Summary

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.

The provisional version published here currently contains the first twenty-eight of the seventy-two chapters of the sūtra, and represents a little under eight of the twelve volumes. Subsequent batches of chapters will be added as their translation and editing is completed.

Acknowledgements

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.

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.

Introduction

Overview

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.

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 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.

Traditional histories include all six “mother” versions of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, as well as in the description of the Degé Kangyur’s Perfection of Wisdom section.

History and Sources

History of the Long Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras

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. 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.

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. Although it was thought at first by Edward Conze 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. 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.

It is important to bear in mind that the naming of the different versions by the number of lines 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, 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.

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

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.

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

Chinese

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sanskrit

Early Gāndhārī and Sanskrit manuscripts of generic Prajñāpāramitā sūtras are mentioned above (1.9–10). Specifically of this Hundred Thousand Line version of the long sūtras, however, no Sanskrit manuscript has survived that can be dated as early as the Chinese and Tibetan translations. But there are Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts of more recent date that, from their content, must be closely related to the Sanskrit original from which the Tibetan translation was made. Some of them may even be copied descendants of a Sanskrit manuscript in the temple of Phamthing that Tibetan histories say was consulted by Ngok Loden Sherab in the eleventh century to correct the earlier Tibetan translation (see below).

Nepalese manuscripts of varying dates are presently to be found not only in Nepal but also in Kolkata, Cambridge, New Delhi, Paris, and Tokyo. A critical edition of the first twelve chapters was published in three installments by Ghoṣa between 1902 and 1914, and more recently has been extended by Kimura in four further volumes, published between 2009 and 2014.

The Sanskrit manuscripts of the Hundred Thousand and Twenty-Five Thousand resemble each other closely in terms of language, terminology, content, and order, as is the case with their Tibetan translations, and like them differ mainly in the degree of expansion of the different groups of dharmas. The Sanskrit of the Hundred Thousand matches the Tibetan translation in content closely.

Tibetan

For anyone interested in how the early Tibetan translations of canonical works in general were carried out, it is a disappointing fact that much of the detailed information about the process was either not recorded or has been lost. However, in the case of The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines‍—thanks to the unique status of this monumental scripture‍—traditional historical accounts include far more detail of the successive versions that led to the Tibetan translation preserved in the Kangyurs we have today than is the case for any other work.

A succession of Tibetan translations were made from Sanskrit in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. There are specific terms for these imperial-period manuscript versions of the Hundred Thousand: Labum (bla ’bum) and Lagyur (bla ’gyur), meaning, respectively, a Hundred Thousand (Tibetan ’bum), or a translation (’gyur), that is commissioned or owned by one who is “foremost” or “paramount” (bla), i.e. the emperor.

As a terse summary in his list of canonical translations, Butön’s fourteenth-century History of the Dharma states that “it is well known that there were six versions attributed to the translators Nyang Khampa Gocha, Vairotsana, Che Khyidruk, Zhang Yeshe Dé, and others.” Other accounts mention only four versions, while being in broad agreement on the rough outline of how the Tibetan translations evolved over time.

Much fuller details than Butön sets out are provided by other histories, including a historical survey that opens the commentary on this text by the great prajñāpāramitā commentator Rongtönpa (rong ston shes bya kun rig, 1367–1449); the lineage records of Minling Terchen Gyurmé Dorjé (smin gling gter chen ’gyur med rdo rje, 1646–1714); a survey of the prajñāpāramitā literature in a commentary to the Heart Sūtra by Alaksha Tendar (a lag sha bstan dar, 1758–1839); and an account in the encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge by Kongtrul Lodrö Thayé (kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas, 1813–99). The catalog of the Degé Kangyur, and particularly the historical section of the detailed Narthang Kangyur catalog, written by the fifth Olkha Lelung Jedrung, Lobsang Trinlé (’ol kha / dga’ sle lung blo bzang ’phrin las, 1697–1740), are also very informative. Rongtönpa’s work is the earliest of these histories and most of the others may have drawn from it, or perhaps from other even earlier accounts. The information to be gleaned from these different works is not always consistent, and sometimes conflicting. Here is a tentative synopsis:

• The earliest translation was one made by Khampa Gocha, who had been sent with offerings of gold to India by King Tri Songdetsen to bring back the sūtra; his four-part translation was called The Translation from Memory (thugs ’gyur) because Khampa Gocha had memorized the text while in India‍—some accounts say he had attained the dhāraṇī of perfect recall‍—and only wrote the Tibetan translation when he was back in Tibet. The king, as an offering of merit to the queen who had died, had a copy of that translation written in ink made from his own blood, using goat’s milk as a binder; this version was therefore called The Red Manuscript (reg zig dmar po) or The Red Goat Manuscript (ra gzigs dmar po) and also had four parts. In later times it was taken to Lhasa and is said to have been housed in the brick caitya near the Trulnang temple. It is not clear whether the above names and descriptions refer to a single manuscript or to two different ones of the same translation, but in any case this version, abridged and condensed as it is into four volumes, is also called The Short Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur chung ngu).

• Since the king did not have full confidence in The Translation from Memory, he commissioned Nyang Indrawaro and Wé Mañjuśrī to seek out the text in India and translate it. This they did, and their translation was written using ink made from indigo and the king’s singed hair, with goat’s milk binder. This manuscript was therefore called The Blue Manuscript (reg zig sngon po) or The Blue Goat Manuscript (ra gzigs sngon po); it was also called The Authorized Hundred Thousand (bca’ ’bum), and because the translators’ needs were met through a levy collected from the people, it was known as The Levy Hundred Thousand (dpya ’bum) as well. It too is said to have consisted of four parts, and because they were not held together with cloth bands but had iron fasteners it was also called The Iron Fasteners (lcags thur can). It is said to have been kept at Samyé.

• Later, Pagor Vairotsana, at the instigation of Mutik Tsenpo (also known as Senalek), compared the Sanskrit text with the translation in The Iron Fasteners, revised it, and filled out the abridgements of the earlier version by adding the missing repetitions and lengthening some lines. He wrote out a new six-volume manuscript, which was called The Medium-Length Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur ’bring po). According to Rongtönpa, it was also known as The Snowy One Promised by the King (rgyal po’i thugs dam par kha ba can), from the name of (or on) the binding boards, and both Rongtönpa and the Narthang catalog add, too, that it was called The Bats (pha wang can) because there was a bats’ nest near the place in Samyé where it was kept. Kongtrul says that it was still in Samyé Chimphu in his time (i.e., the mid-nineteenth century). Other authors, including Situ Panchen in the Degé catalog and Kongtrul, say that this is the version called The Deerskin Case Hundred Thousand (’bum sha sgro can), and the Narthang catalog explains in some detail how all the fascicles came to be stored as scrolls in a deerskin. However, the Narthang catalog says that the same name was also applied, for similar reasons, to the next revision; this may explain the apparent inconsistencies between authors in regard to this particular moniker.

