Essay: On the Diamond Sutra - Hindustan Times
close_game
close_game

Essay: On the Diamond Sutra

BySuhit Bombaywala
May 22, 2023 07:28 PM IST

In this, the 1,155th anniversary month of the world’s earliest dated, printed book, a look at what the sutra imparts about life and the nature of reality

If you love to read books, or have carried a book in a bag like a talisman when going outdoors, or left a book by your pillow and let its loving lull you to sleep, you might appreciate the importance of May 2023. According to The British Library, it’s the anniversary month of “the world’s earliest dated, printed book”. This book is the Chinese version of the Diamond Sutra (in Sanskrit,Vajrachhedika Prajnaparamita Sutra), a strange, wondrous book.

The Diamond Sutra is a Buddhist text written which was written circa 400 CE. It is the earliest printed text with a known date of printing, 868 AD and was found in China. (The British Library) PREMIUM
The Diamond Sutra is a Buddhist text written which was written circa 400 CE. It is the earliest printed text with a known date of printing, 868 AD and was found in China. (The British Library)

A five-metre-long horizontal scroll, it’s a delicious visual representation of the journey that books take you on. A scroll, you might ask. Not a handy thing with flippy pages? Such a challenge to stuff into your bag, and where does the bookmark go? Do please consider, as a joke, how many folks can read a five-metre long scroll together, in, say, a Mumbai local train, and you’ll begin to think that perhaps the scroll has its advantages.

Its other distinction is, it comes with the dedication, “for universal free distribution”. Printed long before Creative Commons was devised, the Diamond Sutra is the world’s first creative work espousing open access to information. It even foreshadows the maker’s notices you see in free-to-share literature today. After the text comes a note saying, “On the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of the Xiantong reign period, Wang Jie had this made for universal distribution on behalf of his two parents.” That date works out, The British Library says, to 11th May 868. Thanks, stranger from ancient China, for your act of generosity!

It’s splendid, dear Wang Jie, that your name lives on. Small as your act might have been, the ripples it made continue to spread. Grateful to you indeed, but pardon the frankness, mister, it rankles even today that a certain hard drive crashed years ago, taking its contents into shunyata. And your book made of paper – Paper! – was discovered in a sealed library cave in 1900, along with around 40,000 objects, most of them texts on subjects ranging from religions to maths and arts. Said the Buddha, all is impermanent. To which Silicon Valley might add: But expiry dates vary.

As things go, sir, your copy of the Diamond Sutra is around 1,100 years old, so the British Library would have to pay a huge late fee for borrowing it, were it not for your dedication of the book to the public domain.

The Diamond Sutra scroll (The British Library)
The Diamond Sutra scroll (The British Library)

Dear reader, how do you spell “Gutenberg”? You don’t, not as an inventor or originator of printing anyway. To China goes the credit for inventing printing. This tech developed there early because, as expert Susan Whitfield is quoted in The Smithsonian, “[I]n Buddhist belief, copying images or the words of the Buddha was a good deed and way of gaining merit in Jie’s culture”. So, the quicker and more the copies of texts made, the more merit – good karma – accumulated by spreading the Buddhadharma (Buddha's teachings) in the world.

Woodblock printing was already a mature technology in China when this scroll was printed. An artisan meticulously carved the text on a block of wood, the carved wood was inked, covered with a sheet of paper, and the paper was brushed with care, staining gloriously with the text of the Diamond Sutra. Carve, ink, brush, repeat. Page after page was joined together in a scroll.

We don’t know whose translation of the sutra appears on the scroll. It may have been the canonical translator, Kumarajiva, or not. He’d made the translation from Sanskrit into Chinese around four centuries before. He was of confluential origin; his mother Jiva, says the Khyentse Foundation, hailed from Kucha, a land which is in current-day China; his father Kumarayana, as per the Foundation, was Indian. Kumarajiva, was exposed to various Buddhist schools, turned out to be an exemplary student of the Buddhadharma, and grew up an accomplished scholar who knew multiple wisdom traditions. He is said to have translated around 50 central sutras of Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhism, including the Diamond Sutra. In case his is not the translation used for the book, it seems reasonable to say that his work informed subsequent translators of the sutra.

