Niruttidīpanī

The Niruttidīpanī, a Pali grammar — and the first work in the long list of Ledi Sayadaw's books.

Ledi Sayadaw is the Burmese scholar-monk of the turn of the twentieth century through whom Abhidhamma study and insight meditation reached a mass lay audience — the hinge between the monastery and the layman's practice hall. Bode, writing in 1909 and picking him as her example of “a learned monk of the most recent times”, heads his bibliography with this book: “Niruttidipani (a Pali grammar, and afterwards a Burmese nissaya on the same work)”, among the works “published in Rangoon in 1905 and 1906” (Bode 1909, p. 97). 1905–1906 CE is therefore a date of printing, not of composition.

Bode uses him to make a point about continuity: “Scholarship in the twentieth century followed the lines first traced as long ago as the twelfth century in Burma”. The rest of her list shows the reach — manuals on nibbāna, on form, on the factors of awakening, on mindfulness of breathing, on the perfections, on dependent origination, on the four truths. The colophon here says which grammatical system this belongs to: Iti niruttidīpaniyā nāma moggallānadīpaniyā tabbādikaṇḍo nāma kitakaṇḍo niṭṭhito — a dīpanī on the Moggallāna system, this section treating the primary derivative suffixes.