Five Things to Know About the Diamond
Sutra, the World’s Oldest Dated Printed Book
Jason Daley SMITHSONIAN.COM MAY 11,
2016
No one
is sure who Wang Jie was or why he
had The Diamond
Sutra printed. But we do know that on
this day in 868 A.D.—or the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of
Xiantong in Jie’s time—he commissioned a block printer to create a
17-and-a-half-foot-long scroll of the sacred Buddhist text,
including an inscription on the lower right hand side
reading, “Reverently made for universal free distribution by
Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents.” Today, that scroll
is housed
at the British Library and
is acknowledged as the oldest dated printed book in
existence.
Chances
are you know a little something about
the Gutenberg
Bible, the first book
made with moveable type, which came along almost 600 years later.
Bibliophiles might also have a working knowledge of other famous
manuscripts like the Book
of Kells, The Domesday
Book,
and Shakespeare’s
First Folio.
Well, The Diamond
Sutra should be in that
pantheon of revered books, as well. Here’s why:
Origins
The text was originally discovered in 1900 by a monk in Dunhuang,
China, an old outpost of the Silk Road on the edge of the Gobi
Desert. The Diamond
Sutra, a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese, was one
of 40,000 scrolls and documents hidden in “The Cave of a Thousand
Buddhas,” a secret library sealed up around the year 1,000 when the
area was threatened by a neighboring kingdom.
In
1907, British-Hungarian archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein was on an
expedition mapping the ancient Silk Road when he heard about the
secret library. He bribed the abbot of the monastic group in charge
of the cave and smuggled away thousands of documents,
including The Diamond
Sutra. The International Dunhuang
Project is
now digitizing those documents and 100,000 others found on the
eastern Silk Road.
Content
The Diamond
Sutra is relatively
short, only
6,000 words and
is part of a larger canon of “sutras” or sacred texts
in Mahayana Buddhism, the branch of
Buddhism most common in China, Japan, Korea and southeast
Asia. Many practitioners believe that the Mahayana Sutras were
dictated directly by the Buddha,
and The Diamond
Sutra takes the form of a
conversation between the Buddha’s pupil Subhati and his
master.
Why is it
Diamond?
A full
translation of the document's title
is The
Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion.
As Susan
Whitfield, director of the Dunhuang Project
explains, the sutra
helps cut through our perceptions of the world and
its illusion. "[W]e just think we exist as individuals
but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality:
there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” Whitfield
writes.
Why did Wang Jie
commission it?
According to Whitfield, in Buddhist belief, copying images or the
words of the Buddha was a good deed and way of gaining merit in
Jie’s culture. It’s likely that monks would have unrolled the
scroll and chanted the sutra out loud on a regular basis. That’s
one reason printing developed early on in China, Whitfield
explains. “[If] you can print multiple copies, and the more copies
you’re sending out, the more you’re disseminating the word of
Buddha, and so the more merit you are sending out into the world,”
she writes. “And so the Buddhists were very quick to recognize the
use of the new technology of printing.”
What is one quote I
should know from The
Diamond Sutra?
It’s
difficult to translate the sutra word for word and still catch its
meaning. But this passage about life, which Bill Porter, who goes
by the alias "Red
Pine," adapted to
English, is one of the most popular:
So you should view this fleeting world—
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.