The Diamond Sūtra (Sanskrit: ) is a Mahāyāna Buddhist sutra from the genre of ('perfection of wisdom') sutras. Translated into a variety of languages over a broad geographic range, the Diamond Sūtra is one of the most influential Mahayana sutras in East Asia, and it is particularly prominent within the Chan (or Zen) tradition, along with the Heart Sutra.

A copy of the Tang dynasty Diamond Sūtra was found among the Dunhuang manuscripts in 1900 by Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu and sold to Aurel Stein in 1907. It dates back to May 11, 868 CE and is broadly considered to be the oldest extant printed book, although other, earlier, printed materials on paper exist that predate this artifact. It is in the collection of the British Library.

alt=|thumb|This painting is a redrawing based on a sketch of the Diamond Sūtra found in the Mogao Caves.

The book of the Diamond Sūtra is also the first known creative work with an explicit public domain dedication, as its colophon at the end states that it was created "for universal free distribution".

Title

The Sanskrit title for the sūtra is the , which may be translated roughly as the 'Vajra Cutter Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra' or 'The Perfection of Wisdom Text that Cuts Like a Thunderbolt'.

  • ; shortened to
  • ,
  • Tangut: ,

History

The exact date of the composition of the Diamond Sūtra in Sanskrit is uncertain—arguments for the 2nd and 5th centuries have been made. Kumārajīva's translation style is distinctive, possessing a flowing smoothness that reflects his prioritization on conveying the meaning as opposed to precise literal rendering. The Kumārajīva translation has been particularly highly regarded over the centuries, and it is this version that appears on the 868 Dunhuang scroll. It is the most widely used and chanted Chinese version.

In addition to the Kumārajīva translation, a number of later translations exist. The Diamond Sūtra was again translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by Bodhiruci (the one from North India) in 509, Paramārtha in 558, Dharmagupta (twice, in 590 and in 605~616), Xuanzang (twice, in 648 and in 660~663), Bodhiruci (the one from South India) in 693, and Yijing in 703. Birchbark manuscript fragments of several Mahāyāna sūtras have been discovered at the site, including the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (MS 2385), and these are now part of the Schøyen Collection. The Diamond Sutra features prominently in the 1st chapter of the Platform Sutra, the religious biography of Huineng, where hearing its recitation is supposed to have triggered the enlightening insight that led Huineng to abandon his life as a woodcutter to become a Buddhist monk. Its major themes are anatman (not-self), the emptiness of all phenomena (though the term 'śūnyatā' itself does not appear in the text), the liberation of all beings without attachment and the importance of spreading and teaching the Diamond Sūtra itself. In his commentary on the Diamond Sūtra, Hsing Yun describes the four main points from the sūtra as giving without attachment to self, liberating beings without notions of self and other, living without attachment, and cultivating without attainment. According to Shigenori Nagatomo, the major goal of the Diamond Sūtra is: "an existential project aiming at achieving and embodying a non-discriminatory basis for knowledge" or "the emancipation from the fundamental ignorance of not knowing how to experience reality as it is".

In the sūtra, the Buddha has finished his daily walk to Sravasti with the monks to gather offerings of food, and he sits down to rest. Elder Subhūti comes forth and asks the Buddha: "How, Lord, should one who has set out on the bodhisattva path take his stand, how should he proceed, how should he control the mind?"

What follows is a dialogue regarding the nature of the "perfection of insight" (Prajñāpāramitā) and the nature of ultimate reality (which is illusory and empty). The Buddha begins by answering Subhuti by stating that he will bring all living beings to final nirvana (extinction, blowout), but that after this "no living being whatsoever has been brought to extinction".

Another reason why the Buddha makes use of negation is that language reifies concepts and this can lead to attachment to those concepts, but true wisdom is seeing that nothing is fixed or stable, hence according to the Diamond Sūtra thoughts such as "I have obtained the state of an Arhat" or "I will bring living beings to nirvana" do not even occur in an enlightened one's mind because this would be "seizing upon a self ... seizing upon a living being, seizing upon a soul, seizing upon a person".

The mind of someone who practices the Prajñāpāramitā or "perfection of wisdom" is then a mind free from fixed substantialist or "self" concepts:

Paul Harrison's translation of the Sanskrit version states:

Dunhuang block print

thumb|upright=.6|Elder [[Subhūti addresses the Buddha. Detail from the Dunhuang block print.]]

There is a woodblock-printed copy of the Diamond Sutra in the British Library which, although not the earliest example of block printing, is the earliest example which bears an actual date.

The extant copy is in the form of a scroll about long. The archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein purchased it in 1907 in the walled-up Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwest China from a monk guarding the caves – known as the "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas".

The colophon, at the inner end, reads:

In 2010 UK writer and historian Frances Wood, head of the Chinese section at the British Library, Mark Barnard, conservator at the British Library, and Ken Seddon, professor of chemistry at Queen's University, Belfast, were involved in the restoration of its copy of the book. The British Library website allows readers to view the Diamond Sūtra in its entirety.

