The Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines
Introduction

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition classifies the discourses delivered by Buddha Śākyamuni in terms of the three turnings of the doctrinal wheel, promulgated at different places and times in the course of his life. Among them, the sūtras of the first turning expound the four noble truths, those of the second turning explain emptiness and the essenceless nature of all phenomena, while those of the third turning elaborate further distinctions between the three essenceless natures.1 The sūtras of the transcendent perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā),2 to which the text translated here belongs, are firmly placed by their own assertion3 within the second turning, promulgated at Vulture Peak near Rāja­gṛha.

It is in these sūtras that the role of the compassionate bodhisattva with a mind set upon enlightenment achieves preeminence over the śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas of lesser attainment.4 The central message subtly integrates relative truth and ultimate truth, reiterating that great bodhisattva beings should strive to attain manifestly perfect buddhahood in order to eliminate the sufferings of all sentient beings rather than merely terminate cyclic existence for their own sake, even though, from an ultimate perspective, there are no phenomena, no sentient beings, and no attainment of manifestly perfect buddhahood.

The relentless deconstruction of all conceptual elaborations with respect to phenomena, meditative experiences, and even the causal and fruitional attributes characteristic of the bodhisattva path, which is explicitly emphasized throughout these sūtras, may have been controversial,5 but it has given rise to both Madhyamaka dialectics and to the non-analytical meditative pursuits of the Chan (Zen) tradition. In Tibet, on the other hand, the sūtras are generally approached through study of The Ornament of Clear Realization and its extensive commentaries, which constitute the Parchin (phar phyin) literature‍—one of the principal subjects of the monastic college curriculum. These treatises elaborate on the eightfold structural progression of the bodhisattvas’ goals, paths, and fruit which are implied, though understated, in all but the recast manuscript of the Sūtra in Twenty-five Thousand Lines.

Traditional Tibetan accounts hold that, following their promulgation by Śākyamuni, the sūtras were concealed in non-human abodes‍—the longest Sūtra in One Billion Lines among the gandharvas, the Sūtra in Ten Million Lines among the devas, and the Sūtra in One Hundred Thousand Lines among the nāgas‍—the last of these being retrieved and revealed by Nāgārjuna from the ocean depths and initially propagated in South India.

The extant texts forming this cycle of sūtras are replete with abbreviations, modulations, and other mnemonic features, indicative of an early oral transmission‍—even today they are read aloud as an act of merit in monastic halls and public gatherings. At the same time, the medium length and longer sūtras explicitly extoll the merits of committing the sūtras to writing, in the form of a book, as an offering for the benefit of posterity.6

The earliest written version appears to have taken shape around the start of the first millennium, in the age when birch-bark and palm-leaf manuscripts first began to appear in the Indian subcontinent. Contemporary research (Falk 2011, Falk and Karashima 2012) has brought to our attention extant segments and fragments of a birch-bark scroll containing a portion of a generic manuscript of the Sūtra of the Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in the Gāndhārī language, written in Kharoṣṭhī script, which was, by all accounts, retrieved from a stone case in the Bajaur region of the Afghan-Pakistan border. The manuscript has been carbon dated within the range of 25–74 ᴄᴇ.

Philological evidence suggests that this manuscript was the forerunner of a later Gāndhārī manuscript translated by Lokakṣema into Chinese, while certain peculiarities of transcription and the presence of conventional mnemonic abbreviations also presuppose an earlier manuscript, which may no longer be extant.7 These Kharoṣṭhī scrolls are among the oldest surviving exemplars of all Indic texts, with the exception of the Aśokan rock inscriptions and pillar edicts, and it has been speculated that their source manuscript may even predate the original redaction of the Pāli Canon.8

Conze (1960: 1–2) outlines the case for the sūtras’ South Indian origin among the Pūrvaśaila and Aparaśaila schools of the Mahāsaṅghika order, where the monasteries of Amarāvati and Dhānyakataka each seems to have preserved a version in Prakrit. Other evidence, not least the survival of the Kharoṣṭhī manuscript segments from Bajaur, suggests, on the contrary, that the sūtras were first committed to writing in the northwest. The epigraphic research of Richard Salomon at the University of Washington tends toward the latter view. The Arapacana alphabet found in some of the longer sūtras as a dhāraṇī follows the order of letters and peculiarities of the Kharoṣṭhī script.9 Furthermore, the earliest Chinese translation of the Eight Thousand Lines (Taisho 224), dated 179–180 ᴄᴇ, was prepared at Luoyang by Lokakṣema, a Kuṣāṇa monk from the northwest.10

