Vimativinodanī-ṭīkā (paṭhamo bhāgo)

The Vimativinodanī, the “Dispeller of Wrong Opinions” — the last comprehensive treatment of the Vinaya in this literature. This is the first of its two volumes.

It is a book written against another book. Its closing verses state the programme plainly: a commentary that will clear away the confusion its predecessors created. The predecessor in view is almost certainly Sāriputta, whose subcommentary on the Samantapāsādikā it quotes and repeatedly rejects. That makes its author a slightly younger contemporary of Sāriputta — about 1150–1200 CE.

Neither author nor initiator is named in the text. Tradition gives it to Kassapa on the authority of the Gandhavaṃsa and the Sāsanavaṃsa, and the Sāsanavaṃsa makes him a South Indian. That fits a striking passage inside the work itself, about a Tamil poem — the Kuṇḍalakesivatthu of the Thera Nāgasena, composed “here in Damiḷaraṭṭha”, which the author says propagates wrong views: views accepted by Sāriputta and rejected by the Mahāthera Ācariya Buddhappiya. He may be one of the initiators named in the subcommentary on the Vinayavinicchaya.