Dear Petra,
That's a good answer, thanks. The authorship of certain works written in
Pali can be hard to determine, especially where nothing is said about who
wrote the book in the concluding verses, if any. The Mmd has no such verses
but at least one of the two ṭIkās I have on it states that the aurhtor is
Vimalabuddhi yet Vajirabudhhi is mentioned as the author on the title page
of my Burmese edition of Mmd.
Best,
Jim.
----- Original Message -----
From: "petra kieffer-pülz" <kiepue@...>
To: <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: [palistudy] New Publication
Dear Jim,
>
> Thank you for the announcement. I take it that you are the author of this
> new publication. One question I sometimes wonder about is whether or not
> the
> author of the Vajirabuddhiṭīkā and the Mukhamattadīpanī (aka Nyāsa) are
> one
> and the same or two different ones. The author of Mmd comes under the name
> of either Vajirabuddhi or Vimalabuddhi and lived well before Aggavaṃsa of
> the 12th cent. A.D.
>
The idea that a Vajirabuddhi was the author of the Vajirabuddhitika probably
dates only from the 12th to 13th centuries.
In fact we do not have a name for the author. A colleague of mine, Dragomir
Dimitrov, who is working on the Sinhalese monk scholar
Ratnamati thinks him to be the author of the Vajirabuddhitika (his study
will be published in the near future). I dealt with these questions in the
book.
Your second question whether the authors of the Vajriabuddhitika and of the
Mukhamattadipani are the same,
I think no. The author of the Mukhamattadipani quotes from the
Vajirabuddhitika and has some passages in common with this text,
but as a whole the Mmd, to my opinion, is a little younger than the
Vajirabuddhitika (which I think was composed probably in the
10th century AD). The Mmd is written in a more stereotype style than the
Vajirabuddhitika, and uses a more developed
scholastic style.
Best wishes,
Petra