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Table of Contents

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Summary

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The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines is the longest of all the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and fills no fewer than twelve volumes of the Degé Kangyur. Like the other two long sūtras, it is a detailed record of the teaching on the perfection of wisdom that the Buddha Śākyamuni gave on Vulture Peak in Rājagṛha, setting out all aspects of the path to enlightenment that bodhisattvas must know and put into practice, yet without taking them as having even the slightest true existence. Each point is emphasized by the exhaustive way that, in this version of the teaching, the Buddha repeats each of his many profound statements for every one of the items in the sets of dharmas that comprise deluded experience, the path, and the qualities of enlightenment.

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The provisional version published here currently contains only the first thirteen chapters of the sūtra. Subsequent batches of chapters will be added as their translation and editing is completed.

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Acknowledgements

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The text was translated by Gareth Sparham, partly based on the translation of The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines by the late Gyurme Dorje and the Padmakara Translation Group. Geshe Lobsang Gyaltsen, 80th Abbot of Drepung Gomang monastery, and Geshe Kalsang Damdul, former Director of the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, kindly provided learned advice.

The translation was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. Nathaniel Rich and John Canti edited the translation, John Canti wrote the provisional introduction, and Ven. Konchog Norbu copyedited the text. Celso Wilkinson, André Rodrigues, and Sameer Dhingra were in charge of the digital publication process.


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The translation of this text has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of those who offered leadership gifts to inaugurate our campaign, The Perfection of Wisdom for All. In chronological order of contributions received, these include:

Yan Xiu, Yan Li, Li Yifeng, and Wang Issa; Thirty, Twenty, Jamyang Sun, and Manju Sun; Anonymous; Ye Kong and family, Chen Hua, and Yizhen Kong; Wang Jing and family; Joseph Tse, Patricia Tse, and family; Zhou Tianyu, Chen Yiqin, Zhou Xun, Zhuo Yue, Chen Kun, Sheng Ye, and family, Zhao Xuan, Huang Feng, Lei Xia, Kamay Kan, Huang Xuan, Liu Xin Qi, Le Fei, Li Cui Zhi, Wang Shu Chang, Li Su Fang, Feng Bo Wen, Wang Zi Wen, Ye Wei Wei, Guo Wan Huai, and Zhang Nan; Ang Wei Khai and Ang Chui Jin; Jube, Sharma, Leo, Tong, Mike, Ming, Caiping, Lekka, Shanti, Nian Zu, Zi Yi, Dorje, Guang Zu, Kunga, and Zi Chao; Anonymous, Anonymous; An Zhang, Hannah Zhang, Lucas Zhang, and Aiden Zhang; Jinglan Chi and family; Anonymous; Dakki; Kelvin Lee and Doris Lim.

We also acknowledge and express our deep gratitude to the 6,145 donors who supported the translation and publication of this text through contributions made throughout the campaign period.

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Introduction

Overview

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The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines is the longest of the three so-called “long” Perfection of Wisdom, or Prajñāpāramitā, sūtras. Indeed, not only is it the very longest of all Buddhist texts, but it is among the longest single works of literature in any language or culture. In the Degé Kangyur it fills twelve volumes, and comprises fourteen percent of the whole collection by number of pages.

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With an evident similarity in structure, order, and content to the other two long Prajñāpāramitā sūtras (in twenty-five thousand and eighteen thousand lines), it is a detailed record‍—in fact the most detailed extant record‍—of what is traditionally said to have been a single teaching1 on the perfection of wisdom that the Buddha Śākyamuni gave on Vulture Peak in Rājagṛha, setting out all aspects of the path to enlightenment that bodhisattvas must know and put into practice, yet without taking them as having even the slightest true existence.

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Traditional histories include all six “mother” versions of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras2 among the complete records of this single episode of teaching, and some even enumerate still longer versions not propagated in the human realm, such as a sūtra for the gods in ten million lines, and one for the gandharvas in one billion lines. Indeed, the present sūtra in one hundred thousand lines is itself said to have been retrieved from the nāga realm by Nāgārjuna.3

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The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines therefore has a unique status among scriptures in the Tibetan canon. Its vast length, and its many extended sequences of repeated formulations modulated by changes to a single term alone, make it difficult to study as a doctrinal textbook, but it is revered as the fullest possible expression of the Buddha’s definitive teachings on the nature of phenomena, the path, and the awakened state. To read it, recite it aloud, or even to be in the physical presence of its volumes is seen as having a powerful force and blessing.

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Yet its importance is more than just symbolic. Although the shorter forms of the Perfection of Wisdom teachings are‍—relatively, at least‍—easier to study, The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines remains the scripture that most fully embodies the Buddha’s pronouncements on this all-important theme, and the uncompromising detail of its statements makes their meaning unmistakably clear.

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The sūtra exists in the three principal languages of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan, with the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts being most closely aligned. The Tibetan translation was made in several successive stages in the early, imperial translation period of the late eighth and early ninth century, and traditional histories document in some detail the translators, manuscripts, sponsors, and locations of the early translations.

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It is analyzed and explained by Indian scholars in a number of commentaries that were also translated into Tibetan, and by a small number of indigenous Tibetan commentarial works. Little specific, detailed attention has been paid to it by Western authors, and until now it has not been translated in full into English or any other Western language.

