Paṭisambhidāmagga

• 1. Introduction

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  The Patisambhidamagga is a Buddhist scripture whose Pali name means "path of discrimination." Readers sometimes shorten it to Patisambhida. It belongs to the Pali Canon, the scriptural collection of Theravada Buddhism. Tradition credits it to Sariputta, a great disciple of the Buddha. Yet the book is hard to place. Is it a discourse, or a systematic treatise? Is it as old as tradition suggests? And what does it say about the nature of experience? Scholars who have studied it disagree about its age by centuries. The way to start is with its structure, because the book is built on an unusual plan.

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• 2. Thirty Chapters

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  The Patisambhidamagga holds thirty chapters, called katha in Pali. They are grouped into three divisions, known as vagga, of ten chapters apiece. The book is the twelfth in the Khuddaka Nikaya, a collection within the Sutta Pitaka. The first chapter, on knowledge, makes up about a third of the whole work.

  The opening division is the Mahavagga, or Great Division. It begins with a list, called a matika, naming 73 types of knowledge. The rest of that division elaborates each type in detail. The second division is the Yuganandhavagga, the Coupling Division, and it poses a series of questions. The third is the Paññavagga, the Wisdom Division, and it supplies the answers to those questions. Somewhere inside this frame sits a section called the Suññakatha, which takes up the meaning of emptiness.

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• 3. Emptiness Defined

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  In the Suññakatha, the text uses the term sabhava, and it is probably the first Pali Abhidhamma text to do so. There it means the empty nature of the five aggregates. The passage walks through materiality, feeling, conceptualization, volitions, consciousness and becoming in turn. For materiality it says: "Born materiality is empty of sabhava (sabhavena suññam); disappeared materiality is both changed and empty." Each of the others receives the same sentence. The passage then labels the result "empty in terms of change."

  The text also turns to the sense spheres. It calls them "void of self or of what belongs to self or of what is permanent or everlasting or eternal or not-subject-to-change." Noa Ronkin explains what this adds up to. Ronkin writes that the totality of human experience is "devoid of an enduring substance or of anything which belongs to such a substance." The reason is that this totality depends on many and various conditions. Everything that makes up experience arises and dissolves in a continuous process. Ronkin also has a view on where the whole book fits in history.

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• 4. Sutta or Abhidhamma

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  The Patisambhidamagga has been described as an "attempt to systematize the Abhidhamma." It has also been called a possible precursor to the Visuddhimagga. Its systematic approach points toward the Abhidhamma. So does the matika that summarizes the contents of its first section. Yet the book also repeats the standard sutta opening evaṃ me suttaṃ, which means "thus have I heard." That is a mark of the Sutta Pitaka.

  The Vibhanga overlaps with the Patisambhidamagga in both content and aspects of composition. For that reason A.K. Warder suggested that the book may once have been classified as an Abhidhamma text. A different link runs to the Dasuttara Sutta of the Digha Nikaya, which tradition also attributes to Sariputta. Noa Ronkin proposes that the Patisambhidamagga likely dates from the era when the Abhidhamma was forming. In this view it is a parallel development to the interpretive traditions seen in the Vibhanga and the Dhammasangani.

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• 5. Signs of Lateness

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  According to the German tradition of Indology, the Patisambhidamagga was likely composed around the 2nd century CE. The evidence is internal. The text quotes the Sutta and Vinaya Pitaka many times over. It also assumes the reader already knows a range of Buddhist legends and stories. The names of various arahants appear without any explanation of who they were.

  The vocabulary points the same way. The term patisambhida is absent from the older sutra and vinaya texts. It does appear in the Abhidhamma and in several Khuddaka Nikaya texts regarded as relatively late. A variant form, pratisamvid, occurs in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. That suggests other, non-Theravada sects shared the concept. One more text, the Dipavamsa, points toward a very different date.

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• 6. An Older Claim

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  The Dipavamsa lists the Patisambhidamagga among the texts rejected by the Mahasanghikas. A.K. Warder took this reference, together with certain thematic elements, as a clue. He suggested that some form of the book may date to the 3rd century BCE. That is the traditional date given for the schism with the Mahasanghikas.

  L. S. Cousins took another path. He associated the text with the doctrinal divisions of the Second Buddhist Council. On that basis he dated it to the first century BCE. Whatever its true age, the text proved stubborn for modern translators.

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• 7. Translating the Path

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  The Path of Discrimination, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, was published in 1982 by the Pali Text Society in Bristol. It arrived late. The Patisambhidamagga was one of the last texts of the Pali Canon to be translated into English. Its technical language, frequent repetition and frequent elision made it a challenge for translators and interpreters. Nanamoli's work appeared posthumously, after extensive editing and reworking by A.K. Warder.

  A second volume carries one part of the book to a wider audience. Mindfulness of Breathing, also translated by Nanamoli, appeared in a sixth edition in 1998 from the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka. It includes the Anapanakatha from the Patisambhidamagga. Beside it stand the Anapanasati Sutta and other material from Pali literature on the subject. The pairing sets a section of this difficult book next to a sutta on the same practice.

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