The fact that the sūtras were copied, expanded and translated rapidly into other languages suggests that the admonishment to commit them to writing as an act of merit was taken seriously by early proponents of the Great Vehicle. Scholarly opinion differs as to which of the sūtras appeared first. Conze (1960) considers that the first two chapters of the Verse Summation and the Eight Thousand Lines are the oldest, while Japanese scholars tend to give precedence to the Adamantine Cutter (in Three Hundred Lines). The latter text was highly influential in the development of Huineng’s Platform Sūtra (Liùzǔ Tánjīng), and a copy of it is also the world’s oldest extant printed book, dated 868, retrieved by Sir Aurel Stein from Dunhuang and preserved in The British Museum. Schopen (2005: 31–32, 55) puts forward the idea that there was a shift from the oral transmission exemplified in the Adamantine Cutter to the written transmission of the Eight Thousand Lines.

The historical evolution of the sūtras within the Indian subcontinent is examined preeminently in Conze (1960: 1–18), who outlines the following four historical phases: (1) the appearance of the medium length Sūtra in Eight Thousand Lines, dated 100 ʙᴄᴇ–100 ᴄᴇ; (2) the expansion of the longer versions, dated 100–300 ᴄᴇ; (3) the contraction of the shorter versions, dated 300–500 ᴄᴇ; and (4) the appearance of various means for attainment (sādhana, sgrub thabs) associated with the female deity Prajñā­pāramitā, dated 600–1200 ᴄᴇ. This structure may still hold in general, although the reservations of Japanese scholarship concerning the antiquity of the short Adamantine Cutter (in Three Hundred Lines) should be noted.

The titles of the various sūtras within the genre are differentiated on the basis of the number of thirty-two syllable “lines” (śloka) contained in their original Sanskrit manuscripts. There is also internal numbering, which assists navigation. This takes two forms: the tally of fascicles (kalāpa, bam po) into which the original bark or palm leaf manuscripts were bundled is indicated at the start of each tome, and the tally of chapters (parivarta, le’u) which distinguish the content is indicated at the conclusion of each chapter. The present translation emphasizes the divisions of the chapter titles, while encoding the residual tally of fascicles. For example the final fascicle heading of the sūtra, which would read “Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines. The thirty-fourth fascicle is as follows,” appears encoded as [B34].

In Tibetan translation, the sūtras of the transcendent perfection of wisdom comprise approximately one fifth of the entire Kangyur, taking up twenty-one volumes of the Lhasa and Urga Kangyurs, twenty-two of the Cone Kangyur, twenty-three of the Degé and Narthang Kangyurs, and up to twenty-seven of some of the manuscript Kangyurs. In most Kangyurs, this section, known as Prajñā­pāramitā (shes phyin), precedes all the other sūtra divisions‍—the Ava­taṃsaka (phal chen), Ratna­kūṭa (dkon brtsegs) and General Sūtra (mdo sde) sections‍—reflecting the high prestige of the Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom within Mahāyāna Buddhism as a whole. In most Kangyurs, including the Degé, the section includes twenty-three distinct texts, foremost among them being the “six mothers” (yum drug) and the “eleven children” (bu bcu gcig). In some Kangyurs, including those of the Peking family, the section contains only seventeen (the “mothers” and “children”), and the seven other texts usually classed in this genre are found in other divisions.

The six mothers are the “longer” and “medium” length sūtras, which are said to be distinguished by their structural presentation of all eight aspects of the bodhisattvas’ path, as elucidated in The Ornament of Clear Realization. The shorter texts, being terser, do not fully elaborate this structure.11 The six mothers are outlined as follows:

In addition to these Tibetan translations, there are extant Sanskrit manuscripts from Gilgit and Nepal, complete in some cases, partial in others, and Chinese translations representing all of the longer and medium length versions of the sūtra, with the exception of The Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines. A bibliographic appraisal of all texts within the cycle can be found in Conze (1960: 31–91), and listings of the corresponding translations into Western languages in Pfandt (1983).

The Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines, which is translated here, uniquely has no extant Sanskrit manuscripts or Chinese translations‍—the Tibetan version alone is extant‍—nor are there any extant commentaries of Indo-Tibetan or Sino-Japanese origin. For these reasons, Conze (1960: 46) has even expressed doubt as to its authenticity, suggesting that the sūtra may have been composed in Tibet. This, however, is highly unlikely‍—in style and content the sūtra is compatible with the three longer versions, and quite dissimilar to the indigenous Tibetan compositions of the ninth century, when it was listed in the Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) catalogue.15 Situ Paṇchen’s catalogue to the Degé Kangyur includes the colophon of this sūtra, indicating that it was translated into Tibetan by Jinamitra, Prajñāvarman, and the translator Yeshé Dé.16

Hikata (1958: ix–lxxxiii) claims that the text is a somewhat erratic version of the three longer sūtras, and yet this is not borne out by a detailed analysis of the sūtra itself, which, as we shall see, may justifiably be regarded as a compact and coherent restatement of the longer versions, having much more in common with them than with The Eight Thousand Lines.

