Prajnaparamita

• 1. Introduction

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  Prajnaparamita is a word that carries two ideas at once: wisdom so complete it has crossed to the other shore of understanding, and a vast collection of Buddhist scriptures that tried to describe what that crossing feels like. The Sanskrit term combines prajna, meaning wisdom or knowledge, with paramita, which can mean perfection, excellence, or simply "gone beyond." Together they point toward something the texts themselves insist cannot be pointed at. How do you describe a way of seeing that dissolves every concept you use to describe it? That paradox is the engine driving one of the largest bodies of religious literature ever assembled, texts composed across more than seven centuries somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, beginning around 100 BCE and continuing to 600 CE. Among them are two of the most recited scriptures in the Buddhist world: the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. What did these texts teach? Where did they come from, and how did they travel from a riverbank in southern India to the courts of Tang dynasty China and the monasteries of Tibet? And why does a tradition devoted to the impossibility of grasping anything insist, with extraordinary persistence, on producing more and more words?

• 2. Origins Along the Krishna River

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  Edward Conze, the scholar who spent much of the twentieth century mapping this literature, estimated that the Prajnaparamita sutras were composed in about forty texts across roughly seven centuries. The earliest of them, according to the chronology Western scholars have traditionally followed, is the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, probably committed to writing in the 1st century BCE. A number of scholars have proposed that the Mahayana Prajnaparamita teachings first took shape among the Caitika subsect of the Mahasanghikas, along the Krishna River in the Andhra region of southern India. Two famous monasteries near the Amaravati Stupa and Dhanyakataka gave their names to the Purvashaila and Aparashaila schools, and each of these schools held a copy of the Astasahasrika in the Prakrit language. Guang Xing reads the view of the Buddha in that sutra as consistent with Mahasanghika doctrine, and Conze estimated the sutra's composition to around 100 BCE.

  In 2012, Harry Falk and Seishi Karashima published a damaged Kharosthi manuscript of the same sutra. It closely resembles the first Chinese translation by Lokaksema, made around 179 CE, whose source text is assumed to have been in the Gandhari language. That manuscript, the so-called Split manuscript, points to the text being originally composed in Gandhari, the language of Gandhara, the region now forming the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, encompassing Peshawar, Taxila, and the Swat Valley. Falk and Karashima declined to estimate the age of the original the Split manuscript was copied from.

  Japanese scholars have traditionally held a different view, placing the Diamond Sutra earlier than the Astasahasrika on the grounds of content and theme rather than translation dates. Gregory Schopen has also argued, from parallel passages in both texts, that the Vajracchedika represents the earlier oral tradition, while the Astasahasrika represents the later, written one.

• 3. How the Canon Grew

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  Conze mapped the growth of the Prajnaparamita literature across nine developmental stages. It began with something like an urtext corresponding to the first two chapters of the Ratnagunasancaya Gatha, then expanded outward in both directions at once: longer texts absorbed Abhidharma material and concessions to the Buddhism of faith, including Pure Land references, while the tradition simultaneously produced shorter and shorter sutras, from the Diamond Sutra down to the Prajnaparamita in One Letter. At its largest, the Satasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra ran to 100,000 lines.

  Jan Nattier read the medium-length Pancavimsatisahasrika, the Perfection of Wisdom in 25,000 Lines, as essentially the Astasahasrika base text sliced up and filled with interpolated material. That text survives in Sanskrit from Gilgit, exists in four Chinese translations, and occupies three volumes of the Tibetan Kangyur. Indian commentaries on it were written by Vimuktisena, Haribhadra, Smritijnanakirti, and Ratnakarashanti. According to Joseph Walser, there is evidence connecting the 25,000-line and 100,000-line sutras to the Dharmaguptaka sect, while the original 8,000-line text has no such connection.

  Nattier also argued that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal text composed in China in the 7th century, assembled from extracts of the Pancavimsatisahasrika and other sources. Red Pine disagreed and maintained that the Heart Sutra is of Indian origin. Matthew Orsborn argued, from the chiastic structures visible in the Astasahasrika, that the entire sutra may have been composed as a unified whole, with only a few additions to a complete core.

• 4. The Esoteric Turn

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  From the 8th century through the 11th century CE, a later phase of Indian Buddhism produced Tantric Prajnaparamita texts. These esoteric sutras are generally short. They contain mantras and dharanis and reference Mantrayana ideas. Where the earlier sutras described wisdom through negation and philosophical analysis, these later texts promoted simple practices centered on recitation as a path to accumulated merit and awakening.

  Among the esoteric Prajnaparamita sutras are the Adhyardhashataika Prajnaparamita (150 lines), the Ekashlokaika Prajnaparamita, the Svalpaakshara Prajnaparamita, the Kaushaika Prajnaparamita, and the Candragarbha Prajnaparamita, among others. Some of these texts, including the Svalpakshara, claimed that reciting their dharanis alone was as effective as full esoteric ritual practice complete with mandalas and abhiseka. Two of these sutras remain in widespread use today: the Prajnaparamitahridaya, commonly recited throughout Asia, and the Adhyardhashataika, which is widely recited in Shingon Buddhism.