• Later still, in the reign of Mutik Tsenpo’s son Tri Ralpachan, in the period when a number of Indian scholars were working with Tibetan translators in Tibet on the translation and revision of many texts and the great language revision edicts were drawn up, Surendrabodhi, Kawa Paltsek, Chokro Lui Gyaltsen, and others made an extensive revision of the translation in six parts (according to Rongtönpa) or sixteen (according to the Narthang catalog, Tendar, and Kongtrul), which was called The Long Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur chen mo). Rongtönpa calls this version The Deerskin Case Hundred Thousand (’bum sha sgro can) rather than the preceding one but, as mentioned above, the Narthang catalog explains how both versions were kept in deerskin wrappers and the name can therefore refer to either one or the other.

• At a point in this sequence that remains to be determined and is not mentioned in any of these accounts, but lies probably in the late eighth or early ninth century period, as many as eight copies of the whole text were made by scribes in Dunhuang. They were probably commissioned by or on the behalf of one of the kings (probably Tri Ralpachen). Pages from these copies, as well as rejected pages subsequently used for writing practice, make up a large proportion (along with manuscripts of The Aparimitāyurjnāna Sūtra) of the manuscripts found in Dunhuang.

• The Narthang catalog then summarizes the six early manuscripts, and gives them yet more monikers:

“At that time, since to produce a great Mother (i.e., a Hundred Thousand) was possible only for the king and not for his subjects, only these six were made:

• (1) Tri Detsuk’s Monochrome Imperial Hundred Thousand (khri sde gtsug gi bla ’bum skya bo);

• (2) Senalek Jingyön’s Innermost Hundred Thousand (mjing yon gyi sbug ’bum);

• (3) Lhasé Tsangma’s Demarcated Hundred Thousand (gtsang ma’i bye ’bum);

• (4) Ralpachen’s Six-Volume Hundred Thousand (ral pa can gyi drug ’bum);

• (5) Prince Namdé’s Red-Faced Version (gnam lde lha’i zhal dmar can); and

• (6) Darma’s Yellow-Paper Version (dar ma’i shog ser can).”

• At this point in the story there seems to have been a proliferation of further Hundred Thousands produced as copies of one or another of these six, perhaps resulting from a royal prerogative on sponsoring them coming to an end. Rongtönpa provides a detailed list of seventeen named Hundred Thousands and the places they were kept, including the earliest ones he had already described, culminating in one made by Chang Dorje Tsultrim (lcang or cang rdo rje tshul khrims) of Ru Tsam (ru ’tshams), who produced the seventeenth from a detailed comparison of the other sixteen. Rongtönpa goes on to classify the seventeen into groups according to the short, medium-length, or long Labum from which they were copied. The Narthang catalog has less detail but correspondingly mentions nineteen Hundred Thousands, including those of the subsequent period that could be produced not just by the kings but by subjects. It also points to the importance of the same significant figure, Chang Dorje Tsultrim, who soon afterward compared all nineteen and made a “highly corrected version.” Proliferating from that version, the catalog says, about sixty copies were made, and indeed Rongtönpa proceeds to list a large number of these and their locations to a total of sixty-five.

• In the later translation period, in the late eleventh century, Ngok Lotsāwa, according to the Degé catalog and others, having consulted the Indian manuscripts to be found in Tibet and the Iron Fasteners translation, revised and corrected the above-mentioned Long Imperial Translation by comparing it against a Sanskrit manuscript in the Phamthing temple in Pharphing, Nepal. These catalog accounts also mention that the corrections included the addition of the names of three meditative absorptions that had been missing in earlier versions. It is Ngok’s revised translation that, according to most Kangyur catalogs, is preserved in the Kangyur. However, although Rongtönpa places Ngok’s version in fifth and last place among the most significant, major translations, it is difficult to be entirely certain where to place it in time relative to the other revisions and simple copies that he also details, mentioned above.

• The Narthang catalog, indeed, seems to place less importance on Ngok’s revisions and mentions his version only in passing. Rather, it attributes the final establishment of a fully correct version, a “later descendant of the Imperial Hundred Thousands” (bla ’bum gyi bu phyi), to a Yarlung Jowo Chöjé (yar klung jo bo chos rje). The catalog also gives more extensive detail than any other of the differences between versions and the corrections made to establish the definitive version, including the varying numbers of meditative absorptions but also some of the sections and passages that had been missed in earlier manuscripts.

The translation preserved in most Kangyurs is thus the result of this long process of evolution. It is commonly divided into twelve volumes, but the Narthang catalog mentions other numbers of volumes into which different manuscripts were divided, and Rongtönpa, saying that there was even one version in thirty volumes, sets out schemes with the details of which bampo (fascicles) were included in which volume for several different volume arrangements: twelve (as in the Degé and many other Kangyurs), fourteen (as in the Berlin and Qianlong Kangyurs), and sixteen (as in the Choné, Phukdrak, Lithang, London, Stok Palace, Ulaanbaatar, and some of the peripheral Kangyurs).

The Degé catalog, describing the translation as being the eleventh-century one that resulted from Ngok Lotsāwa’s revision of previous Tibetan translations against the Sanskrit manuscript of Phamthing, also specifies that the text has seventy-two chapters. It mentions the traditional legend according to which the four final chapters that conclude the Twenty-Five Thousand Line sūtra‍—the questions of Maitreya, the story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata, and the entrusting of the text‍—are missing from the Hundred Thousand because when Nāgārjuna brought the sūtra from the realm of the nāgas, the nāga king had withheld those four chapters to ensure that Nāgārjuna would return. There is, the catalog says, a tradition of appending those four chapters, copied from the other sūtras. Although the Degé Kangyur does not follow that tradition, the Narthang, Lhasa, Namgyal, Hemis, and Shey Kangyurs do, and thus have seventy-five or seventy-six chapters.

The text in the Degé Kangyur is comprised of 301 bam po (fascicles), with between twenty-two and twenty-seven in each volume. The bam po numbers begin again with each volume, unlike most other Kangyurs where they are numbered consecutively throughout the text. Kangyurs in which the extra final chapters have been added have three more bam po, bringing their total to 304.

The Tibetan text in the Degé Kangyur, interestingly, preserves the old orthography of a subscript ya, “ma yata” (ma ya btags), i.e. the subscript ya under the letter ma in certain words, and of the “dadrak” (da drag), i.e. da as a second suffix in certain words ending in na, ra, or la. Spellings such as myi and myed for mi and med, rkyend for rkyen, tshuld for tshul, and smyind for smin are widespread, although in the first volume particularly some of these archaic spellings have been inconsistently revised. In most other Kangyurs these spellings are absent, but the Urga, Namgyal Collection, and Gondlha Kangyurs have also preserved them. Indeed, in the Namgyal Collection version of the sūtra, these archaic features are considerably less revised and spellings such as pha rold tu phyind pa (“the perfection of wisdom”) and rab ’byord (“Subhūti”) are preserved.

Colophons

Given the complex process by which many translators contributed to the extant translation, it is perhaps not surprising that in the Degé and in the majority of other Kangyurs, there is no translators’ colophon. In some Kangyurs, however, the text does have a colophon, and these fall into two groups:

• • The Narthang and Lhasa Kangyurs both have a colophon naming “the Indian upādhyāyas Jinamitra and Surendrabodhi, the chief editor and lotsāwa Bandé Yeshé Dé, and others” as responsible for the translation, editing, and establishment of the text. Note that these two Kangyurs are among the few that add the final four chapters from the Twenty-Five Thousand instead of ending it with the seventy-second chapter, as mentioned above; yet the Namgyal and Shey Kangyurs, which also have the added chapters, have no colophon.

