Commentaries on the Eight Thousand Itself
Against this background of the Prajñāpāramitā treatises in general, Dignāga (480–540 ᴄᴇ) composed what purports to be a brief thematic summary of the Eight Thousand called The Condensed Meaning (Piṇḍārtha, Toh 3809).22 But Dignāga’s summary highlights only specific aspects of the Transcendent State of Wisdom scripture, and the difficulties that nonspecialists had in understanding the philosophical and soteriological frameworks implied in the scripture seem to have continued.
For this reason, in the ninth century ᴄᴇ, King Dharmapāla—who was devoted to the Eight Thousand but confused about it—requested the great scholar Haribhadra to make it clear to him. In response, Haribhadra composed the commentary called Light on the Ornament (Abhisamayālaṃkārāloka, hereafter referred to as Light), which uses Maitreya’s Ornament to explain the structure and meaning of the topics in the Eight Thousand. Haribhadra’s Light quickly became the standard commentary for understanding the scripture. As well as its Tibetan translation preserved in the Tengyur (Toh 3791), the complete Sanskrit text of Light has been preserved and is available in several editions, notably one made by the Japanese scholar Unrai Wogihara in the 1930s.
In the eleventh century, Ratnākaraśānti composed The Quintessence of the Eight Thousand (Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāpañjikāsārottamā, hereafter Quintessence). It has been preserved in Tibetan translation in the Tengyur (Toh 3803), and incompletely in a Sanskrit edition by Padmanabh Jaini, published in 1979.23 As the only other commentary on the Eight Thousand, it addresses matters that Haribhadra had not covered and disputes some things that he had. But aside from unpacking the scripture, Ratnākaraśānti aimed to show—through his many commentaries—how central the Transcendent State of Wisdom is to both Mahāyāna and tantric practice, as in the concluding lines of his opening verses to The Instructions on the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitopadeśa, Toh 4079):
“By cultivating this blessed supreme Perfection every day,
One succeeds in the (methods of) the mantras
And one holds the (methods of) the five transcendent states in the palm of one’s hand.”
In this way, through the efforts of Indian scholars, the Eight Thousand came to be understood as one of the foundational scriptural authorities for the practice of both the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna. Furthermore, since each commentator attempted to prove that the scripture aligns with his own philosophical position, it slowly became the interpretive battleground for different scholastic attempts to systematize the Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist logic of practice.24 Despite their different philosophical perspectives, the commentaries provide excellent access to the scripture’s meaning. Yet even when a commentary explains the esoteric meaning, the relevance and application of this meaning is not always perfectly clear in the words in the scripture itself. So serious scholastic study began to focus more on individual treatises than on the actual scriptures.
From the eighth century onward, Indian scholastic study of the Transcendent State of Wisdom seems to have increasingly read the scriptures through the lens of one particular treatise, namely the Ornament. The Ornament itself is a brief independent treatise that provides a versified outline of topics within the mother Prajñāpāramitā scriptures themselves.25 The outline has eight chapters, which include a total of seventy main topics and twelve hundred subtopics to be realized along the path. But the Ornament neither expands on these topics, nor explains how they are to be interpolated into the Mother Prajñāpāramitā scriptures themselves. Commentaries on the Ornament are required to show where exactly the individual Ornament headings should be inserted into the scriptures and how those headings shed light on each stage of Mahāyāna practice.
Since the Ornament’s outline of topics seems to be designed for the Twenty-Five Thousand, the first commentary on the Ornament by Ārya Vimuktisena simply matched its seventy topics to that scripture. Among the twenty-one different Indian commentaries on the Ornament still extant in Tibetan translations, only two commentaries matched its seventy topics to the much shorter Eight Thousand. First, in the ninth century, Haribhadra’s Light (Ālokā) did so from the philosophical perspective of the Madhyamaka school, and in the eleventh century, Ratnākaraśānti’s Quintessence (Sāratamā) did so from the perspective of the Yogācāra school. In both these commentaries, the study of the Prajñāpāramitā is presented largely as a comparative theory of practice. That is to say, the commentaries show (a) how the Eight Thousand implicitly refers to the stages of the different paths of practice in the vehicle of bodhisattvas, and (b) how these compare to the stages of the different paths of practice in the vehicles of the disciples and solitary realizers. The comparison presents the different theories of practice in the different vehicles, in detail, from multiple perspectives, at every stage of the path. This comparison seeks not just to prove the superiority of the Mahāyāna approach to practice, but also to clarify how it differs from other approaches to practice within the different vehicles—which might seem quite similar, but actually are not.
Although the Ornament’s outline fits the Eight Thousand to some degree, on occasions Haribhadra and Ratnākaraśānti themselves fail to connect one or another of the seventy topics to any passage at all in the Eight Thousand. Whether or not one regards this “fit” problem as stemming from an anachronistic attempt to read later doctrines and practices into the earlier Eight Thousand, Haribhadra’s and Ratnākaraśānti’s commentaries still offer what is probably the best window into the Eight Thousand’s early terminology and otherwise almost inaccessible esoteric meaning.
So helpful was the guidance of these two commentators that when the seven (or eight, see above) different teams of Tibetan translators each translated or retranslated the Eight Thousand into Tibetan between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, they all based their translations on the glosses and explanations that the two commentaries provided. Later, when the Ornament became the focus of Tibetan scholastic education in the different schools and lineages of Tibet, the Tibetans made direct reference to these same two commentaries in their own subcommentaries, sub-subcommentaries, and textbooks. In this way, the Tibetan tradition absorbed the Indian Prajñāpāramitā literature into its own works and continued to expand upon the topics. Over time, the Tibetans came to focus mainly on studying the Ornament without making any reference to the scriptures themselves, since to achieve a serviceable understanding of the Ornament alone is said to take years of dedicated, single-pointed study.26
From this focus on the Ornament came the notion that reading the treatise was the equivalent of reading the scriptures. This may be true in the sense that the seventy topics are indeed said to be the most relevant points made by the scriptures. However, it may lead to distortions of understanding in that (a) the scriptures themselves present the topics in a literary style and genre very different from those of the Ornament and aim to affect the reader in different ways; (b) there are many things in the scriptures not mentioned at all in the Ornament; and (c) the function of the Ornament itself is an intertextual one of illuminating the words of the scriptures, rather than of being understood on its own. Thus, anyone interested in learning more about the Prajñāpāramitā would do well to read the scriptures in conjunction with the commentarial tradition and to keep in mind that the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures have their own value.
Another reason for reading the Eight Thousand is that despite the widespread reverence for it, relatively few Buddhists outside the scholastic setting have any knowledge even of its contents, not to mention its meaning. In the Himalayas today, devoted Buddhists still occasionally perform or sponsor monastic recitations of the Eight Thousand. But a far more common practice, across the modern Mahāyāna Buddhist world, is to chant aloud daily—or occasionally write out—the one-page Heart Sūtra.27 Since the Heart Sūtra focuses on the topic of emptiness and is held to be a condensed version of all Prajñāpāramitā scriptures, many modern Buddhists—and even Western Buddhist Studies scholars with limited exposure to traditional scholastic studies—have erroneously come to believe that “emptiness” is the central topic of all the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures, too. In fact, emptiness is barely mentioned by name in the Eight Thousand and is not even included in the Ornament’s list of the seventy main topics or twelve hundred subtopics, which are considered so central and important to Tibetan Buddhist practice that some monastic universities focus solely on them for up to six years before turning to classical texts on philosophy, logic, and debates related to emptiness.28