Although it was written centuries earlier, the first surviving printed edition of the Diamond Sutra It is dated to the year 868 AD, so it would be the oldest known printed book (prior to Gutenberg's printing press).
Thus, a contemporary of Alfred the Great , of the Great Heathen Army with which the Vikings invaded England and of the Emirate of Córdoba, to review only a few events and characters. Let's see something more about this curious work.
Why is it called Diamond Sutra ? Actually, its original Sanskrit name is Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (The perfection of the wisdom text that cuts like lightning) and refers to the vajra , the weapon made by the god Vishua Karma for his divine colleague Indra with a backbone of the theriomorph sage Dadichi; the Puranas Hindus describe it as two crossed lightning bolts and, in fact, vajra is a term that means both lightning and diamond, being used as a synonym for power.
On the other hand, a sutra is a sermon that expounds a series of teachings to achieve spiritual realization. It is used by both Buddhists and Hindus and, in a certain way, bears a certain resemblance to Christian parables or some religious texts in the Bible. The case that concerns us corresponds to Mahāyāna, which is one of the three great branches of Buddhism, probably originating in India in the 1st century AD. It also belongs to the genre called Prajñāpāramitā sutras (Perfection of Wisdom), along with other very famous sutras such as the Lotus sutras. , the one with the Heart and the one with the Garland .
The one with the Diamond it is also known as Triśatikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra , translatable by The three hundred lines of perfection of vision sutra . The reason is obvious:the text occupies approximately that length, although it will be different in the various translations.
And it is that since its writing on an unspecified date, probably between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, it has been passed on to other languages. The first was into Chinese around 401, by the prolific translator Kumārajīva, a monk from Kashmir who was imprisoned by the Chinese for sixteen years, taking the opportunity to learn the language and translate Buddhist texts into it.
Kumārajīva's version was rather free because it had a pedagogical purpose, but this did not prevent it from being highly valued, to the point of becoming the most used in China, above other later translations such as those of Bodhirudi (509 AD), Paramārtha (558), the two from Dharmagupta (590 and 616), the two from Xuanzang (648 and 660-63), and the one from Yijing (703). Furthermore, it is that of the oldest copy we have today, the Dunhuang scroll (which we will talk about later), even though it is several hundred years later.
Later it was also translated into Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Vietnamese and Tibetan, all Asian countries where the Mahāyāna tradition was important. They were often completed or expanded with annotations, such as those made by two prestigious brother monks, Asanga and Vasubandhu, founders of the Yongacara philosophical school, who wrote commentaries on the Diamond Sutra in his treatise Mahayanasamparigraha, in the fourth century. Or of Chinese sages such as Sengzhao, Xie Lingyun, Zhiyi, Jizang, Kuiji and Zongmi, who together added more than eighty texts (of which only thirty survive).
This attraction to the work was due to the fact that it gave rise to a whole literary-religious current around it, especially in China at the end of the Tang dynasty, when copying and reciting its pages became a common devotional tool to which properties were attributed. miraculous.
In that sense, there are news of specific cases of its mystical utility; for example, the visions that Huineng, the sixth and last patriarch of Zen (638-713), had while reciting it, leaving his job as a woodcutter to become a monk and capturing his experience in a work entitled Sutra Exegesis of the Diamond .
All this shows that at that time the Diamond Sutra It was a very famous work. So much so that copies have been found in quite remote places, such as Bamiyan (Afghanistan), where manuscript fragments of various sutras appeared among the ruins of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravāda monastery, including the Diamond sutras. , presumably taken in person by the aforementioned Xuanzang. This diffusion was helped by the fact that it was relatively short, which made it easy to memorize.
The sutra begins with a usual formula “Evaṃ mayā śrutam…” (So I have heard…) and continues with a dialogue between Buddha and an old monk named Subhuti during the break they take after their daily walk in search of food. The scheme is of questions and answers on four fundamental topics -as defined by the monk Hsing Yun already in the 20th century- as the anatta (insubstantiality of the soul), the liberation of beings without a notion of themselves, life without attachment to the material and the cultivation of oneself. In short, a treatise on existence, perception and compassion, through, among other things, the liberation of preconceived ideas.
As for what we said at the beginning about the Diamond Sutra It is the oldest printed book that we know of, its discovery took place in the five thousand temples that make up the Mogao Caves, in Dunhuang (north China, in the middle of the Gobi desert), together with other documents that were generically baptized as Manuscripts. of Dunhuang. They were discovered in 1907 by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British nationalized Hungarian who, according to his times, was an explorer, archaeologist, ethnographer, geographer and linguist, all this being able to be synthesized in his specialty, Sinology.
Aurel found the caves, which are also known as Of the Thousand Buddhas, thanks to their custodian monk, the Taoist Wang Yuanlu, who had sold him some books found there seven years earlier. The Frenchman Paul Pelliot also collaborated by mapping the site and thoroughly documenting everything, both in writing and in photos and drawings, transcribing the murals that decorated the walls, etc. Among the material collected were thousands of texts in various languages, including the Sutras of Jesus , which we discussed in another article.
Another of the most valuable pieces was the Diamond Sutra, for being the oldest print that is known, made with a system of wooden plates. To be exact, it is not the first example of printing by this method that has been preserved, but it is the one with a specified specific date:May 11, 868. It is a manuscript in the form of a roll of just over four meters in length that is also advanced in something else, being a creative work conceived for the general public, as indicated by its colophon or final note:
The Dunhuang Manuscripts were distributed among various institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the National Library of China (Beijing) and the British Library; in the latter the Diamond Sutra is preserved . In 2010 it underwent a careful restoration and digitization, which allows anyone to consult it online fully.
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Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Taishō Tripiṭaka translation)/Handbook of Zen Buddhism (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki)/The Diamond Sūtra in Chinese Culture (Venerable Yong You)/The Diamond Sutra and The Sutra of Hui-neng (A.F. Price and Wong Mou-lam, trans.; W.Y. Evans-Wentz and Christmas Humphreys, intro)/The Diamond Sutra (translation and commentary by Red Pine)/Journeys on the Silk Road. A desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest printed book (Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters)/Wikipedia