The One Abhidhamma Book With a Named Author and a Date

The Kathavatthu occupies a unique position within the Abhidhamma Pitaka as the only one of its seven books the Theravada tradition itself credits to a specific named historical author, the elder Moggaliputta Tissa, working at a specific historical occasion, the Third Buddhist Council held under the patronage of the emperor Ashoka around 250 BCE, rather than attributing its content directly to the Buddha as the other six books are traditionally described. This traditional attribution, largely accepted by modern scholars as broadly plausible even if not verifiable in every detail, makes the Kathavatthu one of the most useful anchor points available for dating the wider closure and fixing of the Abhidhamma Pitaka, since a text explicitly responding to doctrinal splits among named rival schools cannot be earlier than the emergence of those schools, and its inclusion within the canon shows the Abhidhamma Pitaka as a whole was still open to genuinely new composition as late as the mid third century BCE, considerably later than the core Sutta and Vinaya material.

Because its refutations preserve, however polemically framed, some of the only surviving textual evidence for the specific doctrinal positions of several early Buddhist schools whose own scriptures did not survive independently, the Kathavatthu remains an indispensable, if inherently one-sided, source for historians reconstructing the diversity of early Buddhist thought before the traditions that survive today had fully separated and stabilized.