Voice of the Buddha Buddhaghosa on the Immeasurable Words

What would a Buddhist theory of texts look like through the lens of the 5th-century thinker Buddhaghosa? In Voice of the Buddha, Maria Heim reads from the principal commentator, editor, and translator of the Theravada intellectual tradition, yielding fresh insight into all three collections of the early Pali texts: Vinaya, the Suttas, and the Abhidhamma. Buddhaghosa considered the Buddha to be omniscient, the Buddha's words to be "oceanic." Every word, passage, book--indeed the corpus as a whole--is taken to be "endless and immeasurable" in Buddhaghosa's view. Commentarial practice thus requires disciplined methods of expansion, drawing out the endless possibilities for meaning and application. Heim considers Buddhaghosa's theories of texts, and follows his practices of exegesis to discover how he explored scripture's infinity.

By examining the significance of the immeasurability of scripture in commentarial practice and as a general principle, this book offers new tools to understand the huge scriptural and commentarial literature of the Pali tradition. And by taking seriously a traditional commentator's theory of texts, it beckons us to learn from commentaries themselves how we might read and interpret them and the texts on which they comment.

Maria Heim is Professor of Religion and Elizabeth W. Bruss Reader at Amherst College. She is the author of The Forerunner of All Things and Theories of the Gift in South Asia.

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Building Blocks for an Interpretative Program
Chapter One: The Buddha's Omniscience and the Immeasurability of Scripture
Chapter Two: Scripture, Commentary, and Exegetical Distinctions

Part Two: Interpreting the Three Pitakas
Chapter Three: Interpreting the Contexts and Conditions of Buddhavacana in the Suttanta
Chapter Four: Disentangling the Tangle: Abhidhamma as Phenomenological Analysis
Chapter Five: The 'Completely Pleasing' Exegesis on the Vinaya

Conclusion

Appendix A: The Recollection of the Dhamma
Appendix B: Commentary on the Section on Verañja Starting the Vinaya
Appendix C: Four Oceans and Three Pitakas


Bibliography