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.1 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 teaching2 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 sūtras3 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.4
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 several commentaries that were also translated into Tibetan. 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 introduction 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,5 as well as in the description of the Degé Kangyur’s Perfection of Wisdom section.6