The Nettipakarana — commonly shortened to the Netti — is a Pali work on hermeneutics: rather than presenting doctrine directly, it sets out how the Buddha's teachings are to be interpreted and explained. In content it stands close to the Petakopadesa, and the two are usually discussed together as the earliest surviving attempts within the Pali tradition to make the business of interpretation systematic.
Its colophon and introductory verses ascribe the work to Mahakaccana, a disciple of the Buddha. Scholars, however, place its origins in northern India, and consider it older than Buddhaghosa, whose own commentarial work draws on the methods the Netti lays out. That relationship is part of why the text continues to attract attention: it belongs to the layer of Pali literature that shaped how the canon was afterwards read and expounded.
The text falls into two parts. A short summary section, the Sangahavara, is followed by the longer explanatory Vibhagavara. The second part sets out sixteen haras, or modes of conveying meaning, five nayas, or guidelines, and eighteen root terms, and then illustrates each of them with quotations drawn from the Sutta Pitaka. The result is a technical apparatus rather than a narrative work — a set of interpretive instruments, demonstrated on canonical passages.
Its canonical position varies by tradition. The Burmese tradition counts the Nettipakarana within the Khuddaka Nikaya; other Theravada canons do not include it. This divergence is itself of interest to anyone following how the boundaries of the Pali canon were drawn in different Buddhist countries.
This volume presents the work under a Sinhala title, Asirimath Poth Wahanse, for readers approaching the Netti in Sri Lanka. It will suit students of Pali and of Buddhist textual scholarship, monastic and lay readers working through the commentarial tradition, and anyone interested in the methods by which the suttas have been analysed and taught. Those coming to Buddhist literature for the first time may find it demanding — the Netti assumes a reader already acquainted with the discourses it quotes, and its concern is method rather than doctrine.
For a library of Pali Buddhist texts assembled in Sri Lanka, the Netti is one of the works that explains how the rest came to be read.
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