Mahāpaṇāmapāṭha

The Mahāpaṇāmapāṭha, the “Great Salutation” — homage to the Buddha carried through a succession of named metres, its sections labelled Lalitagāthā, Tanugāthā and so on. It is an exercise in prosody as much as an act of devotion, and it is used as one: the Pali Platform manual takes its worked example of the six-syllable Tanumajjhā metre from this text's sixth stanza.

The text names no author and no initiator, and that is a fact about the text, not a gap in the searching. A scan of its opening and closing found no ganthārambhakathā, no colophon and no place name anywhere in it, and no source on file names the work. No date can be given.

Two things do come from the text itself. Its closing line gives a second title, Vāsamālinī niṭṭhitā — the name to search under when the heading fails. And its last verse dates the completion to the sixth day of the month Phagguṇa, with no year: a day without a year is all this book will say about when it was written.