The Case of the Sarasaá¹...gaha: Reflections on the Reuse of Texts in Medieval Sinhalese Pali Literature

Issue Title: Special Issue on the Reuse of Texts in Indian Philosophy, part 2 The Sarasaá¹...gaha is a Pali text of XIIth-XIIIth century by the Sinhalese monk Siddhattha Thera. Its themes include the aspiration to become a Buddha, shrines, meditation, theories on rain, wind, gender and more. The main body consists of citations from the Nikayas, the Jatakas, the Visuddhimagga and above all, from commentarial literature. By analysing the way the Sarasaá¹...gaha refers to and establishes a dialogue with the quoted works, this paper promotes a new assessment of the cultural and textual tendencies that influenced the development of Buddhist literature especially in the Middle Ages. In particular, the analysis of this text and the quotations of which it is composed reveals the importance of commentarial literature, a literary genre that only recently has attracted the attention of Pali scholars.