The Vimuttimagga

Besides the books in Sinhala Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa names as available to him (which have all disappeared) there was also a manual (existing now only in a Chinese translation of the 6th century CE), presumed to have been written in Pali. Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa himself makes no mention of it; but his commentator, Bhadantācariya Dhammapāla (writing perhaps within two centuries of him), mentions it by name (see Ch. III, n.19). The Visuddhimagga refutes a certain method of classifying temperaments as unsound. The Elder Dhammapāla ascribes the theory refuted to the Vimuttimagga. The theory refuted is actually found in the Chinese version. Then other points rejected by the Visuddhimagga are found in the Vimuttimagga. Some of these are attributed by the Elder Dhammapāla to the Abhayagiri Monastery. However, the Vimuttimagga itself contains nothing at all of the Mahāyāna, its unorthodoxies being well within the “Hīnayāna” field.

The book is much shorter than the Visuddhimagga. Though set out in the same three general divisions of virtue, concentration, and understanding, it does not superimpose the pattern of the seven purifications. Proportionately much less space is devoted to understanding, and there are no stories. Though the appearance in both books of numbers of nearly identical passages suggests that they both drew a good deal from the same sources, the general style differs widely. The four measureless states and the four immaterial states are handled differently in the two books. Besides the “material octads,” “enneads” and “decads,” it mentions “endecads,” etc., too. Its description of the thirteen ascetic practices is quite different. Also Abhidhamma, which is the keystone of Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa’s exegesis, is not used at all in the Vimuttimagga (aggregates, truths, etc., do not in themselves constitute Abhidhamma in the sense of that Piṭaka). There is for instance even in its description of the consciousness aggregate, no reference to the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s classification of 89 types, and nothing from the Paṭṭhāna; and though the cognitive series is stated once in its full form (in Ch. 11) no use is made of it to explain conscious workings. This Vimuttimagga is in fact a book of practical instructions, not of exegesis.

Its authorship is ascribed to an Elder Upatissa. But the mere coincidence of names is insufficient to identify him with the Arahant Upatissa (prior to 3^rd cent. CE) mentioned in the Vinaya Parivāra. A plausible theory puts its composition sometime before the Visuddhimagga, possibly in India. That is quite compatible with its being a product of the Great Monastery before the Visuddhimagga was written, though again evidence is needed to support the hypothesis. That it contains some minor points accepted by the Abhayagiri Monastery does not necessarily imply that it had any special connections with that centre. The source may have been common to both. The disputed points are not schismatical. Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa himself never mentions it.