The Book Tradition Calls the Deepest in the Canon

Theravada tradition holds the Patthana in a position of unmatched reverence among all the texts of the Tipitaka, teaching that the Buddha spent the fourth of the seven weeks following his enlightenment contemplating precisely this system of conditional relations, and that his mind's comprehension of its vast, intricate causal web became so complete and luminous that six colored rays are said to have radiated from his body during this contemplation, an image that later became the source of the six colors used in the modern Buddhist flag, first designed in Sri Lanka in the 19th century and now flown by Buddhist communities of every tradition worldwide. This traditional veneration reflects a real doctrinal judgment within Theravada thought: because the teaching of dependent origination, that all phenomena arise through conditions rather than through an uncaused or independently existing self, sits at the very center of the Buddha's awakening, the Patthana's exhaustive working out of exactly how that conditioning operates is understood as the fullest possible unpacking of the insight the entire teaching rests on.

Modern scholars, while not sharing the tradition's devotional framing, generally agree the Patthana represents the most sophisticated and philosophically ambitious achievement of the entire Abhidhamma project, a systematic attempt, without clear parallel elsewhere in the ancient world's surviving religious literature, to specify with exhaustive precision every mode by which conditioned reality actually operates.