Rs.225.00
30 September 2005
by Bimala Charan Law (Author)
About The Book
BUDDHAGHOSA was the most celebrated commentator of the Theravada School of Buddhism. An attempt has been made in the present treatise to build up a connected history of the life and labours of the distinguished exegete. In the first chapter I have attempted to put together the materials for a life-history of Buddhaghosa as culled from his own works as well as from Dhammakitti s account recorded ir the Mahavamsa The second chapter deals with the legends which grew about our commentator as mentioned in the Buddhaghosuppatti the Sasanavamsa and similar works. Much importance cannot be attached to these legends as they are of little value from the historical point of view. The third chapter treats of the origin and development of Bud-dhist commentaries and an important branch of the Bud-dhist literature namely that of the Poranas has been ex-amined in it. I am indeed thankful to Mrs. Rhys Davids for kindly drawing my attention to this point. In the fourth chapter dealing with the works of Buddhaghosa I have discussed about the ascription of the authorship of the Dhammapada commentary to our commentator. A Sanskrit poem Padyacüdāmani attributed to Buddhaghosa and lately published by the Government of Madras has also been noticed in it. I have omitted the Jätaka commentary from my list of the works of Buddhaghosa although this may appear to be somewhat astounding to many.
About the Author
Mr. Bimala Charan Law as an investigator in that unharvested field needs no introduction.She is in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. All were of historical interest. All would have to be discussed in any critical history of Buddhaghosa s work. He had there no scope to deal with any one of them.
His book will be by no means a last word on the subject. It will be relatively easy for European scholars less un-daunted than Mr. Law to carry forward their work when we get all that has been ascribed to Buddhaghosa printed in Roman letter. But the book is all the more needed now as a very useful compendium of what we yet know of Buddha-ghosa both from his own works and from other docu-ments. Theories about the great commentator are crop-ping up. They rest on a more or less slender basis of evidence from lack of more historical prolegomena such as this book affords. We have recently assisted in publishing Mr. Nagai s theory that "the Visuddhi-magga is in reality a revised version of Upatissa s Vimutti-magga."
Paperback : 183 pages
ISBN-10 : 8188043281
ISBN-13 : 978-8188043286
Reading age : 7 years and up
Dimensions : 13.7 x 1.3 x 20.8 cm