BUDDHISM IN SRI LANKA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA 145The split between the Mahavihara and the Abhayagiri Vihara, which
came to call itself the Dharmaruci sect, continued until the twelfth cen-
tury c.E., with royal support alternating between the two. Soon after the
initial split, the Dharmaruci began accepting Mahasanghika teachings, and
later became the exponent of Mahayana and Tantrism as these were ex-
ported from India. As for the Mahaviharans, they continued adding to
their commentaries until the second century C.E., when their fear that any
new additions might obscure the original teachings inspired them to close
the commentaries for good. Their reputation for conservatism spread
back to the Indian mainland; by the fourth and fifth centuries C.E., main-
land Buddhists reacting to the Mahayana movement became interested in
the traditions that the Mahavihara had preserved. Monks from the
Mahavihara were invited to teach on the mainland, a group ofbhikkhuvi:s
was invited to help establish the Bhikkhu:lfl Sangha in China (see Section
8.4), and Indian monks came to Sri Lanka to study.
One of these monks, Buddhaghosa, came from the Theravadin center
in Kancipuram and asked permission to translate the commentaries from
Sinhala into Pali so as to make them available to an international audience.
According to tradition, the elders of the Mahavihara asked him first to
compose a treatise on Buddhist practice to test his understanding of the
Dharma. The massive treatise he composed in response, the Visuddhimagga
(The Path to Purification), so impressed them that they willingly provided
him with the commentaries together with all the scribes and other assis-
tance he might need. Eventually, he collated the various Sinhalese com-
mentaries and prepared Pali commentaries to most of the books in the
canon. They, together with The Path to Purification, have since come to
define Theravadin drthodoxy up to the present, and in Sri Lanka and
Burma are regarded as even more authoritative than the canon itself.
Buddhaghosa's works demonstrate how much even the most conserva-
tive Theravadins in his time had acquired from other elements in the pre-
vailing Buddhist-Brahmanical milieu. For example, they contain views on
the supernatural quality of the Buddha that were apparently adopted from
the Mahasanghikas. They also refer to "secret doctrines" that the elders
would teach only to certain students. More importantly, they drop the
canon's emphasis on whole-body breath awareness as the prime form of
concentration practice (see Section 2.3.2) in favor of trance states acquired
by staring at objects of various colors, a technique that plays only a
peripheral role in the canon (Strong EB, sec. 3.5.6). They then define
dhyana in terms of these trance states, which by their own admission are
virtually impossible to attain through breath awareness. This shift in the
definition of what constitutes dhyana led to the controversy, still alive in
the Theravada tradition, concerning the relationship between dhyana and
mindfulness, and the question of how necessary dhyana is for the attain-
ment ofliberating insight.
Mter Buddhaghosa made the commentaries accessible to scholars in
south India, Kancipuram came to eclipse the Mahavihara as the main cen-
ter ofTheravadin studies. New scholars there provided commentaries to