Selected English translations

{| class="wikitable"

|-

! Author

! Title

! Publisher

! Notes

! Year

! ISBN

|-

| Max Müller

| The Vagrakkhedika or diamond-cutter, in Buddhist Mahayana Texts (Sacred Books of the East), F. Max Muller et al.

| Oxford University Press

| Translation of the Vajracchedikā prajñāpāramitā from Sanskrit. Based on Muller's edition, the first Sanskrit edition published in the West, based on four Sanskrit manuscripts, one from Tibet, one from China, and two from Japan.

| 1894

|

|-

| William Gemmell

| The Diamond Sutra (Chin-kang-ching), or, Prajna-paramita

| Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.; Project Gutenberg

| Translation of the Diamond Sutra from Chinese with an introduction and notes.

| 1912

|

|-

| Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

| The Diamond Sutra

| Various

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra

| 1934

|-

| Edward Conze

| Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamond Sutra and The Heart Sutra

| George Allen & Unwin

| The Diamond Sūtra and The Heart Sutra, along with commentaries on the texts and practices of Buddhism

| 1958

|

|-

| Gregory Schopen

| The Manuscript of the Vajracchedikā Found at Gilgit, in Studies in the Literature of the Great Vehicle: Three Mahāyāna Buddhist Texts, ed. by L. O. Gómez and J. A. Silk

| Centers for South and Southeast Asia

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra from the Sanskrit Gilgit manuscript

| 1989

|

|-

| Thich Nhat Hanh

| The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion

| Parallax Press

| The Diamond Sūtra with a Vietnamese Thiền commentary

| 1992

|

|-

| Mu Soeng

| The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

| Wisdom Publications

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra with commentary

| 2000

|

|-

| Michael Roach

| The Diamond Cutter, An Exalted Sutra of the Greater Way on the Perfection of Wisdom

|

| Tibetan-English edition, translated from the Tibetan translation of Shilendra Bodhi.

| 2001

|

|-

| Red Pine

| The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom; Text and Commentaries Translated from Sanskrit and Chinese

| Counterpoint

| The Diamond Sūtra, translated from the Sanskrit (mostly from the editions by Max Muller and Edward Conze) with selections of Indian and Chán commentary from figures such as Asanga, Vasubandhu, Huineng, Linji and Chiang Wei-nung (1871–1938).

| 2001

|

|-

| Hsuan Hua

| A General Explanation: The Vajra Prajna Paramita Sutra

| Buddhist Text Translation Society

|

| 2002

|

|-

| Nan Huai-Chin

| The Diamond Sutra Explained

| Primodia Media

|

| 2004

|

|-

| A.F. Price and Wong Mou-Lam

| Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-neng

| Shambhala Classics

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra and Platform Sutra

| 2005

|

|-

| Paul Harrison

| Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra

| Hermes Publishing

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra from the Sanskrit (compiled from Gilgit and the Schøyen collection manuscripts)

| 2006

|

|-

| Burton Watson

| The Diamond Sutra

| The Eastern Buddhist NEW SERIES, Vol. 41, No. 1

| Translated and introduced by Watson, based on the modern Japanese annotated translation by NAKAMURA Hajime 中村元 and KINO Kazuyoshi 紀野一義 Hannya shingyō; Kongō hannyakyō (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1960).

| 2010

|

|-

| Young San Seong Do

| The Diamond Sutra

| Angkor Verlag

| Translation of the Diamond Sūtra based on the Chinese text by Kumarajiva, including a glossary of Chinese and Sanskrit terms

| 2010

|

|-

| Alex Johnson

| Diamond Sutra

|

| Created by taking 15 different previous translations of the Diamond Sūtra. Every element that was common through each of the translations was kept.

|2019

|

|}

See also

  • Science and technology of the Tang dynasty

References

Further reading

  • Cole, Alan (2005). Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature, Berkeley: U Cal Press, pp. 160–196. For a close reading of the text's rhetoric, see chapter 4, entitled "Be All You Can't Be, and Other Gainful Losses in the Diamond Sutra."
  • William Gemmell, transl. (1912). The Diamond Sutra, London: Trübner.
  • Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters (2011). Journeys on the Silk Road: a desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest printed book, Picador Australia, .
  • Agócs, Tamás (2000). The Diamondness of the Diamond Sutra. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 53, (1/2), 65–77
  • Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra: English Translation, by Paul Harrison
  • Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra: English Translation, Lapis Lazuli Texts
  • The Diamond of Perfect Wisdom Sutra: English Translation, by Chung Tai Translation Committee
  • Romanized Sanskrit and Devanagari of the Diamond Sutra in the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon.
  • Romanized Sanskrit of the Diamond Sutra in the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon.
  • Devanagari of the Diamond Sutra in the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon.
  • Multilingual edition of Vajracchedikā in the Bibliotheca Polyglotta
  • Conserving the Diamond Sutra, IDPUKvideo (2013)
  • An English translation by 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha
  • The Diamond Sutra, also called the Vajra Cutter Sutra, available in multiple languages from the FPMT
  • The Diamond Sūtra encoded as synthetic DNA (Sutra2DNA)