Vuttodaya

The Vuttodaya, Saṅgharakkhita's book on Pali metre — and “seems to be the only original work on Pali metre extant”.

In the second half of the 1100s CE the elder Saṅgharakkhita, writing in Ceylon, produced a series of works on grammar, prosody and rhetoric. He calls himself a pupil of Moggallāna, whom he names Sīlathera — which ties this group of books directly to the second grammatical school.

He says outright why he wrote it: the books of Piṅgala and the rest are not suited to those studying pure Māgadhī, so here are rules for making Pali verse instead. In 136 stanzas and part-stanzas across six chapters he sets out the general definitions and symbols and then every metre he knew — mattāchandas, gaṇacchandas and all the varieties of akkharacchandas — though the old āryā appears to have been outside his knowledge. For all that, the work rests entirely on Sanskrit prosody, and now and then takes a sentence over from Piṅgala with only the smallest change needed to turn Sanskrit into Pali.