The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines

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, at some point after it first appeared in the fourth century, came to dominate their study.

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,⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹ 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 them an unsuitable way of using the Abhisamayālaṃkāra as the key to this particular, longest version of all of the sūtras.

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).⁵² 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).⁵³

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.⁵⁴

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.

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) 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 Yeshé (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 (phya pa chos kyi seng ge).⁵⁵

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 Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (dol po pa shes rab rgyal mtshan) in the fourteenth century;⁵⁶ the one (mentioned above) by Rongtönpa in the fifteenth century; and one by Karma Chakmé (kar ma chags med) in the seventeenth century.