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 3790.47
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.48
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. However, two chapters that have titles in the Twenty-Five Thousand (26 and 27) do not have titles in the Hundred Thousand.49
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.