Visuddhimagga (‘The path of complete purification’) is an early 5th-century CE work written in Pali by Buddhaghosa, in Sri Lanka.

Together with the Pali Canon, it is considered one of the most important texts in the Theravada tradition.

Buddhaghosa was born into a family of Brahmans in Magadha, an ancient kingdom in northeast India. Before converting to Buddhism, he studied the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts in Hinduism. He is thought to have arrived in Sri Lanka around 420 CE, where, after consulting the Pali Canon and its commentaries, he wrote the Visuddhimagga, in addition to commentaries on other writings.

The work is divided into three parts: moral discipline (p. sīla), concentration (p. samādhi) and wisdom (p. prañña). It is presented as a continuation of the seven stages of purification taught by the Buddha and collected in the Rathavinitasutta (sermon 24 of the Majjhima Nikaya, second of the five collections, or nikayas, of the Suttapitaka). It thus describes the meditative techniques of the Theravada (the forty objects of meditation of samatha or ‘tranquility of mind’) and the methods of vipassanā (‘higher vision’), and it reviews the main Buddhist doctrines.