• • The Stok Palace Kangyur and the Bhutanese Kangyurs of mostly Themphangma affiliation‍—Chizhi, Dongkarla, Neyphug, Phajoding Ogmin, and Tashiyangtse‍—have a quite different colophon, in which no translators are mentioned but reference is made to some of the earlier translations. A tentative rendering of this colophon would be:

“This is the golden Hundred Thousand called Not Mixed with Wrongs in twelve sections, and is based on the corrected, limit-defining Black Hundred Thousand of Gyan-gong, which itself had resulted from being proofed and edited sixteen times after being compared against the early limit-defining, abridged manuscripts in Samyé and Lhasa, and so forth, and which, since the great lotsāwa, the omniscient Butön Rinchen Drup, had confirmed it as the prototype, was used as master copy for the Hundred Thousand produced by the great scholar Rinchen Gyaltsen.”

Structure and Content Compared to Those of the Other Long Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras

This sūtra is structured in almost exactly the same way as The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines (Toh 9), with the same chapter sequence and divisions, and in Tibetan the same terminology and phraseology, to the extent that it would be difficult not to conclude that the Tibetan translations of both were produced by the same translators. Indeed, the Sanskrit source texts of the two sūtras must have been very similar, too‍—as far as can be judged, for the Sanskrit of the Twenty-Five Thousand matches not the Kangyur “many-chapter” version, Toh 9, but the Tengyur “eight-chapter” version, Toh 3790.

The Hundred Thousand and Twenty-Five Thousand are far more similar to each other in language and chapter structure than they are to the third of the long Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, the Eighteen Thousand (Toh 10), which has considerably more chapter divisions and different phraseology. Nevertheless, all three sūtras follow an almost identical sequence of themes, interlocutors, and doctrinal statements.

The Hundred Thousand as preserved in most Kangyurs, however, has only seventy-two chapters as compared to the seventy-six of the Twenty-Five Thousand. This is because the final four chapters of the latter, comprising the questions of Maitreya, the story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata, and the entrusting of the sūtra, are not present in this text. As noted above, they are traditionally seen as “missing” because the nāgas withheld them from Nāgārjuna as he was leaving to take the sūtra back with him to the human realm. The story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata is indeed present not only in the Twenty-Five Thousand but also in the Eighteen Thousand and Eight Thousand Line sūtras, so it is not unreasonable to see it as “missing.” On the other hand, the chapter on the questions of Maitreya is only present in the Twenty-Five Thousand and Eighteen Thousand, and has been seen by some commentators as possibly a later addition, with evidence of a somewhat different doctrinal foundation.

Apart from these differences at the very end of the text, all the other chapter breaks here in the Hundred Thousand correspond precisely to those in the Twenty-Five Thousand, except that chapter 57 in the Twenty-Five Thousand corresponds to two chapters, 57 and 58, here in the Hundred Thousand. The chapter numbering thereafter, across the two sūtras, is consequently offset by one, so that the final chapter 72, here in the Hundred Thousand, corresponds to chapter 71 in the Twenty-Five Thousand.

Most of the seventy-two chapters have no specific chapter titles, but ten do have titles, and these are all identical to those of the corresponding chapters in the Twenty-Five Thousand. Two chapters that have titles in the Twenty-Five Thousand, however (26 and 27), have no titles in the Hundred Thousand.

Apart from these relatively minor structural discrepancies, the most striking differences between the three long sūtras are, of course, in length. This is almost entirely due not to any thematic differences‍—even fine-grained ones‍—but to the different degree to which each doctrinal statement is unpacked. In all three texts the Buddha, or one of his interlocutors, makes statements about groups of phenomena (dharmas) that may be constituents of the deluded perceptions of beings in saṃsāra, elements of the path, or features of the awakening to which the path leads. Depending on whether each statement is repeated only for a category of such dharmas, for subgroups of dharmas within that category, or in full for each individual dharma in every group, the three sūtras are characterized, respectively, by relatively small, somewhat larger, or extremely large numbers of repetitions. The substance of the statements themselves, and their order, are the same in all three texts.

The Commentaries

1. Those Based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra

The majority of Indian Prajñāpāramitā commentaries are concerned either with interpreting the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras in the light of Asaṅga-Maitreya’s Abhisamayālaṃkāra, or with explaining that somewhat cryptic and condensed treatise itself. Indeed, the six “mother” sūtras are so called because they all contain all eight main topics, or abhisamayas (“clear realizations”), forming the principal structure of the treatise, that important and influential key to the Prajñāpāramitā texts that has so dominated its study since it first appeared in the fourth century.

The version of the long sūtras closest to the original but hypothetical sūtra explained to Asaṅga by Maitreya is probably the Twenty-Five Thousand, but (as pointed out above) in the fourth century the long sūtras had probably not yet crystallized into the stable, length-denominated versions we have inherited today. Commentaries based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra at first focused on the Twenty-Five Thousand, even though the close correspondence of the Hundred Thousand to the Twenty-Five Thousand means that the insights of those commentaries could also, mostly, be applied to the Hundred Thousand.

Nevertheless, a commentary eventually was written that focused on applying the Abhisamayālaṃkāra to the Hundred Thousand as well as to the other two long sūtras. It is The Teaching on the Eight Clear Realizations as the Common Meaning of the Sūtras in One Hundred Thousand Lines, Twenty-Five Thousand Lines, and Eight Thousand Lines (Prajñā­pāramitā­mātṛkāśata­sāhasrikā­bṛhacchāsana­pañca­viṃśati­sāhasrikāmadhya­śāsanāṣṭādaśa­sāhasrikā­laghu­śāsanāṣṭa­samānārtha­śāsana, Toh 3789), attri­bu­ted to the eleventh-century scholar Smṛtijñānakīrti, who spent the last part of his life in Tibet. This commentary, however, is not held in high regard, has not been much used, and may possibly not even be Smṛtijñānakīrti’s work.

Later, another commentary was written that focused entirely on interpreting the Hundred Thousand in terms of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. It is An Explanation of The One Hundred Thousand Lines (stong phrag brgya pa’i rnam par bshad pa, Toh 3802), attributed to the Kashmiri scholar Dharmaśrī, who was invited to Western Tibet by the tenth-century king Lha Lama Yeshe Ö. However, this commentary, too, may be incorrectly attributed and is also not well considered.

While the meaning, structure, and many other details of the Hundred Thousand can of course be elucidated through study of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra and its general commentaries, the unreliable status of these two particular commentarial works has made of them an unsuitable way of using the Abhisamayālaṃkāra as the key to this particular, longest version of all of the sūtras.

2. The Two Bṛhaṭṭīkā Commentaries

A quite different approach to the study of the Hundred Thousand is taken by the two commentaries known under a variety of titles and monikers, including the “long explanations” (bṛhaṭṭīkā, rgya cher bshad pa) and “destroyers of harm” (gnod ’joms). Neither makes reference to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra.

The first of the two, probably written earlier, comments on and explains all three of the long sūtras, while the second concentrates only on the Hundred Thousand.

The first is The Long Explanation of the Noble Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Eighteen Thousand Lines (Toh 3808), attributed variously to Vasubandhu (fourth century) and Daṃṣṭrāsena (late eighth or early ninth century).

