The Diamond Sutra of Dunhuang: The Oldest Dated Printed Book

Around 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, who had made himself caretaker of the Mogao caves near Dunhuang, found a sealed doorway behind a painted wall. Behind it was a small chamber, now called Cave 17 or the Library Cave, packed from floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and prints. It had been walled up around the year 1000, and the reason is unknown. In 1907 the archaeologist Aurel Stein bought a large share of the collection from Wang. Among the rolls he took to London was a scroll about five metres long, printed from carved wooden blocks. At its end it gives the day it was made: 11 May 868.

The scroll

• Seven sheets of paper, printed from woodblocks and pasted into a scroll, with a frontispiece: the Buddha preaching to his elderly disciple Subhūti, surrounded by monks, attendants, guardians and two lions.
• The text is the Diamond Sutra (Sanskrit Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā, "the Perfection of Wisdom that cuts like a thunderbolt/diamond"), in the Chinese translation by Kumārajīva (c. 402 CE).
• The colophon reads: "Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of Xiantong."
• It is not the oldest printing known. Printed charms and short texts survive from earlier, and a Buddhist dhāraṇī from Korea may be older. It is the oldest complete printed book that is dated, and its quality shows that printing was already a mature craft by 868.

What the sutra teaches

The Diamond Sutra is one of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. It is a dialogue in which the Buddha teaches Subhūti that a bodhisattva must work to free all beings while not holding on to any idea of self, of beings or of liberation. Its paradoxical sayings (a thing is taught to be "not X, therefore it is called X") train the reader to see that all phenomena are empty (śūnya) of fixed identity. Its closing verse, shown on the scroll above, compares all conditioned things to a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, dew and lightning.

In East Asia it became one of the most recited and copied sutras, above all in Chan/Zen Buddhism. Tradition says the sixth patriarch Huineng was awakened on hearing a line of it.

Merit in multiplication

Wang Jie's colophon explains why the book was printed. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, copying, reciting and spreading a sutra earns great merit, and the Diamond Sutra itself says so. Merit could be dedicated to others, living or dead. Printing let one pious act make many copies, each "for universal free distribution". It was a devotional technology before it was a commercial one. Many of the Library Cave's manuscripts are sutra copies dedicated in the same way.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The diamond (vajra). The vajra, both "diamond" and "thunderbolt", stands for wisdom that is indestructible and cuts through illusion. The same word names the ritual implement of Vajrayāna Buddhism.

The frontispiece as teaching scene. The picture sets out the scene that opens the sutra, Subhūti kneeling before the Buddha, so that the reader enters the text as a member of the assembly.

Emptiness in images. The dream, illusion, bubble, shadow, dew and lightning of the closing verse became a stock set of images in East Asian Buddhist art and poetry for the passing nature of all things.

Connections

Buddhism (ch11), Mahayana Buddhism (ch20), Zen & Pure Land Buddhism (ch54), and Tibetan & Vajrayana Buddhism (ch53). Compare the Sacred Tooth Relic (V27) for relics and merit, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02) for another sealed library.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/diamond-sutra.html