Dāṭhānāga, a senior elder living at the Sumaṅgala college of monks in Sri Lanka, asked for this book, and Buddhaghosa records the request in its closing verses. The Sumaṅgalavilāsinī is his commentary on the Dīgha Nikāya, the collection of the Buddha's thirty-four long discourses, composed in Pāli in the fifth century. The same verses say what kind of work it is: it takes the substance of the Great Commentary, the Sinhala commentary kept at the Mahāvihāra in Anurādhapura, and recasts it in Pāli, the language of the discourses themselves. They also give its length as eighty-one recitation units and add the fifty-nine of the Visuddhimagga, his treatise on the path, because that book was written to explain the collections too; counted together, he says, they make one hundred and forty. Before it reaches the first discourse, the commentary tells the history of the text it explains: the council held at Rājagaha after the Buddha's death, where the elder Mahākassapa questioned Upāli on the monastic discipline and the Buddha's attendant Ānanda on the discourses, and the assembled monks recited what they had answered. The first discourse lists sixty-two speculative views about the self and the world, and the commentary works through each. On the discourse of the Buddha's last journey and death it fills in the days and the places, and Yang-Gyu An translated that section into English as The Buddha's Last Days for the Pali Text Society in 2003. Bhikkhu Bodhi has translated its reading of the discourse to King Ajātasattu, who had killed his father to take the throne.

Key concepts

What are the four great references?

They are the standards for deciding whether something counts as the Buddha's teaching. A saying offered as his must be compared with the three collections of scripture and with the standard of restraint from the passions, and if it fits neither it is set aside. For a practice the rules never mention, the test is likeness: whatever resembles what is forbidden and blocks what is allowed is not allowed.

What are the sixty-two views?

They are the catalogue of speculations about the self and the world in the first long discourse, eighteen about the past and forty-four about the future. They include the eternalists, who hold the self and world everlasting, and the annihilationists, who hold the self ends at death. Buddhaghosa traces each to its source, often a meditator's partial memory of past lives or a chain of reasoning from what one does not see.

What are the fruits of the life of a renunciant?

Here the life of a renunciant, sāmañña, means the noble eightfold path itself, and its fruits are the four stages of awakening, from stream-entry, where the first bonds to suffering break, to arahantship, where none remain. King Ajātasattu asks about the fruits without knowing this meaning: he wants a reward that can be seen now, like a craftsman's wages, and the discourse answers him at that level first.

What is a mind-made body?

It is a body a meditator produces from the mind alone, complete with every limb and faculty and resembling its maker in every feature. The comparisons are drawing a reed from its sheath or a sword from its scabbard: the new form comes out of the old one whole. The extraction is mental, not physical, and it is one of the powers listed among the fruits of a renunciant's life.

Themes of the book

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

Who Keeps the Word

Once the teacher is dead, his words survive only in what disciples remember and recite. How a later monk can tell the Buddha's word from anyone else's is the question the commentary answers before it explains a single discourse.

Buddhaghosa starts with history because authority depends on it. He tells how, after the Buddha's death, Mahākassapa chose the monks for a council at Rājagaha, questioned Upāli on the discipline and Ānanda on the discourses, and had the assembly recite what they answered. Where his sources disagree, as on how Ānanda arrived, he records both. For anything that turns up later he lays down tests: compare it with the three collections and with restraint from the passions, and rank the teachers' views, and finally one's own opinion, below the texts.

  • teaching
  • religious authority
  • interpretation
  • monastic discipline
  • arahantship
  • knowledge

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The Net of Views

The first long discourse lists sixty-two ways of speculating about the self and the world. The commentary asks where each comes from, since a view that has a source can be understood and not only refuted.

Behind most of the sixty-two views Buddhaghosa finds an honest mistake rather than malice. A meditator who remembers past lives but none beyond a certain birth concludes that the self has no beginning. A Brahmā reborn first in an empty world watches others appear after his wish and takes himself for their maker. Eternalists take one part of a person, a feeling, the body or consciousness, and call it the everlasting self. The net of the title, he says, means only that no view falls outside the teaching's account.

  • perception
  • rebirth
  • karma
  • buddhist cosmology
  • meditation
  • knowledge

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Kings and the Last Days

The long discourses bring the Buddha before rulers and follow him to his death. The commentary fills in the people, places and motives the discourses leave out, and has to decide how much a story may say.

Buddhaghosa reads the long discourses as history with consequences. Ajātasattu's name, he explains, means an enemy before birth, and in his royal line son kills father until the people kill the last king. On the last journey he follows the days and places and lists the readings of the Buddha's last dish, tender pork, soft rice or a remedy, while insisting the illness came after the meal and not from it. A father's deathbed advice to bow to the six directions becomes a lesson in household ethics.

  • kingship
  • buddhahood
  • impermanence
  • merit
  • generosity
  • virtue
  • suffering

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Within this work

passages held
2,390
distinct concepts
1,640
by passages held, corpus-wide
#19

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: “meditation” and “mindfulness”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
meditationmindfulness53
karmarebirth42
liberationmeditation33
generositykarma21
liberationrebirth18
liberationmindfulness16
meditationrebirth14
buddhist cosmologyrebirth13
karmaliberation10
liberationteaching9
generosityteaching8
buddhist cosmologykarma7
buddhist cosmologymeditation7
generosityrebirth7
karmameditation7
buddhist cosmologyliberation6
generosityliberation6
generositymeditation6
meditationteaching4
mindfulnessrebirth4
mindfulnessteaching3
buddhist cosmologygenerosity2
buddhist cosmologymindfulness1
karmateaching1
rebirthteaching1

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.

  1. Manorathapūraṇī

    The last of his four commentaries on the collections of discourses: its closing verses name it the Manorathapūraṇī, "fulfiller of the wish", because it completed his wish to explain them all.

     PI
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Sāratthappakāsinī

    Made for the elder Jotipāla, and home of the "dry insight" gloss on the Susīma discourse that is still argued over.

     PI
  6. Sumaṅgalavilāsinī you are here PI
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
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