The second is The Long Commentary on The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines (Toh 3807), also often attributed to Daṃṣṭrāsena but without certainty. It was possibly written in Tibet, and may be the commentary on the Hundred Thousand referred to in some early inventories as written by (or under the supervision of) Tri Songdetsen.

Both these commentaries divide the sūtra into its main divisions by means of two structural principles: the “three approaches” or “gateways” (sgo gsum), and the “eleven discourses” or “formulations” (rnam grangs bcu gcig). More will be said about these below. But as well as providing these helpful structural principles, both commentaries explain the meaning and importance of each text passage by passage in considerable detail, and in ways that are relatively easy to understand compared with the more opaque explanations based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra.

3. Tibetan Commentaries

Although there was an early translation of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, from what little we can surmise it seems that in the early, imperial period the study of the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras was mainly influenced by the Bṛhaṭṭīkā approach. The full impact of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra came later through the Kadampa masters in the lineage of Atiśa and Rinchen Zangpo, and particularly after the founding of the monastery of Sangpu Ne’utok (gsang phu ne’u thog) monastery with Ngok Loden Sherab’s new translation of the text in the eleventh century. The two main traditions of Prajñāpāramitā studies were founded by Ngok’s two main disciples. One started with Dré Sherab Bar (’bre shes rab ’bar) and passed through Ar Changchub Yeshe (ar byang chub ye shes), Butön, Rinchen Namgyal (rin chen rnam rgyal), and Yaktön Sangyé Pal (g.yag bston sangs rgyas dpal) to the great commentator and scholar Rongtönpa. The other started with Drolungpa Lodrö Jungné (gro lung pa blo gros ’byung gnas) and passed through Chapa Chökyi Sengé (pha pa chos kyi seng ge).

The Abhisamayālaṃkāra has remained the central pillar of Prajñāpāramitā scholasticism in Tibet, and of the many commentaries and treatises written on the literature by scholars from both these lineages and their successors down to the present day, the large majority focused on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. Even when one of the sūtras provided the focus of such works, it was almost always either the Twenty-Five Thousand or the Eight Thousand.

There are nevertheless three notable commentaries centered on the Hundred Thousand: one by Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (dol po pa shes rab rgyal mtshan) in the fourteenth century; the one (mentioned above) by Rongtönpa in the fifteenth century; and one by Karma Chakmé (kar ma chags med) in the seventeenth century.

Translations and Studies in Western Languages

Few Western scholars have explored the Prajñāpāramitā literature. The Russian scholar Eugène Obermiller (1901–35) was one of the first to edit and translate Sanskrit and Tibetan Prajñāpāramitā texts, but had a tragically short life beset by a severe handicap.

The great pioneer of the Prajñāpāramitā literature in the West was the Anglo-German scholar Edward Conze (1904–79), and he has been the only translator (until now) courageous enough to tackle the sheer immensity of this sūtra, from the Sanskrit of which‍—partly, as he used as his sources the two other long sūtras, too‍—he produced The Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom in 1975. Rather than a full translation, it is a one-volume abridgement of the content of the three long sūtras, structured using the more numerous chapter breaks and titles of the Eighteen Thousand, and arranged (indeed sometimes rearranged) according to the divisions and subdivisions drawn from the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, which are found as headings and subheadings throughout the translation.

Conze had forthright views on most topics, and his perspective on the Prajñāpāramitā literature was one that overwhelmingly emphasized the doctrinal content over its literary qualities. In his preface to another of his translations, that of the Eight Thousand, he says:

“A literal, word by word translation of the Prajñāpāramitā is tiresome to read, and practically unintelligible to anyone who does not have the Sanskrit original before him. If ever there was a case where the letter kills the spirit, it is here. The Sūtra itself was meant to be memorized, the translation is meant to be read. Lengthy repetitions, stereotyped phrases, and the piling up of synonyms were of great assistance to memory, but they irritate and distract the modern reader, and obscure from him the meaning of the text.”

Whether one agrees with this view or not, the result is that his combined translation of the long sūtras forms a useful and practical guide to the content of these works, yet is far from representing in English the full range of qualities that are to be found in the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts themselves.

The outstanding work of the late Stefano Zacchetti, mainly from Chinese and Sanskrit sources, certainly deserves mention. A recent set of volumes by Karl Brunnhölzl has also been a welcome addition to the available material in English, providing a wealth of detailed information and translated commentaries, mostly centered on works related to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. Our own translator Gareth Sparham, a decade before embarking on his recent work for 84000 on the sūtras themselves, published an important four-volume translation of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra with the commentaries of Haribhadra and Vimuktisena.

The Content of This Update of the Ongoing English Translation

We are presenting here the first and second installments of the ongoing translation into English of The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines. The twenty-eight chapters translated in this installment together make up a little under two thirds of the text as a whole, bringing us close to the end of the eighth of the twelve volumes in the Degé Kangyur.

The group of chapters now published here also covers some distinct portions of the text in terms of its overall semantic structure, as seen from some of the traditional perspectives mentioned above.

First of all, chapter 1, in all the commentaries, is the setting of the scene for the teachings (nidāna, gleng gzhi), describing the place, the time, the Buddha as teacher, his audience, and indicating what sort of teaching will be given. Most commentaries explain the opening passages in considerable detail, especially the lists of qualities of the śrāvaka disciples and bodhisattvas. Much of the chapter is then taken up by a long description of how the Buddha emanates lights that benefit beings throughout the universe and announce the teaching in other buddhafields.

The explanations of the perfection of wisdom itself begin with chapter 2.

From the Abhisamayālaṃkāra Perspective

The Abhisamayālaṃkāra divides the subject matter of the long sūtras into eight topics, or “clear realizations” (abhisamaya, mngon par rtogs pa): (1) all-aspect omniscience, (2) knowledge of the aspects of the path, (3) knowledge of all the dharmas, (4) clear realization of all aspects, (5) culminating clear realization, (6) serial clear realization, (7) instantaneous clear realization, and (8) the fruitional buddha body of reality.

The first thirteen chapters correspond to the Buddha’s teaching on the first of these eight principal topics, i.e., the understanding of all-aspect omniscience. The reason all-aspect omniscience‍—which refers to the omniscient, awakened understanding of a fully enlightened buddha‍—is placed as the first of the eight clear realizations is that bodhisattvas must understand it before practicing it, and as the fruitional body taught in detail in the last part of the sūtra, this all-aspect omniscience is the very goal or object of bodhicitta, the mind set on full awakening. To practice the perfection of wisdom one must aim at the fullest awakening of buddhahood and not any of the lesser degrees of realization, such as those of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas.

Of the next batch of chapters published in translation here, chapters fourteen through the first part of twenty-seven cover the second of the eight topics, the understanding of the knowledge of the aspects of the path. This refers to the understanding, progressively developed by bodhisattvas, of the paths to be followed by all types of beings. This therefore includes the paths of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas as well as the various levels and aspects of the path that is followed by bodhisattvas on the Great Vehicle itself. There are descriptions of all these paths and their differences, as well as important sections on the benefits of worship, on relics of the Buddha, on merit, dedication, and praise, and on the purity of all dharmas.

