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WorkBuddhaghosa

The Path of Purification

Asked to explain one verse about a tangle, Buddhaghosa answered with the whole Theravāda path from conduct to release.

by Buddhaghosa1,656 passages held

  • Pali, the original language
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Original title
Visuddhimagga
Original language
Pali

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Overview

A deity in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Buddha's connected discourses, asks who can untangle the tangle within and the tangle without, and the Buddha answers in one verse: a wise person, established in moral conduct, who develops the mind and understanding. The Visuddhimagga, "the path of purification", is not a commentary but an independent treatise built on that verse, composed in Pāli by Buddhaghosa in the fifth century at the Mahāvihāra, the great monastery of Anurādhapura in Sri Lanka. The Cūḷavaṃsa, a Sri Lankan chronicle continued around the thirteenth century, tells the story as a test: the elders set the newly arrived Indian monk verses to expound before they would trust him with their Sinhala commentaries, and he answered with this book; deities hid the text twice, he wrote it out again each time, and the three copies were found to agree. Its closing verses say only that it was requested by Saṅghapāla, an elder of the Mahāvihāra. Its twenty-three chapters follow the verse in three parts: sīla, moral conduct; samādhi, concentration, taught through forty meditation subjects; and paññā, understanding, which takes the person apart into impersonal processes and ends in seven stages of purification. Behind it stands an older manual, the Vimuttimagga of Upatissa, kept now only in a sixth-century Chinese translation, which counts thirty-eight meditation subjects and orders insight by the four noble truths instead. The Indian scholar P. V. Bapat argued that Buddhaghosa wrote some of his paragraphs with that book, and the rival Abhayagiri monastery, in mind. The Visuddhimagga became the standard account of the path wherever Theravāda is practised, and a main source of the twentieth-century insight-meditation movement; modern monks such as Bhikkhu Sujato and Thanissaro Bhikkhu argue that its account of concentration departs from the discourses. Pe Maung Tin put it into English for the Pali Text Society between 1922 and 1931, and Nyanatiloka's German appeared in a Buddhist journal from 1926 and as a book in Munich in 1931.

Key concepts

What are sīla, samādhi and paññā?

They are the three parts of the path, and the three parts of the book: sīla is moral conduct, samādhi is concentration, the mind steadied on one object, and paññā is understanding, seeing body and mind as they are. Buddhaghosa reads all three out of a single verse in which the Buddha says a wise person, established in conduct, develops the mind and understanding, and so untangles the tangle within and without.

What is a kasiṇa, and what is the sign a meditator waits for?

A kasiṇa is a plain object taken whole as a meditation subject, such as a disk of clay or earth. The meditator looks at it until its image appears as clearly with eyes closed as with eyes open; that is the acquired sign. Kept up, it gives way to a cleaner inner image, the counterpart sign, and on this the mind can settle into absorption.

What does temperament mean in the Visuddhimagga?

Temperament (carita) is the tendency that dominates a person's mind, read from the qualities that come up most often in them. Buddhaghosa counts six: greedy, hating, deluded, faithful, intelligent and speculative. Conceit and greed show the greedy kind, anger and envy the hating kind, doubt and restlessness the deluded. A teacher who knows it can give the pupil a meditation subject and surroundings that work against the dominant fault.

What are access concentration and absorption?

They are two depths of the same stillness. Access concentration is the mind held close to its object with the hindrances, such as sensual desire and ill will, set aside, but not yet sunk into it. Absorption, jhāna, is the mind fully merged with the object, in four ascending levels. Access is enough to begin insight, and Buddhaghosa notes that some subjects, such as the recollection of death, never go beyond it.

What are the seven purifications?

They are the stages the book uses to order the whole path. The first two are purified conduct and purified concentration. The other five belong to understanding: purification of view, which sees a person as mind and matter only; of overcoming doubt; by knowing the path from what is not the path; of the way; and finally knowledge and vision itself, the moment of awakening.

Themes of the book

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

Conduct Comes First

Asked how anyone gets free of the tangle of craving, the verse names conduct before concentration and understanding. What a stable mind requires of daily behaviour is the question here.

Buddhaghosa opens the path with what a monk does, eats, owns and looks at, not with sitting still. Moral conduct for him covers more than the rules: it includes how a monk earns his food, so that walking and sitting to look holy for the sake of alms counts as deceit, and how he guards his eyes, so that a passing face is not grasped by its details. Thirteen optional ascetic practices and a list of ten ties to cut follow, because a mind still busy with property, family and gain cannot settle on anything.

  • monastic discipline
  • defilements
  • craving
  • attention
  • perception

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A Subject for Each Mind

Forty meditation subjects are on offer, from a disk of earth to the thought of one's own death. Which of them fits which person decides whether concentration takes hold at all.

Instead of one method for everyone, Buddhaghosa builds a pharmacy. A teacher reads the pupil's temperament, greedy, angry, deluded, faithful, intelligent or restless with thought, and prescribes accordingly: corpses in a charnel ground for the one ruled by lust, loving-kindness for the one ruled by anger. Each subject is followed from first attention to the inner image it leaves behind and on into the deep absorptions. The middle chapters then go further than any other account of the path, into the powers a concentrated mind is said to gain, and treat them as a by-product, never the goal.

  • meditation
  • concentration
  • jhana
  • mindfulness
  • body contemplation
  • body
  • equanimity
  • psychic powers

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A Person Taken Apart

Understanding, the third part, sets out to show that the one who suffers is made of passing processes with nobody behind them. If that is so, it has to say who walks the path and who reaches its end.

Buddhaghosa's understanding is analysis carried out on oneself. Body and mind are broken into aggregates, elements and sense bases, then traced through the chain of conditions, until what looked like a self shows up as mind and matter leaning on each other like a blind man carrying a cripple. Insight then passes through a sequence of knowledges, seeing everything arise and vanish, then as dangerous, then as something to leave, ordered into seven purifications. Along the way he warns that light and joy can be mistaken for arrival.

  • insight meditation
  • non-self
  • aggregates
  • dependent origination
  • conditionality
  • causation
  • materiality
  • consciousness
  • impermanence
  • suffering
  • knowledge
  • wisdom
  • liberation
  • rebirth

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Within this work

passages held
1,656
distinct concepts
836
by passages held, corpus-wide
#34

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: “concentration” and “meditation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
concentrationmeditation135
impermanenceinsight meditation41
consciousnessmeditation36
consciousnessrebirth31
impermanencemeditation27
liberationmeditation23
dependent originationrebirth21
concentrationliberation12
consciousnessdependent origination12
insight meditationliberation11
concentrationinsight meditation10
meditationrebirth10
consciousnessimpermanence9
impermanenceliberation9
dependent originationimpermanence8
impermanencerebirth6
concentrationconsciousness5
consciousnessliberation4
dependent originationmeditation4
liberationrebirth4
dependent originationinsight meditation3
dependent originationliberation3
concentrationrebirth2
consciousnessinsight meditation2
concentrationdependent origination1
concentrationimpermanence1
insight meditationmeditation1
insight meditationrebirth1

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

    Begins with history, the council that first recited the texts, before explaining the long discourses, the first collection in the canon's order.

     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) you are here PI
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