Kavidappaṇanīti

Kavidappaṇanīti, “the poet's mirror of conduct” — a collection of gnomic and didactic verse. The nīti books stand at the edge of the Pali world, and draw heavily on the Indian subhāṣita tradition rather than on the canon.

Nobody knows who made it, and there is no critical edition of it at all — both scholars who have written on it cite it from the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana text, which is the text printed here. No date can be given either, only two fixed points around it: it was circulating by the time of the Vajirasāratthasaṅgaha, and its verse 143 is the same verse that stands in Saṅgharakkhita's Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā (Gornall 2020, p. 84 n. 40).

Where it circulated is better established than when it was written. Schnake groups it with the Dhammanīti and the Lokanīti as nīti texts that “circulated in the North area, and probably enjoyed some success” — the northern Thai region and Lan Na, not Burma alone.