Prajna Paramita

THE PERFECTION OF WISDOM IN EIGHT THOUSAND LINES & ITS VERSE SUMMARY Translated by Edward Conze PREFACE The Two Versions In this book the reader finds the same text presented in two versions, once in verse and once in prose. For early Mahayana 1 Sutras that was quite a normal procedure. Generally speaking the versified versions are earlier, and in all cases they have been revised less than those in prose. The reason lies in that the verses are in dialect, the prose in generally correct Sanskrit. The dialect is nowadays known as “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit,” a term adopted by Professor F. Edgerton who first compiled its grammar and dictionary.2 The verses are often difficult to construe, and require close comparison with the Tibetan translations which reflect the knowhow of the Indian pandits of the ninth century. Nevertheless most of my translation should be regarded as fairly reliable, and there are serious doubts only about the rendering of I 7, II 13 and XX 13, which so far no amount of discussions with fellow scholars has dispersed. The Ratnaguna The verse form of this Sutra is handed down to us under the name of Prajnaparamita-Ratnagunasamcayagatha 3 (abbreviated as Rgs), which consists of 302 “Verses on the Perfection of Wisdom Which is the Storehouse of Precious Virtues,” the virtuous qualities being, as the Chinese translation adds, those of the “Mother of the Buddhas.” The text has acquired this title only fairly late in its history, for references to it occur only at XXIX 3 (idam gunasamcayanam) and XXVII 6 (ayu vihara gune ratanam), i.e. in the latest portions of the text. But Haribhadra, its editor, has not made it up from these hints because two verses from it are quoted by Candrakirti (ca 600) under the title of Arya-Samcayagatha.4 Unfortunately our present text is not the original one. It has been tampered with in the eight century when, under the Buddhist Pala dynasty, which then ruled Bihar, the great expert on Prajnaparamita, Haribhadra, either rearranged 5 the verses or, perhaps, only divided them into chapters. Regrettably the Chinese translators also missed the original text and produced only a tardy and one too reliable translation of Haribhadra’s revision in A.D. 1001. But the verses themselves, are distinct from their arrangement, cannot have been altered very much because their archaic language and metre would resist fundamental changes. Although some of the poem’s charm evaporates in translation, it nevertheless comes through as a human and vital statement of early Mahayana Buddhism, simple and straightforward, pithy and direct. Not unnaturally the Ratnaguna is still very popular in Tibet where it is usually found in conjunction with two other works of an edifying character, the “Vows of Samantabhadra” and “The Recitation of Manjusri’s Attributes.” In my view the 41 verses of the first two chapters constitute the original Prajnaparamita which may well go back to 100 B.C. and of which all others are elaborations. Elsewhere I have given an analytical survey of their contents.6 These chapters form one single text held together by the constant recurrence of the refrain “and that is the practice of wisdom, the highest perfection” (esha sa prajna-vara-paramita carya) and terminated by a fitting conclusion in II 13.7 In fact the title of the original document was probably “the practice (carya) of Perfect Wisdom,” just as the China the first P.P text had been the Tao-hsing, “the practice of the Way,” in one fascicle 8 and as in the three earliest Chinese translations the first chapter was called “practice (of the Way),” and not, as now, “the practice of the knowledge of all modes.”9 At the other end there are 52 verses which have no counterpart in the Ashta at all. In the main they are a separate treatise which deals, in verse order, with the five perfections which led up to the perfection of wisdom 10 and which was appended to the existing Rgs so as to bring the number of chapters from 28 to a total of 32. For the rest, 33 more Rgs verses are absent from the Ashta.11 They concern mostly similes. Of special interest are the similes in chapter XX which deal with the following particularly abstruse subject: It is one of the most distinguishing features of a “Bodhisattva” that he can postpone his entrance into Nirvana so as to help living beings. Technically this is expressed by saying that “he does not realize the Reality-limit (bhuta-koti).” “Reality-limit” had for a while been one of the more obscure synonyms of “Nirvana,” but now by a shift in meaning it becomes identified with the inferior hinayanistic Nirvana of the Arhat as distinct from the full and final Nirvana of a Buddha.12 Tradition