The pioneering Norwegian Indologist Sten Konow is the only academic to have given serious consideration to our text in his 1941 monograph, which includes a Sanskrit reconstruction and translation of the first two chapters. These particular chapters are of great interest because they conveniently draw together the enumerations of the three hundred and sixty-seven aspects of phenomena, meditative experiences, causal and fruitional attributes, and attainments that form the critique of the sūtras. Konow (1941: 70) compares the list of these phenomena and attributes to those found in other sūtras within the cycle and in other Mahāyāna texts. In particular, with regard to the unusual listing of only seventy-eight minor marks, rather than eighty, he speculates that The Ten Thousand Lines “may represent an earlier attempt,” predating the enumerations found in the Mahā­vastu, Lalita­vistara, and Mahā­vyutpatti, which all appear to have a common source.

In the course of translating the present text, we have sought to identify parallel passages in the Dutt (1934) and Kimura (1971–2009) editions of the recast Sanskrit manuscript (which also facilitated the preparation of the trilingual glossary). Other secondary sources have also proved to be essential research tools, including Conze’s Materials for a Dictionary of the Prajñā­pāramitā Literature (1973), along with his composite translation from the longer sūtras (1975), and the translations of the renowned Indian treatises of Hari­bhadra and Vi­mukti­sena contained in Sparham (2006–2012). For appraisals of the transcendent perfection literature in general, readers may also wish to consult Dayal (1932), Conze (1960), Williams (1989), Jamieson (2000), and Brunnholzl (2010), the last of whom, in his introduction, offers important insights from the Tibetan commentarial tradition.

While the deconstruction of all aspects of conceptual elaboration is explicitly stated throughout the sūtra, the structural progression of the bodhisattva path is largely understood by implication and it is unraveled chiefly with reference to the commentary found in Maitreya’s Ornament of Clear Realization. The recast Sanskrit manuscript of later provenance, edited in Dutt (1934) and Kimura (1971–2009) presents the entire Twenty-five Thousand Lines in that context, and it is on that basis that we can also, by analogy, understand the implied meaning of The Ten Thousand Lines.

The eight aspects of the bodhisattvas’ progression include: three which present the theoretical understandings of the goals to be realized, four which present the practical application of training through which they will be realized, and one which presents the fruit arising from conclusive realization. Together these form the graduated approach of the bodhisattva path that is revered and maintained in all Tibetan traditions, and most exemplary in the lives and teachings of the great Kadampa masters, such as Ngok Loden Sherab. The eight aspects with their seventy topics may be outlined as follows:

In terms of The Ten Thousand Lines, we can see that the parallel passages of the Sanskrit edition of the recast manuscript, following Dutt and Kimura, suggest that chapters 1–14 pertain to the understanding of all phenomena, chapters 15–18a pertain to the understanding of the aspects of the path, and chapters 18b–19 pertain to the understanding of omniscience. Chapters 20–25a pertain to training in the clear realization of all phenomena, chapters 25b–28a pertain to the training in culminating clear realization and serial clear realization, and chapters 28b–30 pertain to the training in instantaneous clear realization. Chapter 31 explores the indications of irreversible bodhisattvas, chapter 32 pertains to the fruitional attainment of the buddha attributes, and chapter 33 concludes the sūtra with the admonishments that it should be respected, maintained, and entrusted for the sake of posterity.

In the following summary, the eight aspects appear as subtitles with the same Roman numerals as in the list above. The thirty-three chapters are unevenly distributed among them.

Although 84000’s general preference is to avoid the use of square brackets to indicate words or phrases added in the translation as an aid to understanding and readability, an exception has been made in the case of this text. The most frequent reason for their use here is to provide, in passages dealing with a series of previously enumerated elements under discussion, a reference to what those elements are that is missing in the taut phrasing of the Tibetan (and, we may assume, the original Sanskrit). Although these added phrases are arguably included in the text’s meaning, if not its actual words, they have been left in square brackets to avoid confusing readers who might wish to read the translation along with the original, as well as to facilitate close comparison of the different Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom sūtras.

References to the parallel passages in the recast Sanskrit manuscript, mentioned above, have been left embedded throughout the underlying database file of this translation, e.g. [cf. Dutt: 142] or [cf. Kimura II-III: 18], but have been rendered invisible in this display. The database file is available on request to scholars and researchers.