The rest of chapter twenty-seven (from 27.657 onward) together with chapter twenty-eight‍—the last of the chapters translated in the most recent installment‍—cover the third of the eight “clear realization” topics, the understanding of the knowledge of all the dharmas. The point established and emphasized in this section‍—although it is also a key theme throughout the perfection of wisdom sūtras‍—is that śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas (in particular, but also bodhisattvas in training), in order to overcome ordinary, deluded perceptions, make use of powerful notions including the identification of all the dharmas of defilement and purification that they discern as such. However, these are themselves all constructs and notions that, from the perspective of the perfection of wisdom, can represent a range of attachments, from gross to very subtle.

From the Perspective of the Bṛhaṭṭīkā Commentaries

A. According to the three approaches (sgo gsum)‍—the brief, intermediate, and detailed teachings, destined respectively for those whose faculties allow them to understand terse, middling, or extensive explanations‍—the first twenty-eight chapters now published here include the brief and intermediate teachings fully, along with a portion of the detailed teaching, as follows.

• (1) The brief teaching comes at the start of chapter 2, and consists only of this statement by the Buddha:

“Here, Śāradvatīputra, bodhisattva great beings who want to fully awaken to all phenomena in all their aspects should persevere in the perfection of wisdom.” (2.1)

(2) The intermediate teaching follows immediately and continues through the discussions between Śāriputra, Subhūti, and the Buddha to the end of chapter 13. The Buddha responds to Śāriputra’s question about what the brief teaching means in terms of the four topics into which it can be subdivided: what a bodhisattva great being is, what it is to attain consummate buddhahood with respect to all phenomena in all their aspects, what “persevering” means, and what the perfection of wisdom is. Four practices are taught‍—armor-like, engagement, accumulation, and deliverance‍—and then, in some detail, eight aspects related to the “persevering.” The last of these eight is a discussion, starting with chapter 8, that arrives at an authoritative conclusion, including twenty-eight or twenty-nine questions, further dialogue between Subhūti and Śāriputra, and in chapters 11, 12, and 13 a long discussion of the Great Vehicle, its attributes, and its results. This entire intermediate teaching is sometimes referred to as “the chapter of Subhūti,” which is also the chapter title this text gives to the last chapter in this section, the thirteenth; that chapter title may be intended to cover the entire group of chapters 3 through 12, too. The intermediate teaching is centered on all-aspect omniscience, and by teaching nonconceptual perfection of wisdom it focuses on ultimate truth.

Summary

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.

The provisional version published here currently contains the first twenty-eight of the seventy-two chapters of the sūtra, and represents a little under eight of the twelve volumes. Subsequent batches of chapters will be added as their translation and editing is completed.

Acknowledgements

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.

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.

Introduction

Overview

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.

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 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.

Traditional histories include all six “mother” versions of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, as well as in the description of the Degé Kangyur’s Perfection of Wisdom section.

History and Sources

History of the Long Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras

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. 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.

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. Although it was thought at first by Edward Conze 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. 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.

It is important to bear in mind that the naming of the different versions by the number of lines 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, 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.

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

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.

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

Chinese

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sanskrit

Early Gāndhārī and Sanskrit manuscripts of generic Prajñāpāramitā sūtras are mentioned above (1.9–10). Specifically of this Hundred Thousand Line version of the long sūtras, however, no Sanskrit manuscript has survived that can be dated as early as the Chinese and Tibetan translations. But there are Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts of more recent date that, from their content, must be closely related to the Sanskrit original from which the Tibetan translation was made. Some of them may even be copied descendants of a Sanskrit manuscript in the temple of Phamthing that Tibetan histories say was consulted by Ngok Loden Sherab in the eleventh century to correct the earlier Tibetan translation (see below).

Nepalese manuscripts of varying dates are presently to be found not only in Nepal but also in Kolkata, Cambridge, New Delhi, Paris, and Tokyo. A critical edition of the first twelve chapters was published in three installments by Ghoṣa between 1902 and 1914, and more recently has been extended by Kimura in four further volumes, published between 2009 and 2014.

The Sanskrit manuscripts of the Hundred Thousand and Twenty-Five Thousand resemble each other closely in terms of language, terminology, content, and order, as is the case with their Tibetan translations, and like them differ mainly in the degree of expansion of the different groups of dharmas. The Sanskrit of the Hundred Thousand matches the Tibetan translation in content closely.

Tibetan

For anyone interested in how the early Tibetan translations of canonical works in general were carried out, it is a disappointing fact that much of the detailed information about the process was either not recorded or has been lost. However, in the case of The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines‍—thanks to the unique status of this monumental scripture‍—traditional historical accounts include far more detail of the successive versions that led to the Tibetan translation preserved in the Kangyurs we have today than is the case for any other work.

A succession of Tibetan translations were made from Sanskrit in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. There are specific terms for these imperial-period manuscript versions of the Hundred Thousand: Labum (bla ’bum) and Lagyur (bla ’gyur), meaning, respectively, a Hundred Thousand (Tibetan ’bum), or a translation (’gyur), that is commissioned or owned by one who is “foremost” or “paramount” (bla), i.e. the emperor.

As a terse summary in his list of canonical translations, Butön’s fourteenth-century History of the Dharma states that “it is well known that there were six versions attributed to the translators Nyang Khampa Gocha, Vairotsana, Che Khyidruk, Zhang Yeshe Dé, and others.” Other accounts mention only four versions, while being in broad agreement on the rough outline of how the Tibetan translations evolved over time.

Much fuller details than Butön sets out are provided by other histories, including a historical survey that opens the commentary on this text by the great prajñāpāramitā commentator Rongtönpa (rong ston shes bya kun rig, 1367–1449); the lineage records of Minling Terchen Gyurmé Dorjé (smin gling gter chen ’gyur med rdo rje, 1646–1714); a survey of the prajñāpāramitā literature in a commentary to the Heart Sūtra by Alaksha Tendar (a lag sha bstan dar, 1758–1839); and an account in the encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge by Kongtrul Lodrö Thayé (kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas, 1813–99). The catalog of the Degé Kangyur, and particularly the historical section of the detailed Narthang Kangyur catalog, written by the fifth Olkha Lelung Jedrung, Lobsang Trinlé (’ol kha / dga’ sle lung blo bzang ’phrin las, 1697–1740), are also very informative. Rongtönpa’s work is the earliest of these histories and most of the others may have drawn from it, or perhaps from other even earlier accounts. The information to be gleaned from these different works is not always consistent, and sometimes conflicting. Here is a tentative synopsis:

• The earliest translation was one made by Khampa Gocha, who had been sent with offerings of gold to India by King Tri Songdetsen to bring back the sūtra; his four-part translation was called The Translation from Memory (thugs ’gyur) because Khampa Gocha had memorized the text while in India‍—some accounts say he had attained the dhāraṇī of perfect recall‍—and only wrote the Tibetan translation when he was back in Tibet. The king, as an offering of merit to the queen who had died, had a copy of that translation written in ink made from his own blood, using goat’s milk as a binder; this version was therefore called The Red Manuscript (reg zig dmar po) or The Red Goat Manuscript (ra gzigs dmar po) and also had four parts. In later times it was taken to Lhasa and is said to have been housed in the brick caitya near the Trulnang temple. It is not clear whether the above names and descriptions refer to a single manuscript or to two different ones of the same translation, but in any case this version, abridged and condensed as it is into four volumes, is also called The Short Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur chung ngu).