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This provisional introduction, which will be updated progressively over the next months and years as further sections of the translation are added, focuses mostly on the history, source texts, and features of The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines in particular. Readers will find more information and references regarding the Prajñāpāramitā literature in general, its different texts, the long sūtras as a group sharing essentially the same structure and content, their history and evolution, and the protagonists and their doctrinal statements, in the introductions to The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines and The Perfection of Wisdom in Eighteen Thousand Lines,4 as well as in the description of the Degé Kangyur’s Perfection of Wisdom section.5

History and Sources

History of the Long Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras

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From a historical perspective, a group of “long Prajñāpāramitā sūtras,” including texts that exist variably in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan, appears to have been one distinctive genre that took form from the early Prakrit literature on the perfection of wisdom that first appeared in writing in the first centuries ʙᴄᴇ and ᴄᴇ. Modern scholars have disagreed about which of the geographically dispersed Buddhist communities of the time may have first given rise to this literature, some favoring its origin among the Mahāsāṅghikas of Andhra in the south of India, while others point to evidence of its early flourishing in the northwest regions such as Gandhāra. Whichever may be the case, a birch-bark scroll from the northwest, in the Gāndhārī language, written in Kharoṣṭhī script, and found in Bajaur (a district of present-day Pakistan near the Afghan border), has been radiocarbon-dated to the first century ᴄᴇ and is currently the oldest known Prajñāpāramitā manuscript.6 It is fragmentary and cannot be matched to any extant recension of the complete sūtras, or identified as belonging to the “long sūtra” group. If anything, it may be most closely related to The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, and thus supports the hypothesis that another group of sūtras similar to the Eight Thousand may be older in form than both the longer sūtras and the shorter ones, which evolved from texts of the Eight Thousand subfamily via processes respectively of expansion and contraction.7

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The earliest surviving manuscript that can be identified as a “long” (Mahāprajñāpāramitā) version is another birch-bark scroll, this one found along with a large number of other texts in Gilgit in 1931. It is in Sanskrit and can be dated by details of its script to the sixth or seventh century ᴄᴇ.8 Although it was thought at first by Edward Conze9 to be a hybrid consisting of parts of The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines and parts of The Perfection of Wisdom in Eighteen Thousand Lines, it is now taken as one among the many coexisting versions of the “long” sūtra series.10 As the most complete of the Gilgit Prajñāpāramitā manuscripts, it is a very important source; the others are incomplete fragments. Another, similar Sanskrit manuscript of a generic “long” version was found in Dunhuang.11

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It is important to bear in mind that the naming of the different versions by the number of lines12 they contain is likely to have been a later development, applied as a means of classifying the profusion of circulating texts of different lengths. It was already in use by the time these texts were first translated into Tibetan in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, but it is not a feature of the oldest Chinese translations. The earliest evidence of this nomenclature appears to be in the Chinese literature, in the record of a lecture by the sixth-century translator Bodhiruci,13 and its widespread adoption in the centuries that followed may have served to limit further profusion and even reduce the variety of different texts by fixing their number. Those texts in different languages that can be seen as belonging to the “long” sūtra group (as distinct from the mid-length Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and the many short versions of the sūtra, each of which followed their own evolutionary path), differentiated as they are by greater or lesser degrees of expansion of the lists of dharmas, show complex patterns of textual proximity that do not necessarily follow the numerical denominations that were retrospectively applied to them. Indeed, these numerical titles may obscure rather than clarify the recensional affinities.14

Source Texts of The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines

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With that important reservation, there are three recensions within the overall group of “long” Perfection of Wisdom sūtras that can nevertheless justifiably be labeled The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines:

• a seventh-century Chinese translation;

• the present late eighth- or early ninth-century Tibetan translation; and

• the version preserved in Sanskrit in the form of several Nepalese manuscripts, none of which are more than a few centuries old.

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The Tibetan and Sanskrit recensions are quite similar to each other, while the Chinese differs from both in a number of respects.

Chinese

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The Chinese translation was made by Xuanzang in the mid-seventh century from the massive collection of material he had brought from his travels in India. It takes the form of the first of the sixteen sections or “assemblies” that represent historically independent texts and make up the voluminous compilation of perfection of wisdom works he translated as The Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra (Taishō 220).15

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Just how the extant Sanskrit and Tibetan versions differ compared to this single comparable Chinese translation has not been fully documented, but the differences are not to be ignored. The Sanskrit original from which Xuanzang translated this section is said to have been 132,600 ślokas in length, and thus possibly even longer than the Sanskrit texts that were translated into Tibetan and have also survived in the Nepalese tradition. Moreover, the sections of Xuanzang’s compilation, despite being explicitly differentiated, are presented together as in some sense comprising a single work, and it is thought that this arrangement was not Xuanzang’s own invention but may have been a feature of his Sanskrit source texts.

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Nevertheless, it is practical, and a close approximation, to consider the first section as identifiable with the texts known in Sanskrit and Tibetan as The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines.

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The second and third sections of Xuanzang’s Chinese translation correspond in similar respects to the Twenty-Five Thousand Line and Eighteen Thousand Line sūtras as found in both Sanskrit and Tibetan (for the Twenty-Five Thousand Line) and in Tibetan alone (for the Eighteen Thousand Line). It is also significant that the first and second sections, despite their differences in the degree of compression, are strikingly similar to each other in language, content, and order, but less closely related to the third. The same pattern of similarities and differences exists between the Hundred Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Eighteen Thousand Line sūtras in Tibetan and (for the first two) Sanskrit.

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A final point to be made concerning the Chinese translation is that the relatively late appearance in China of this equivalent of the Hundred Thousand, the longest of the long sūtras, almost five centuries after the first translation of the equivalent of the Eight Thousand and four centuries after the first appearance of the equivalent of the Twenty-Five Thousand, provides supporting evidence for the notion that‍—for the long sūtras‍—a process of expansion from shorter to longer versions, rather than contraction from longer to shorter, may provide the better account of their evolution.16

Sanskrit

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Early Gāndhārī and Sanskrit manuscripts of generic