The great commentary.
The Abhidharma-mahāvibhāṣā-śāstra — "the great commentary of options" — is the vast Sarvāstivāda compendium compiled, tradition holds, by five hundred arhats at a council in Kashmir to defend and expand Kātyāyanīputra's own root treatise, the Jñānaprasthāna. Two hundred fascicles long, it is the fullest surviving record of the Vaibhāṣika school's internal debates — named master against named master, question by question — and the very compendium Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa was later written to condense. This page is the entrance for reading it fascicle by fascicle, as the translation proceeds.
How to read this collection
This is the largest single work in this section of the site — ten times the length of the Abhidharmakośa already translated in full here. Rather than wait to publish it all at once, Ru-Yi is translating and posting it fascicle by fascicle, starting from the very beginning: fascicle 1, the treatise's own prose preface, arguing for the work's authority before its technical content begins.
Fascicle 1 is live now. It carries no root-verse-and-commentary structure of its own — from fascicle 2 onward, the treatise settles into the form it sustains for the rest of its length: a topic or verse from the Jñānaprasthāna, followed by the recorded, often conflicting positions of named Vaibhāṣika masters on what it means.
What each fascicle will include
- A plain-English translation, made fresh from Xuánzàng's Chinese, source and translation set side by side.
- Key Sanskrit and Chinese technical terms, explained once and used consistently with Ru-Yi's other Abhidharma translations.
- Reading notes on the argument's structure, and on how named masters' positions here connect to later treatises, including the Abhidharmakośa.
A note on sources. This translation is made directly from the Chinese text in the Taishō canon (大正藏 T1545, vol. 27), which is in the public domain, via the CBETA digital edition. No complete modern English translation of this treatise exists; a small number of individual fascicles and topical excerpts have been rendered by specialist scholars over the years, but none of that scholarship is reproduced or paraphrased here — the English wording throughout is Ru-Yi's own, and the reading notes are original as well, grounded in standard Sarvāstivāda scholarship rather than a specific named commentator's lecture transcript.
The Eight Chapters
According to this treatise's own fascicle 1, Kātyāyanīputra organized the many lines of argument the Buddha taught into eight chapters (蘊), each gathering discourse on one broad topic. The Mahāvibhāṣā takes up this same structure, chapter by chapter, across its full two hundred fascicles.
Read by Fascicle
Two hundred fascicles, translated as the project proceeds. Fascicle 1 links to Ru-Yi's own plain-English essay and translation; every other fascicle links out to the source text on CBETA until its own translation is ready.