• Since the king did not have full confidence in The Translation from Memory, he commissioned Nyang Indrawaro and Wé Mañjuśrī to seek out the text in India and translate it. This they did, and their translation was written using ink made from indigo and the king’s singed hair, with goat’s milk binder. This manuscript was therefore called The Blue Manuscript (reg zig sngon po) or The Blue Goat Manuscript (ra gzigs sngon po); it was also called The Authorized Hundred Thousand (bca’ ’bum), and because the translators’ needs were met through a levy collected from the people, it was known as The Levy Hundred Thousand (dpya ’bum) as well. It too is said to have consisted of four parts, and because they were not held together with cloth bands but had iron fasteners it was also called The Iron Fasteners (lcags thur can). It is said to have been kept at Samyé.

• Later, Pagor Vairotsana, at the instigation of Mutik Tsenpo (also known as Senalek), compared the Sanskrit text with the translation in The Iron Fasteners, revised it, and filled out the abridgements of the earlier version by adding the missing repetitions and lengthening some lines. He wrote out a new six-volume manuscript, which was called The Medium-Length Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur ’bring po). According to Rongtönpa, it was also known as The Snowy One Promised by the King (rgyal po’i thugs dam par kha ba can), from the name of (or on) the binding boards, and both Rongtönpa and the Narthang catalog add, too, that it was called The Bats (pha wang can) because there was a bats’ nest near the place in Samyé where it was kept. Kongtrul says that it was still in Samyé Chimphu in his time (i.e., the mid-nineteenth century). Other authors, including Situ Panchen in the Degé catalog and Kongtrul, say that this is the version called The Deerskin Case Hundred Thousand (’bum sha sgro can), and the Narthang catalog explains in some detail how all the fascicles came to be stored as scrolls in a deerskin. However, the Narthang catalog says that the same name was also applied, for similar reasons, to the next revision; this may explain the apparent inconsistencies between authors in regard to this particular moniker.

• Later still, in the reign of Mutik Tsenpo’s son Tri Ralpachan, in the period when a number of Indian scholars were working with Tibetan translators in Tibet on the translation and revision of many texts and the great language revision edicts were drawn up, Surendrabodhi, Kawa Paltsek, Chokro Lui Gyaltsen, and others made an extensive revision of the translation in six parts (according to Rongtönpa) or sixteen (according to the Narthang catalog, Tendar, and Kongtrul), which was called The Long Imperial Translation (bla ’gyur chen mo). Rongtönpa calls this version The Deerskin Case Hundred Thousand (’bum sha sgro can) rather than the preceding one but, as mentioned above, the Narthang catalog explains how both versions were kept in deerskin wrappers and the name can therefore refer to either one or the other.

• At a point in this sequence that remains to be determined and is not mentioned in any of these accounts, but lies probably in the late eighth or early ninth century period, as many as eight copies of the whole text were made by scribes in Dunhuang. They were probably commissioned by or on the behalf of one of the kings (probably Tri Ralpachen). Pages from these copies, as well as rejected pages subsequently used for writing practice, make up a large proportion (along with manuscripts of The Aparimitāyurjnāna Sūtra) of the manuscripts found in Dunhuang.

• The Narthang catalog then summarizes the six early manuscripts, and gives them yet more monikers:

“At that time, since to produce a great Mother (i.e., a Hundred Thousand) was possible only for the king and not for his subjects, only these six were made:

• (1) Tri Detsuk’s Monochrome Imperial Hundred Thousand (khri sde gtsug gi bla ’bum skya bo);

• (2) Senalek Jingyön’s Innermost Hundred Thousand (mjing yon gyi sbug ’bum);

• (3) Lhasé Tsangma’s Demarcated Hundred Thousand (gtsang ma’i bye ’bum);

• (4) Ralpachen’s Six-Volume Hundred Thousand (ral pa can gyi drug ’bum);

• (5) Prince Namdé’s Red-Faced Version (gnam lde lha’i zhal dmar can); and

• (6) Darma’s Yellow-Paper Version (dar ma’i shog ser can).”

• At this point in the story there seems to have been a proliferation of further Hundred Thousands produced as copies of one or another of these six, perhaps resulting from a royal prerogative on sponsoring them coming to an end. Rongtönpa provides a detailed list of seventeen named Hundred Thousands and the places they were kept, including the earliest ones he had already described, culminating in one made by Chang Dorje Tsultrim (lcang or cang rdo rje tshul khrims) of Ru Tsam (ru ’tshams), who produced the seventeenth from a detailed comparison of the other sixteen. Rongtönpa goes on to classify the seventeen into groups according to the short, medium-length, or long Labum from which they were copied. The Narthang catalog has less detail but correspondingly mentions nineteen Hundred Thousands, including those of the subsequent period that could be produced not just by the kings but by subjects. It also points to the importance of the same significant figure, Chang Dorje Tsultrim, who soon afterward compared all nineteen and made a “highly corrected version.” Proliferating from that version, the catalog says, about sixty copies were made, and indeed Rongtönpa proceeds to list a large number of these and their locations to a total of sixty-five.

• In the later translation period, in the late eleventh century, Ngok Lotsāwa, according to the Degé catalog and others, having consulted the Indian manuscripts to be found in Tibet and the Iron Fasteners translation, revised and corrected the above-mentioned Long Imperial Translation by comparing it against a Sanskrit manuscript in the Phamthing temple in Pharphing, Nepal. These catalog accounts also mention that the corrections included the addition of the names of three meditative absorptions that had been missing in earlier versions. It is Ngok’s revised translation that, according to most Kangyur catalogs, is preserved in the Kangyur. However, although Rongtönpa places Ngok’s version in fifth and last place among the most significant, major translations, it is difficult to be entirely certain where to place it in time relative to the other revisions and simple copies that he also details, mentioned above.

• The Narthang catalog, indeed, seems to place less importance on Ngok’s revisions and mentions his version only in passing. Rather, it attributes the final establishment of a fully correct version, a “later descendant of the Imperial Hundred Thousands” (bla ’bum gyi bu phyi), to a Yarlung Jowo Chöjé (yar klung jo bo chos rje). The catalog also gives more extensive detail than any other of the differences between versions and the corrections made to establish the definitive version, including the varying numbers of meditative absorptions but also some of the sections and passages that had been missed in earlier manuscripts.

The translation preserved in most Kangyurs is thus the result of this long process of evolution. It is commonly divided into twelve volumes, but the Narthang catalog mentions other numbers of volumes into which different manuscripts were divided, and Rongtönpa, saying that there was even one version in thirty volumes, sets out schemes with the details of which bampo (fascicles) were included in which volume for several different volume arrangements: twelve (as in the Degé and many other Kangyurs), fourteen (as in the Berlin and Qianlong Kangyurs), and sixteen (as in the Choné, Phukdrak, Lithang, London, Stok Palace, Ulaanbaatar, and some of the peripheral Kangyurs).