• 5. Xuanzang's Journey and Translation

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  By 260 CE, Prajnaparamita texts had already reached Central Asia. The Chinese monk Zhu Zixing traveled to Khotan that year specifically to find original Sanskrit sutras, and he succeeded in locating a Sanskrit Prajnaparamita in 25,000 verses. Hinayanaists in Khotan regarded the text as heterodox and tried to prevent it from leaving. Zhu Zixing ultimately stayed in Khotan himself but sent the manuscript to Luoyang, where it was translated by the Khotanese monk Mokshala. A second copy arrived in Chang'an in 296 CE, carried by the Khotanese monk Gitamitra.

  Translation of Prajnaparamita texts into Chinese had begun in the 2nd century CE. The main translators included Lokaksema, Zhi Qian, Dharmaraksha, Kumajiva, Xuanzang, Faxian, and Danapala. The monk Xuanzang, who lived from approximately 602 to 664, undertook his own journey to India and returned with three separate copies of the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. Working with a team of disciple translators, he began rendering the text into Chinese in 660 CE, using those three copies as cross-references to safeguard the integrity of the translation. Some of his collaborators urged him to produce an abridged version. After a series of dreams resolved his uncertainty, Xuanzang committed to producing the complete unabridged text, which ran to 600 fascicles and five million Chinese characters. It incorporates sixteen separate Prajnaparamita texts, from the 100,000-line sutra through the Diamond Sutra and the 150-line Prajnaparamita.

• 6. Emptiness and the Logic of Negation

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  Most modern Buddhist scholars, including Lamotte, Conze, and Yin Shun, have identified sunyata, emptiness, as the central theme of the Prajnaparamita sutras. Conze described the teaching as meaning that dharmas, or phenomena, are empty of any own-being (svabhava): they are not ultimate facts in their own right, but are dependent on conditions outside themselves, and when viewed with perfected wisdom they reveal an own-being that is identical with emptiness. He outlined six ways the texts describe the ontological status of dharmas: they have no own-being; they exist only nominally as conventional expressions; they are without distinctive marks; they are absolutely isolated; they have never been produced and are unborn; and non-production is illustrated by similes such as dreams, echoes, reflected images, mirages, and space.

  The Prajnaparamita sutras express this through a characteristic form of negation that Japanese Buddhologist Hajime Nakamura called the "logic of not." A statement is made, then negated, then reaffirmed: "A is not A, therefore it is A." The Diamond Sutra gives a direct example: "As far as 'all dharmas' are concerned, Subhuti, all of them are dharma-less. That is why they are called 'all dharmas.'" The rationale is the Buddhist two truths doctrine, in which negating conventional truth is meant to expose the ultimate truth that nothing carries an essential nature.

  The sutras treat all dharmas as in some way like an illusion (maya), a dream, or a mirage. The Diamond Sutra lists the conditioned as comparable to a shooting star, clouded sight, a lamp, a drop of dew, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, and a thunder cloud. The character who speaks this insight in the Astasahasrika, Subhuti, extends it even to nirvana: "not two different things are illusions and Nirvana, are dreams and Nirvana." The Bodhisattva who perceives all beings and phenomena as illusory is called the "illusory man" (mayapurusha), and this perception is described as the "great armor" (mahasannaha) of the Bodhisattva's practice.

• 7. The Bodhisattva Ideal

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  The 8,000-line Prajnaparamita sutra defines a Bodhisattva as one who trains in all phenomena without obstruction and knows all dharmas as they really are. The Mahayana (Great Vehicle) holds that the goal of the Buddhist path is to become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings, not only oneself. A passage in the sutra makes the contrast explicit: rather than taming and leading one single self to nirvana, the Bodhisattva trains to place all beings into suchness and lead the entire immeasurable world of beings to nirvana.

  The core practice of the Bodhisattva is Prajnaparamita itself, described as a deep (gambhira) state of knowledge arising from both analysis and meditative insight. It is non-conceptual and non-dual, and the Astasahasrika describes it as "not grasping at form, not grasping at sensation, perception, volitions and cognition." According to Karl Brunnholzl, Prajnaparamita means that all phenomena, from form through omniscience, are utterly devoid of intrinsic characteristics, and the wisdom that recognizes this is always nonconceptual and free from reference points.

  Conze identified several psychological qualities belonging to the Bodhisattva's practice: non-apprehension (anupalabdhi); non-attachment (anabhinivesa); no attainment (aprapti), meaning no person can possess or acquire any dharma; non-reliance on any dharma; and what Conze called the attitude of non-assertion. Alongside wisdom, the sutras emphasize patience (ksanti), without which Bodhisattvas cannot reach their goals, and freedom from fear in the face of the doctrine that all dharmas are empty, including the Bodhisattva's own existence. A good friend (kalyanamitra) is identified as useful on the path to that fearlessness. The Bodhisattva also generates great compassion (maha-karuna) for all beings while maintaining equanimity through understanding of emptiness, so that even after bringing countless beings to nirvana the Bodhisattva knows that "no living being whatsoever has been brought to nirvana."

  The Prajnaparamita sutras were first brought to Tibet during the reign of Trisong Detsen, who ruled from 742 to 796, by scholars Jinamitra and Silendrabodhi and the translator Ye shes De. Tibetan Buddhist scholasticism has since studied these texts primarily through the Abhisamayalankara (Ornament of Clear Realization), traditionally attributed to the Bodhisattva Maitreya as a revelation to the scholar Asanga in the 4th century CE. The Gelug school, according to Georges Dreyfus, treats the Ornament as the central text for the study of the path and as a kind of Buddhist reference work read through commentaries by Je Dzong-ka-ba, Gyel-tsap Je, and the authors of monastic textbooks.