- Lived:
- flourished around 430 CE; birthplace disputed — tradition says Magadha, near the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya; modern scholarship makes a serious case for Andhra or the Tamil country → the work of his life was done at the Mahāvihāra, the Great Monastery of Anurādhapura in Sri Lanka, in the reign of King Mahānāma (c. 412–434 CE)
- Field:
- Theravāda Buddhism — monk, commentator, translator; author of the Visuddhimagga, the "Path of Purification"
- The Big Idea:
- By 400 CE, nine centuries of accumulated explanation of the Buddha's words survived only in old Sinhala, on one island. Buddhaghosa sailed there, mastered that library, and recast the whole of it in Pali, the shared scriptural language — producing the edition of Buddhism that Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos still read.
- In their words:
- "For there is suffering, but none who suffers; / Doing exists although there is no doer; / Extinction is but no extinguished person; / Although there is a path, there is no goer." (Visuddhimagga, ch. XVI, translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli)
- If you remember one thing:
- The second most influential voice in Theravāda Buddhism belongs to a man who insisted, on nearly every page he wrote, that he was saying nothing of his own — and it is precisely because he claimed nothing that everything now passes through him.