The Commentator Who Standardized a Tradition

Buddhaghosa is the reason Theravada Buddhism has the systematic shape it does. An Indian-born scholar-monk of the fifth century who worked at the Mahavihara, the Great Monastery of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, he undertook to translate and organize the old Sinhala commentaries on the Pali Canon into Pali, the tradition's shared scholarly language. His masterwork, the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), is a comprehensive manual of doctrine and meditation, structured on the threefold scheme of virtue, concentration, and wisdom (sila, samadhi, panna), and it remains the single most authoritative summary of Theravada practice, still studied in monasteries today.

Through his commentaries on the canonical texts he effectively fixed the orthodox interpretation of the tradition for the following fifteen centuries. Little is known of his life beyond a semi-legendary account in the Mahavamsa chronicle; his significance is textual and enormous. Where the Buddha's teaching survived as scattered discourses, Buddhaghosa gave it an architecture.