The Degé catalog, describing the translation as being the eleventh-century one that resulted from Ngok Lotsāwa’s revision of previous Tibetan translations against the Sanskrit manuscript of Phamthing, also specifies that the text has seventy-two chapters. It mentions the traditional legend according to which the four final chapters that conclude the Twenty-Five Thousand Line sūtra‍—the questions of Maitreya, the story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata, and the entrusting of the text‍—are missing from the Hundred Thousand because when Nāgārjuna brought the sūtra from the realm of the nāgas, the nāga king had withheld those four chapters to ensure that Nāgārjuna would return. There is, the catalog says, a tradition of appending those four chapters, copied from the other sūtras. Although the Degé Kangyur does not follow that tradition, the Narthang, Lhasa, Namgyal, Hemis, and Shey Kangyurs do, and thus have seventy-five or seventy-six chapters.

The text in the Degé Kangyur is comprised of 301 bam po (fascicles), with between twenty-two and twenty-seven in each volume. The bam po numbers begin again with each volume, unlike most other Kangyurs where they are numbered consecutively throughout the text. Kangyurs in which the extra final chapters have been added have three more bam po, bringing their total to 304.

The Tibetan text in the Degé Kangyur, interestingly, preserves the old orthography of a subscript ya, “ma yata” (ma ya btags), i.e. the subscript ya under the letter ma in certain words, and of the “dadrak” (da drag), i.e. da as a second suffix in certain words ending in na, ra, or la. Spellings such as myi and myed for mi and med, rkyend for rkyen, tshuld for tshul, and smyind for smin are widespread, although in the first volume particularly some of these archaic spellings have been inconsistently revised. In most other Kangyurs these spellings are absent, but the Urga, Namgyal Collection, and Gondlha Kangyurs have also preserved them. Indeed, in the Namgyal Collection version of the sūtra, these archaic features are considerably less revised and spellings such as pha rold tu phyind pa (“the perfection of wisdom”) and rab ’byord (“Subhūti”) are preserved.

Colophons

Given the complex process by which many translators contributed to the extant translation, it is perhaps not surprising that in the Degé and in the majority of other Kangyurs, there is no translators’ colophon. In some Kangyurs, however, the text does have a colophon, and these fall into two groups:

• • The Narthang and Lhasa Kangyurs both have a colophon naming “the Indian upādhyāyas Jinamitra and Surendrabodhi, the chief editor and lotsāwa Bandé Yeshé Dé, and others” as responsible for the translation, editing, and establishment of the text. Note that these two Kangyurs are among the few that add the final four chapters from the Twenty-Five Thousand instead of ending it with the seventy-second chapter, as mentioned above; yet the Namgyal and Shey Kangyurs, which also have the added chapters, have no colophon.

• • The Stok Palace Kangyur and the Bhutanese Kangyurs of mostly Themphangma affiliation‍—Chizhi, Dongkarla, Neyphug, Phajoding Ogmin, and Tashiyangtse‍—have a quite different colophon, in which no translators are mentioned but reference is made to some of the earlier translations. A tentative rendering of this colophon would be:

“This is the golden Hundred Thousand called Not Mixed with Wrongs in twelve sections, and is based on the corrected, limit-defining Black Hundred Thousand of Gyan-gong, which itself had resulted from being proofed and edited sixteen times after being compared against the early limit-defining, abridged manuscripts in Samyé and Lhasa, and so forth, and which, since the great lotsāwa, the omniscient Butön Rinchen Drup, had confirmed it as the prototype, was used as master copy for the Hundred Thousand produced by the great scholar Rinchen Gyaltsen.”

Structure and Content Compared to Those of the Other Long Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras

This sūtra is structured in almost exactly the same way as The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines (Toh 9), with the same chapter sequence and divisions, and in Tibetan the same terminology and phraseology, to the extent that it would be difficult not to conclude that the Tibetan translations of both were produced by the same translators. Indeed, the Sanskrit source texts of the two sūtras must have been very similar, too‍—as far as can be judged, for the Sanskrit of the Twenty-Five Thousand matches not the Kangyur “many-chapter” version, Toh 9, but the Tengyur “eight-chapter” version, Toh 3790.

The Hundred Thousand and Twenty-Five Thousand are far more similar to each other in language and chapter structure than they are to the third of the long Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, the Eighteen Thousand (Toh 10), which has considerably more chapter divisions and different phraseology. Nevertheless, all three sūtras follow an almost identical sequence of themes, interlocutors, and doctrinal statements.

The Hundred Thousand as preserved in most Kangyurs, however, has only seventy-two chapters as compared to the seventy-six of the Twenty-Five Thousand. This is because the final four chapters of the latter, comprising the questions of Maitreya, the story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata, and the entrusting of the sūtra, are not present in this text. As noted above, they are traditionally seen as “missing” because the nāgas withheld them from Nāgārjuna as he was leaving to take the sūtra back with him to the human realm. The story of Sadāprarudita and Dharmodgata is indeed present not only in the Twenty-Five Thousand but also in the Eighteen Thousand and Eight Thousand Line sūtras, so it is not unreasonable to see it as “missing.” On the other hand, the chapter on the questions of Maitreya is only present in the Twenty-Five Thousand and Eighteen Thousand, and has been seen by some commentators as possibly a later addition, with evidence of a somewhat different doctrinal foundation.

Apart from these differences at the very end of the text, all the other chapter breaks here in the Hundred Thousand correspond precisely to those in the Twenty-Five Thousand, except that chapter 57 in the Twenty-Five Thousand corresponds to two chapters, 57 and 58, here in the Hundred Thousand. The chapter numbering thereafter, across the two sūtras, is consequently offset by one, so that the final chapter 72, here in the Hundred Thousand, corresponds to chapter 71 in the Twenty-Five Thousand.

Most of the seventy-two chapters have no specific chapter titles, but ten do have titles, and these are all identical to those of the corresponding chapters in the Twenty-Five Thousand. Two chapters that have titles in the Twenty-Five Thousand, however (26 and 27), have no titles in the Hundred Thousand.

Apart from these relatively minor structural discrepancies, the most striking differences between the three long sūtras are, of course, in length. This is almost entirely due not to any thematic differences‍—even fine-grained ones‍—but to the different degree to which each doctrinal statement is unpacked. In all three texts the Buddha, or one of his interlocutors, makes statements about groups of phenomena (dharmas) that may be constituents of the deluded perceptions of beings in saṃsāra, elements of the path, or features of the awakening to which the path leads. Depending on whether each statement is repeated only for a category of such dharmas, for subgroups of dharmas within that category, or in full for each individual dharma in every group, the three sūtras are characterized, respectively, by relatively small, somewhat larger, or extremely large numbers of repetitions. The substance of the statements themselves, and their order, are the same in all three texts.

The Commentaries

1. Those Based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra

The majority of Indian Prajñāpāramitā commentaries are concerned either with interpreting the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras in the light of Asaṅga-Maitreya’s Abhisamayālaṃkāra, or with explaining that somewhat cryptic and condensed treatise itself. Indeed, the six “mother” sūtras are so called because they all contain all eight main topics, or abhisamayas (“clear realizations”), forming the principal structure of the treatise, that important and influential key to the Prajñāpāramitā texts that has so dominated its study since it first appeared in the fourth century.

