Cūḷagandhavaṃsa

A catalogue of Pali books — one of the very few Pali texts that is about Pali texts. It proceeds by lists: the works, then the teachers who made them, then the men who asked for them, in a fixed formula — “the work called such-and-such was made of his own motion by the teacher so-and-so”. Several attributions in this collection rest on it.

Its date is a judgement, not a statement. Bode describes the parent work, the Gandhavaṃsa, as “a short but interesting account of the earlier Pali literature of Ceylon and Burma”. It is “very sparing of details, and gives us little information as to the period of the works it enumerates, but its help is most useful in settling some questions of authorship and place”. Compared with the Sāsanavaṃsa and the Piṭakat-samuiṅ it “appears to be a seventeenth century production” (Bode 1909, p. x) — so 1600s CE, on internal comparison alone.

Minayeff, who edited it from two Burmese-script manuscripts from Prome, valued it for the same reason: besides the history of the canon it contains “a sketch of the history of the more modern Pali works, far more detailed than that in the Sāsanavaṃsadīpa … or in Sāsanavaṃsa” (Minayeff 1886, p. 55). The name in the text is Nandapañña.