Vimuttimagga

Before Buddhaghosa wrote the Visuddhimagga, there was another book: the Vimuttimagga — “The Path of Freedom” — composed by the elder Upatissa around the third or fourth century CE. A working meditation manual, written by a teacher for people who practice, covering the whole of the path from virtue through concentration to the deepest attainments of insight.

The Pāli original vanished. The book itself survived by a single thread: a Chinese translation made at the Liang court in 505 CE.from the book description

For fifteen hundred years, no one has seen the corresponding Pāli text. This edition brings it back. Working sentence by sentence through the Chinese witness — the Jiětuō dào lùn (解脫道論, Taishō 1648) — and setting each passage beside the Visuddhimagga, whose author knew this book intimately, borrowed from it freely, and corrected it silently, the Pāli of all twelve chapters is reconstructed in its entirety.

The method is held to a strict four-tier typography: the canon’s very words, recovered verbatim from the quotations Upatissa wove into his book; wording carried into the Visuddhimagga and returned here to its older home; the editor’s Pāli for the Chinese’s sense, argued line by line; and open conjecture, marked as such. A full critical apparatus quotes the Chinese beneath the Pāli throughout.

The supporting matter is a study in itself: a book-length introduction on the loss and rediscovery, the Abhayagiri question, and the living traditions that still teach what this book teaches; The Reviser's Hand, a closing study of nearly two hundred documented divergences from Buddhaghosa; and an appendix on the notorious 1963 “Pāli Vimuttimagga,” the modern fabrication this edition’s methods were designed to answer.

For readers of Pāli, students of Buddhist history, and meditators who want the oldest complete manual of their craft.