DESCRIPTION

The Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras are a genre of Buddhist literature that began to appear predominately in the northern regions of the Indus Valley between 100 BCE and 100 CE. They are associated with the earliest phases of Mahāyāna Buddhism. As the name suggests, the primary topic of these texts is Prajñā ('Wisdom'), as a means to liberation and the ‘other shore’ (pāramitā).

PART ONE: NĀGĀRJUNA

A traditional Buddhist account for the origin of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras has it that the Indian philosopher-monk Nāgārjuna received them during an extraordinary journey to an underwater world of nāgas where Muchilinda, King of the Nāgas, revealed to him the enormous million-line Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra. Upon returning the world, Nāgārjuna dispensed the sutra in a variety of lengths, ranging from 100,000 lines to the smallest version of the text, the Heart Sutra.

PART TWO: THE PRAJÑĀPĀRAMITĀ SŪTRAS

Based on manuscript evidence and literary analysis, the oldest ‘strata’ of the prajñāpāramitā sūtras is either the Vajracchedikā-prājñāpāramitā Sūtra (The ‘Diamond Sutra’) or the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (the text in 8,000 lines). Compared to most prajñāpāramitā sūtras, including the 8,000 version, the Vajracchedikā Sūtra is rather simplistic, consisting of a short dialogue between the Buddha and Subhūti that presents the central ideas of Mahayana Buddhism in a very raw, original form. The Aṣṭasāhasrikā, however, is a long complicated discourse with multiple chapters and new, unheard of stories of about bodhisattvas and the graduated process of anuttarā-saṃyak-saṃbodhi - ’unsurpassable, perfect awakening’ as a buddha. A theme tying most prajñāpāramitā sūtras together is a discourse on the nature of emptiness between the Buddha, Subhūti, and Śāriputra, as well as questions, typically from Śakra devānāmindra, about the merit generated from the profound practice of prajñāpāramitā.

The next ‘strata’ of prajñāpāramitā sūtras are various elaborations upon the themes presented in the 8,000 Aṣṭasāhasrikā. These sutras range in length from shorter texts in hundreds of lines to the gargantuan 100,000 line version. In the year 660 AD the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang and his assistants completed a translation of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra in sixteen ‘assemblies’. This is a massive encyclopedic collection of prajñāpāramitā sutras (six hundred fascicles filling three entire Taishō volumes!). It is the most complete collection of Prajñāpāramitā sutras available in any language.

A final ‘strata’ of prajñāpāramitā sūtras would be the variety of tantric or esoteric versions of the sutra that include mantras and dhāraṇīs. In the late 4th Century, Kumārajīva translated an incredibly brief text called the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Great Illumination Mantra 摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經. This text was later re-worked in the 7th Century by Xuanzang into what is now perhaps the most well-known Buddhist sutra in the world, the Heart Sutra. While this rendition is remarkable for capturing the meaning of the prajñāpāramitā sūtra in a mere 25 lines of verse, there is a version of the sutra that is even smaller, given in a single syllable - A.  

PART THREE: MISE EN ABYME

In Western art history, mise en abyme is a term used to describe the technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. Another term is the Droste effect, in which a picture appears within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. And finally, there is the expression, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ – a term for violating the performance convention of an invisible wall separating the viewers of a play from the actors. This can be done by either directly referring to the audience, to the play as a play, or the characters' own fictionality.

All of these expressions may be applied to the way in which prajñāpāramitā sūtras employ a curious literary technique of making reference to themselves as a text, and how they even make reference to the reader of the text. Rather than propaganda, when viewed the right way, these breaches read something like - ‘You are reading this.’ The effect is an implication of the reader magically within the text itself, and/or an implication of the text magically within the lived experience of the reader.