also knew three “doors to deliverance” – emptiness, the signless and the wishless—which are three kinds of meditation which lead straight to Nirvana. Chapter XX now tries to explain (bracketed pages 370-81) how these can be practiced without the undesirable side- effect of the person quitting the world by disappearing into the basically selfish hinayanistic Nirvana. Most readers will find the similes of Rgs more convincing than the apparent rationality of the Ashta. On the other hand, large chunks of the Ashta are unrepresented in the Ratnaguna. They are roughly 240 pages out of 529.13 It is not always quite clear why they should be missing. Some obviously are absent because they were added to the Sutra after the completion of Rgs. They are as I have suggested elsewhere,14 chapters XXIX to XXXII, as well as large portions of chapters XIII, XIX and XXVIII, and so on. Others could probably by no stretch of the imagination be subjected to poetical treatment, such as the attempts to probe the mind of the All-knowing in chapter XII, the rather monotonous rhapsodies on Suchness in chapter XVI, or the sometimes prosy enumerations of Mara’s misdeeds in chapters XI, XVII 328-32, and XXIV 416-21. It is also quite possible that some parts of Rgs are later than the prose text of the Ashta and that their authors did not aim at reproducing all the points of the argument, step by step, but were content to pick out a sentence here or there. The Ashta Now as to the Sutra itself. First its title, Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita 15 (abbreviated as Ashta or A) means “The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines,” or slokas. A sloka is used to indicate a unit of 32 syllables. The Cambridge manuscript Add 866 of A.D. 1008 gives the actual number of slokas after each chapter, and added together they are exactly 8,411. Religious people are inclined to attribute their holy scriptures to divine inspiration, and they do not like to think of them as a historical sequence of utterances made by fallible men. The faithful in India and the Buddhist world in general assumed that all the P.P. Sutras are equally the word of the Buddha, more or less abbreviated according to the faculty of understanding of the people and their zeal and spiritual maturity.16 The first was that in 8,000 lines, or rather its precursor. This was then expanded into 10,000, 18,000, 25,000 and 100,000 slokas; and after that it was contracted to 2,500, 700, 300 (The Diamond Sutra), 150, 25 (The Heart Sutra), and finally into one syllable (“A”). They are all anonymous and date between A.D. 50 and 700. In its language our Sutra is almost pure Sanskrit. The date of its composition can be inferred to some extend from the Chinese translations. The first was Lokakshema’s “P.P. Sutra of the Practice of the Way” in A.D. 179. At that time “the sutra had already assumed the basic format preserved in the Sanskrit, and no chapters are left out completely.”17 But even that must have grown over one or two centuries because it contains many sections omitted in the Ratnaguna (see above at note 14) which reflects an earlier state of the text from which even Lokakshema’s version was derived. After Lokakshema we can follow the further growth and modifications of the text in China over eight centuries.18 The current Sanskrit text which we have translated here is that of the Pala manuscripts which are dated between A.D. 1000 and 1150. They are confirmed by the Tibetan translation of A.D. 985 and to some extend already with one of Hsuan-tsang’s translations (Taisho 220[4], ca A.D. 650). In fact so much effort has been devoted to this greatly revered scripture that its text is unusually well established. From India we have more old manuscripts of it than of any other Mahayana scripture. In China “it was the first philosophical text to be translated from the Mahayana literature into Chinese”19 and it was translated no fewer than seven times. The colophon of the Tibetan translation in the Kanjur shows the exceptional care taken of it over the centuries by some of the greatest names of Tibetan scholarship: - it was first translated ca 850; then again in 1020; then compared with many Indian Mss and commentaries and revised in 1030, and 1075 and again in 1500. The Speakers The Sutras of the Mahayana are dialogues. One must know the conventions behind their representation, because what matters is not only what is said but who says it. First there are three of the best known of the “disciples” of the historical Buddha, technically known as “auditors” (sravaka, from sru, to hear), because they have heard the doctrine directly from the Buddha’s lips.

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