The Diamond Sutra, and also others, nourish the moving ideal of Mahayana Buddhism, the ideal of the bodhisattva (a person who is on the path towards bodhi or Buddhahood). This is a being who has taken the vow to attain Buddhahood in order to remove the suffering of all beings. This vow is taken even today. A bodhisattva practises Buddhist mind training, but not with the goal of individual liberation – a bodhisattva takes many, many lifetimes till they’ve put all other sentient beings on, shall we say, the Nirvana Express. A bodhisattva trains in developing ever greater compassion and wisdom.

The Diamond Sutra is in the form of a dialogue between the Buddha and one of his disciples Subhuti on the nature of reality. Among the multiple points discussed, one is that there is no self and another is an explanation of sunyata. Sunyata, is often translated, not entirely satisfactorily, as “emptiness”.

Although sunyata is not specifically named in this sutra, it is crucial to it. A flower, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, is composed of non-flower elements. To quote from his book, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, “The beautiful flower does not become empty when it fades and dies. It is already empty, in its essence. Looking deeply, we see that the flower is made of non-flower elements — light, space, clouds, earth, and consciousness. It is empty of a separate, independent self.” It lacks an essence of ‘flower-ness’. It exists dependent on causes and conditions. Feel free to swap the word ‘flower’ with ‘human’ in this context.

The short, the 6,000-word Diamond Sutra is not nihilist; it is positive. As academic Supriya Rai explained at Jnanapravaha in Mumbai in 2019, (not specifically mentioning this sutra), Buddhism does not say “nothing exists”, but that “things exist, just not how you think they do”.

“What the Diamond Sutra is actually delivering,” writes Sangharakshita in Wisdom Beyond Words “is not a systematic treatise, but a series of sledgehammer blows, attacking from this side and that, to try and break through our fundamental delusion. It is not going to make things easy for the logical mind by putting things in a logical form”.

A fragment of the Diamond Sutra (The British Library)
A fragment of the Diamond Sutra (The British Library)

Hence, the sutra’s puzzling bit, and there are quite a few: The Buddha saying there is no one to bring to the other shore. “[We] just think we exist as individuals but we don’t,” explains Susan Whitfield, who led the initiative to digitise the documents found in the cave, including this one. “In fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” she says. This is helpful in leading you to liberation, but not in splitting a restaurant bill. Not that I’ve tried!

The sutra exhorts us not to rely on concepts, ideas, language, and notions about this-is-not-dharma and that-is-dharma. So, in order to avoid confusion among fellow beginners, and to avoid giving the impression that I have realised the sutra, I won’t quote from it.

Thich Nhat Hanh (Sarawut Itsaranuwut / Shutterstock)
Thich Nhat Hanh (Sarawut Itsaranuwut / Shutterstock)

The sutra also delivers a gorgeous explanation of how to practice generosity – to do so without getting hung up on ideas, signs, or any object of mind whatsoever. This, we are told, is true generosity, and it leads to a happiness vast and immeasurable as space.

The text is meant to slice through our assumptions about the nature of reality. So, it brims over with paradoxes. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica says, “[T]he form of the presentation underlines the text’s thesis that spiritual realization depends upon transcending rational categories”.

Happy birth anniversary, earliest known printed and dated copy of one of the most sublime teachings: Thich Nhat Hanh called it “the diamond that cuts through illusion”.

Suhit Bombaywala is an independent journalist. He lives in Mumbai.

Unlock a world of Benefits with HT! From insightful newsletters to real-time news alerts and a personalized news feed – it's all here, just a click away! -Login Now!

Continue reading with HT Premium Subscription

Daily E Paper I Premium Articles I Brunch E Magazine I Daily Infographics
freemium
SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Share this article
SHARE
Story Saved
Live Score
OPEN APP
Saved Articles
Following
My Reads
Sign out
New Delhi 0C
Friday, March 29, 2024
Start 14 Days Free Trial Subscribe Now
Follow Us On