The version of the long sūtras closest to the original but hypothetical sūtra explained to Asaṅga by Maitreya is probably the Twenty-Five Thousand, but (as pointed out above) in the fourth century the long sūtras had probably not yet crystallized into the stable, length-denominated versions we have inherited today. Commentaries based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra at first focused on the Twenty-Five Thousand, even though the close correspondence of the Hundred Thousand to the Twenty-Five Thousand means that the insights of those commentaries could also, mostly, be applied to the Hundred Thousand.

Nevertheless, a commentary eventually was written that focused on applying the Abhisamayālaṃkāra to the Hundred Thousand as well as to the other two long sūtras. It is The Teaching on the Eight Clear Realizations as the Common Meaning of the Sūtras in One Hundred Thousand Lines, Twenty-Five Thousand Lines, and Eight Thousand Lines (Prajñā­pāramitā­mātṛkāśata­sāhasrikā­bṛhacchāsana­pañca­viṃśati­sāhasrikāmadhya­śāsanāṣṭādaśa­sāhasrikā­laghu­śāsanāṣṭa­samānārtha­śāsana, Toh 3789), attri­bu­ted to the eleventh-century scholar Smṛtijñānakīrti, who spent the last part of his life in Tibet. This commentary, however, is not held in high regard, has not been much used, and may possibly not even be Smṛtijñānakīrti’s work.

Later, another commentary was written that focused entirely on interpreting the Hundred Thousand in terms of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. It is An Explanation of The One Hundred Thousand Lines (stong phrag brgya pa’i rnam par bshad pa, Toh 3802), attributed to the Kashmiri scholar Dharmaśrī, who was invited to Western Tibet by the tenth-century king Lha Lama Yeshe Ö. However, this commentary, too, may be incorrectly attributed and is also not well considered.

While the meaning, structure, and many other details of the Hundred Thousand can of course be elucidated through study of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra and its general commentaries, the unreliable status of these two particular commentarial works has made of them an unsuitable way of using the Abhisamayālaṃkāra as the key to this particular, longest version of all of the sūtras.

2. The Two Bṛhaṭṭīkā Commentaries

A quite different approach to the study of the Hundred Thousand is taken by the two commentaries known under a variety of titles and monikers, including the “long explanations” (bṛhaṭṭīkā, rgya cher bshad pa) and “destroyers of harm” (gnod ’joms). Neither makes reference to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra.

The first of the two, probably written earlier, comments on and explains all three of the long sūtras, while the second concentrates only on the Hundred Thousand.

The first is The Long Explanation of the Noble Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Eighteen Thousand Lines (Toh 3808), attributed variously to Vasubandhu (fourth century) and Daṃṣṭrāsena (late eighth or early ninth century).

The second is The Long Commentary on The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines (Toh 3807), also often attributed to Daṃṣṭrāsena but without certainty. It was possibly written in Tibet, and may be the commentary on the Hundred Thousand referred to in some early inventories as written by (or under the supervision of) Tri Songdetsen.

Both these commentaries divide the sūtra into its main divisions by means of two structural principles: the “three approaches” or “gateways” (sgo gsum), and the “eleven discourses” or “formulations” (rnam grangs bcu gcig). More will be said about these below. But as well as providing these helpful structural principles, both commentaries explain the meaning and importance of each text passage by passage in considerable detail, and in ways that are relatively easy to understand compared with the more opaque explanations based on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra.

3. Tibetan Commentaries

Although there was an early translation of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, from what little we can surmise it seems that in the early, imperial period the study of the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras was mainly influenced by the Bṛhaṭṭīkā approach. The full impact of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra came later through the Kadampa masters in the lineage of Atiśa and Rinchen Zangpo, and particularly after the founding of the monastery of Sangpu Ne’utok (gsang phu ne’u thog) monastery with Ngok Loden Sherab’s new translation of the text in the eleventh century. The two main traditions of Prajñāpāramitā studies were founded by Ngok’s two main disciples. One started with Dré Sherab Bar (’bre shes rab ’bar) and passed through Ar Changchub Yeshe (ar byang chub ye shes), Butön, Rinchen Namgyal (rin chen rnam rgyal), and Yaktön Sangyé Pal (g.yag bston sangs rgyas dpal) to the great commentator and scholar Rongtönpa. The other started with Drolungpa Lodrö Jungné (gro lung pa blo gros ’byung gnas) and passed through Chapa Chökyi Sengé (pha pa chos kyi seng ge).

The Abhisamayālaṃkāra has remained the central pillar of Prajñāpāramitā scholasticism in Tibet, and of the many commentaries and treatises written on the literature by scholars from both these lineages and their successors down to the present day, the large majority focused on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. Even when one of the sūtras provided the focus of such works, it was almost always either the Twenty-Five Thousand or the Eight Thousand.

There are nevertheless three notable commentaries centered on the Hundred Thousand: one by Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (dol po pa shes rab rgyal mtshan) in the fourteenth century; the one (mentioned above) by Rongtönpa in the fifteenth century; and one by Karma Chakmé (kar ma chags med) in the seventeenth century.

Translations and Studies in Western Languages

Few Western scholars have explored the Prajñāpāramitā literature. The Russian scholar Eugène Obermiller (1901–35) was one of the first to edit and translate Sanskrit and Tibetan Prajñāpāramitā texts, but had a tragically short life beset by a severe handicap.

The great pioneer of the Prajñāpāramitā literature in the West was the Anglo-German scholar Edward Conze (1904–79), and he has been the only translator (until now) courageous enough to tackle the sheer immensity of this sūtra, from the Sanskrit of which‍—partly, as he used as his sources the two other long sūtras, too‍—he produced The Large Sūtra on Perfect Wisdom in 1975. Rather than a full translation, it is a one-volume abridgement of the content of the three long sūtras, structured using the more numerous chapter breaks and titles of the Eighteen Thousand, and arranged (indeed sometimes rearranged) according to the divisions and subdivisions drawn from the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, which are found as headings and subheadings throughout the translation.

Conze had forthright views on most topics, and his perspective on the Prajñāpāramitā literature was one that overwhelmingly emphasized the doctrinal content over its literary qualities. In his preface to another of his translations, that of the Eight Thousand, he says:

“A literal, word by word translation of the Prajñāpāramitā is tiresome to read, and practically unintelligible to anyone who does not have the Sanskrit original before him. If ever there was a case where the letter kills the spirit, it is here. The Sūtra itself was meant to be memorized, the translation is meant to be read. Lengthy repetitions, stereotyped phrases, and the piling up of synonyms were of great assistance to memory, but they irritate and distract the modern reader, and obscure from him the meaning of the text.”

Whether one agrees with this view or not, the result is that his combined translation of the long sūtras forms a useful and practical guide to the content of these works, yet is far from representing in English the full range of qualities that are to be found in the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts themselves.

The outstanding work of the late Stefano Zacchetti, mainly from Chinese and Sanskrit sources, certainly deserves mention. A recent set of volumes by Karl Brunnhölzl has also been a welcome addition to the available material in English, providing a wealth of detailed information and translated commentaries, mostly centered on works related to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. Our own translator Gareth Sparham, a decade before embarking on his recent work for 84000 on the sūtras themselves, published an important four-volume translation of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra with the commentaries of Haribhadra and Vimuktisena.

The Content of This Update of the Ongoing English Translation