9
The Earliest Mahayana Scripture
ACCORDING TO recent Indian and Western scholarship, Shakyamuni Buddha lived around 566 to 486 B.C.E.1 His first dharma discourse took place in Deer Park in Sarnath, near present-day Varanasi, and is referred to as the first turning of the dharma wheel. The Buddha’s teachings over his lifetime include that of anatman, or “no self ”— the realization that there is no independent and everlasting self such as the soul; this understanding ultimately liberates individuals from self-clinging.
The emergence of the enormous body of Prajna Paramita (Realization of Wisdom Beyond Wisdom) scriptures four hundred or more years after the Buddha’s time functioned as a catalyst for the rise of Mahayana Buddhism. These scriptures served as a huge step whereby the early notion of anatman evolved into shunyata — an interrelated nonexistence of substantial individual entities, as well as of all phenomena. The rise of Mahayana is often characterized as the second turning of the dharma wheel.
Sutras created in ancient India take the form of teachings given by Shakyamuni Buddha, so none of them have the compilers’ names, nor are they dated, except in rare cases such as the One Hundred Parable Sutra.2 Historically, most Buddhists believed that all sutras were the actual words of the Buddha, spoken during his forty-five years of teaching. Only when a body of European critical scholarship emerged in the nineteenth century was evidence revealed that sutras had developed over time in response to the understanding and needs of people in later periods.
It was customary for translators of Sanskrit texts into Chinese to record their names along with the titles of the translated works, often with the year of completion noted as well. Ten comprehensive catalogs of translated texts were compiled between the late fourth century and the ninth century, of which the most recent nine are extant. The catalogs include not only these texts, but also known records of translations that are no longer available, as well as scriptures whose authenticity is doubtful or that have been determined as forged. This is why we can retrace the rise, survival, and fall of translated texts in the Chinese language.
The translation in 179 C.E. of the 8,000-line Prajna Paramita into Chinese by Lokakshema — from Bactria in western Central Asia — marked the first translation of this large body of Sanskrit Prajna Paramita literature.
Kumarajiva’s translations of the 8,000-line and 25,000-line Prajna Paramita in the early fifth century were widely studied and recited. He also translated a 100-fascicle summary of the Treatise on Great Wisdom (Dazhidu Lun), an extensive Prajna Paramita commentary, one of three major works attributed to Nagarjuna that was extant in Chinese only and that is often used as a Buddhist encyclopedia.
Xuanzang made a translation of all available scriptures belonging to this category, a total of forty. He classified them as presented by the Buddha in sixteen assemblies, compiling them as the Great Prajna Paramita Sutra in 663. (In China the word “sutra” was added to the title. Thus, these enormous texts are referred to in the ideographic world as “Great Prajna Paramita Sutra” or “Great Sutra.”)
According to Edward Conze, among the many versions of the Prajna Paramita scriptures, the 8,000-line Prajna Paramita can be considered the earliest. This text was started in India in the first century B.C.E. and completed in the first century C.E. Later, a huge number of lines were added to form the 18,000-line, 25,000-line, and 100,000-line Prajna Paramita scriptures.3
The 8,000-line Prajna Paramita text is the first known sutra that contains the word “Mahayana.” It also advocates the ideal image of Buddhist practitioners as bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are beings who vow to be reborn many times, dedicating themselves to the awakening of others by way of appropriate moral conduct and skillful means, free of earthly attachment. They themselves do not become buddhas until all others do.