SUGGESTED READING

📖 Paul Harrison, “Mediums and Messages: Reflections on the Production of Mahāyāna Sūtras” in The Eastern Buddhist XXXV, 1&2, p115-151

Excerpts from “Mediums and Messages”

“The Mahayana sutras translated into Chinese from the late 2nd century onwards by Lokaksema and others show us that Buddhism had already evolved by that date a wealth of new religious ideas and ritual practices, including a diverse repertoire of meditation techniques. These took their place alongside traditional Mainstream Buddhist (or Sravakayana) meditation practices, in which the followers of the new way continued to engage.” - pg. 118

“It is commonplace to say that the early Mahayanists reacted against and rejected the supposed excesses of the Abhidharmikas, but my own reading suggests that they were building on and pushing further earlier meditation traditions, like the smrtyupasthdnas, which incorporated an Abhidharmic approach. They took up the same practice, but instead of simply following the existing script, they also modified and subverted it in a creative fashion…” - p. 120

“…The passage passes from being static to being kinetic, since now we are ourselves creating and manipulating the images, setting them in motion. This gives us a new way of reading the text, as a template for visualisation, the sheer detail of which now begins to make sense. What we are left with on the printed page resembles the wiring diagram for a television set, of interest only to electricians, baffling and tediously complex to anyone else. But when we “do” the text rather than read it, when we perform its operations ourselves, it suddenly becomes a little more interesting.”

- p. 122

“We have here an important statement of the essentials of a system of revelation, a typology which is precisely formulated. It consists ofthree sentences. The first refers to the sort of visionary experience which the pratyutpanna-samadhi is designed to induce, of access to Buddhas preaching in other worlds. The second invokes the concept of dharmanidhdna, “treasures ofthe dharma” or “dharma-deposits,” which recalls the Tibetan gter ma (or chos gter), and since these are objects that can be hidden in the interiors ofmountains, caves and trees, they mustsurely be the teachings in the form of books (pustakagata)… The last sentence describes deities with direct experience of former Buddhas somehow inducing in practitioners the pratibhana or inspiration to give voice to the teachings (by some form of possession, as it were).” - p. 125

“This suggests that from the earliest times some Buddhist practitioners experienced visions in which divinities appeared to them and conferred revelations on them (often in the hours just before dawn), and that these revelations were accepted positively by the tradition. What worked for Mainstream Buddhists could clearly work for Mahayanists as well, and thus we find it attested in many Mahayana sources.” - p, 126

“Recent work on the history of Buddhism has produced a new hypothesis that the Mahayana, far from being a revolt by the urban laity against monastic privilege and self-absorption in an attempt to bring salvation to the masses, was the work of hard-core ascetics, members ofthe forest-dwelling (aranyavasiri) wing of the Buddhist Order. The ‘forest hypothesis…’” - p. 129

“It is certainly true also that Buddhist texts often emphasise the aranya as a state ofmind rather than a situation of physical isolation. Perhaps like the desert in early Christianity, the aranya (forest) became symbolic for Buddhists of the renunciant orientation, but did not necessarily entail actual solitude, except when individual practitioners retired to their cell, cave or tree. For the rest they lived in a community, a community whose life, like the desert communities of 4th-century Egypt, was likely to have been saturated with scripture, scripture primarily in the form of sound.” - p. 133

“Ong’s thesis is that the advent of the technology of writing not only gives human beings a means of writing down their thoughts, it also enables them to think in entirely different ways, transforming human consciousness (p. 78). Orally transmitted “literature” … tends to be formulaic, aggregative rather than analytic, redundant, conservative, concrete rather than abstract, and so on … However, when people commit things to writing, according to Ong, the situation changes: discourse becomes autonomous, generated by the individual working in isolation, distanced from the real world, more abstract, more analytically precise, more introspective, more complexly organised.”

[Ong’s thesis] has sufficient force to make us rethink the development of Buddhism from the primarily oral tradition that we see in the Pali Nikayas and Sanskrit Agamas of Mainstream Buddhism to the new and predominantly literate tradition that Mahayana Buddhism is, a tradition involving a kind of transformation of consciousness.

This is not to say that many elements of the primary oral tradition are not preserved in the sutras of the Mahayana, since they clearly are: these works are packed full of the cliches and formulas of Mainstream scriptures, the parallel structures, repetitions, numerical lists and so on, but these components are used to express new ideas, like building materials pillaged from an old structure to erect a new one. Although we can hardly prove that these texts too were not produced orally, the frequent references in them to the act of copying the sutras, or to enshrining and venerating them in book-form strongly suggest that they began life in written form.” - p. 134

“There is thus evidence of some interest among followers of the Mahayana in dream experiences and of what can be considered dream practices foreshadowing the dream yoga of the later Tantric tradition.” - p. 140