Pācityādiyojanā

A yojanā on the Pācittiya and the sections that follow it in the Vinaya commentary — and the word names a genre, not a title. A yojanā is an “interpretation explaining the construction”: a late kind of subcommentary that takes the text apart grammatically, clause by clause.

It is one of the few volumes here whose author signs and dates himself. The colophon reads Iti bhadantajāgarattherena katā Pācityādivaṇṇanāya yojanā samattā — the construing of the commentary on the Pācittiya and the rest, made by the venerable Jāgara Thera, is completed. Hinüber puts a year to it: 1869 CE.

That places it four centuries after the best-known books of its kind, the atthayojanās of Ñāṇakitti, who lived at the Panasārāma near Chiang Mai at the end of the 1400s. Hinüber's verdict on that genre is worth carrying to this volume too: as a grammarian, such a commentator “concentrates in his commentaries on grammatical details and seems to contribute little to the understanding of the text as such” (Hinüber 1996, pp. 174–175, §379). Read it for the construction of the sentences, not for the doctrine.