The Early Lost Legal Commentaries of the Mahāvihāra Tradition
DFG-funded project (since 2025)
The aim of this project is to recover 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 is still alive today and whose origins date back to around the 3rd century BCE.
The aim of this study is to catalogue, edit and translate quotations from early, now lost commentaries (ca. 1st century BC to ca. 3rd century AD) on the Vinaya contained in a later legal text (4th/5th century). Based on this catalogue, a careful analysis of the exegeses that emerge from 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, particularly to the history of Buddhist monasticism and the history of Buddhist legal interpretation, and will make these relevant materials systematically accessible for the first time.
Although there are numerous Buddhist monastic traditions, each transmitting its own corpus of authoritative texts, the so-called Threefold Basket (Pāli Tipiṭaka, Sanskrit Tripiṭaka), regarded as the ‘Word of the Buddha’, the Theravāda tradition—still thriving today in South and Southeast Asia—is the only one whose canon has been preserved in an Indian language, namely the Middle Indic language Pāli. This canon represents the Mahāvihāra school’s tradition, while the texts of other subgroups of the Theravāda tradition have not survived.
The monastic law (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 valid for monks and nuns today. Over the millennia of their application, societal changes have necessitated the explanation of some of these rules in light of social developments. As a result, numerous commentaries and subcommentaries on the Buddhist law of the Theravāda tradition have been written over the past 2,000 years, with twenty of these commentaries being fully preserved.
The Vinaya commentary Samantapāsādikā (= Sp), written between the 4th and 5th centuries CE, is crucial for the study of earlier interpretations, as the author relies on earlier, now lost commentaries (circa 1st century BCE to 1st century CE), from which he frequently quotes. These lost commentaries are: 1) Mahā-Aṭṭhakathā (50 quotations), 2) Kurundī-Aṭṭhakathā (108 quotations), 3) Mahāpaccarī-Aṭṭhakathā (133 citations), 4) Saṅkhepa-Aṭṭhakathā (12 citations), and 5) Andhaka-Aṭṭhakathā (19 citations). The aim of this project is to compile a complete catalogue of the 303 citations from the first four of these commentaries (the fifth has already been the subject of another study). Through a detailed analysis of the individual quotations, the varying orientations of these commentaries will be identified and explored. By drawing on the three most important sub-commentaries on the Vinaya—Vajirabuddhiṭīkā (Vjb, 10th century CE), Sāratthadīpanīṭīkā (Sp-ṭ, 12th century CE), and Vimativinodanīṭīkā (Vmv, circa 12th-13th century CE)—it will also be possible to trace the survival of these early traditions in later centuries.