The early lost legal commentaries of the Mahāvihāra tradition: A contribution to the development of Buddhist monastic law

• Applicant: Aruna Keerthi Goigoda Gamage, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546820614

The early lost legal commentaries of the Mahāvihāra tradition: A contribution to the development of Buddhist monastic law. This project recovers lost early legal exegeses of one of the oldest continuously surviving legal traditions in the world, namely, the Buddhist monastic law (Vinaya) of the Theravāda tradition (Mahāvihāra school), which dates back to about the 3rd c., BCE and still thrives today in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The aim of this study is to catalogue, edit and translate quotations from early, now lost commentaries (ca. 1st c. BCE–3rd c., CE) on the Vinaya, which are contained in a later legal commentary called Samantapāsādikā (4th–5th c., CE). On the basis of this catalogue, a careful analysis of the exegeses that emerge in these quotations and their classification in the development of Buddhist law will be undertaken. The study will thus make an important contribution to the history of Buddhist law, in particular to monasticism and legal interpretation, and will make the relevant materials systematically accessible for the first time. Although there are many Buddhist monastic traditions, each of which transmits its own corpus of authoritative texts, the Threefold Basket (Pāli: Tipiṭaka; Sanskrit: Tripiṭaka), only that of the Theravāda tradition has been preserved in an Indian language, namely, the Middle Indic language Pāli. This canon represents the tradition of the Mahāvihāra school; the texts of other sub-groups of the Theravāda have not survived. Vinaya constitutes the first part of the canon. It contains, among other things, the rules for monks and nuns traditionally attributed to the Buddha, which remain incumbent upon monks and nuns of the present. During the 2500 years since their inception, it has been necessary to explain some of these rules in the light of changing social realities. For this reason, a large number of commentaries and subcommentaries on the Theravādin Vinaya have been written over the last two millennia. The Samantapāsādikā is relevant for the study of the earliest interpretations, since the author relied on now lost commentaries (ca. 1st c., BCE–1st (?) c., CE), from which he frequently quotes. These lost commentaries are 1) the Mahā-Aṭṭhakathā (50 quotes), 2) the Kurundī-Aṭṭhakathā (108 quotes), 3) the Mahāpaccarī-Aṭṭhakathā (133 quotes), 4) the Saṅkhepa-Aṭṭhakathā (12 quotes) and 5) the Andhaka-Aṭṭhakathā (19 quotes). This project will compile a complete catalogue of the 303 citations of the first four commentaries mentioned (The fifth has already been the subject of another study). By drawing on the three most important subcommentaries on the Vinaya—Vajirabuddhiṭīkā (10th c., CE), the Sāratthadīpanīṭīkā (12th c., CE) and the Vimativinodanīṭīkā (12th–13th c., CE)—it will also be possible to trace the survival of these early traditions during later centuries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants