Khuddakanikāye

The Peṭakopadesa — a guide to interpreting the Suttantas, covering the same ground as the Nettippakaraṇa but arranged quite differently. Its eight chapters are called bhūmis, “planes” — a word used this way nowhere else in Pali literature. It opens not with verse but with an unusual salutation: “homage to the Fully Enlightened Ones, who see the ultimate meaning, who have reached perfection in the qualities beginning with virtue”.

No date can be fixed, but there is one outside anchor: Kumārajīva mentions a text ascribed to Mahākātyāyana, called Pi-le in Chinese — answering to “Peṭaka” — as being used in South India in the 400s CE.

The ascription to Mahākaccāna is louder here than anywhere else, and that is itself a signal. His name and his title suttavebhaṅgin — the eighth bhūmi of this very book is headed Suttavebhaṅgiyaṃ — stand in the colophons of several bhūmis, and even his monastery is named: as this volume's colophon has it, therassa mahākaccāyanassa jambuvanavāsino peṭakopadeso. The relation to the Netti points the same way: the same āryā verses stand in both books, tidily marshalled at the head of the Netti but scattered through the Peṭakopadesa and often badly preserved, which suggests they were taken over here and rearranged. Hinüber's conclusion is that the Netti and the Peṭakopadesa “intruded from outside into the Theravāda as handbooks to understand and to explain the Suttantas” (Hinüber 1996, p. 82, §171). One warning to the reader: the textual tradition is particularly bad, and every manuscript descends from a single corrupt ancestor.