Overview
The Transcendent State of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā, hereafter Eight Thousand) is one of the most important, influential, and revolutionary Buddhist scriptures. It presents the Buddha’s second turning of the wheel of Dharma and thus some of the quintessential teachings at the core of the Mahāyāna. It may be close to the earliest textual form of the Prajñāpāramitā literature that, as it blossomed, forever transformed the Buddhist landscape in India and beyond.
The Eight Thousand is revered as one of the six “mother” Prajñāpāramitā texts, so called because they include the complete set of topics identified in the most influential of the Indian commentaries, The Ornament of Clear Realization (Abhisamayālaṃkāra), as comprising the full range covered by the Prajñāpāramitā teaching. But for those without the time, interest, stamina, or need to study the other, longer “mother” texts, the lesser level of detail with which the Eight Thousand covers that full range of topics makes it more accessible. The Eight Thousand seems to have been extensively read and studied in India, and was translated into Chinese and Tibetan more times than virtually any other scripture.
The Prajñāpāramitā sūtras are widely seen as presenting the Buddha’s core teaching on the emptiness of phenomena and their ultimate lack of defining characteristics. Yet as scriptures they are not easy to understand fully, and gave rise to a very large commentarial literature, starting with Nāgārjuna’s treatises and in a later period Maitreya-Asaṅga’s Ornament of Clear Realization and its many subcommentaries. Of those subcommentaries, the ones composed by Haribhadra and Ratnākaraśānti, from their different viewpoints, are renowned for their elucidation of the difficult points in the text, of its implicit structure, and of how its underlying themes are crucial for a full understanding of the Buddhist path in general and for the practice of a bodhisattva in particular.
This translation therefore includes substantial notes drawing on these two commentaries, in order to allow as full an appreciation as possible of the depth and breadth of the scripture itself, and to point out some of the ways in which its style and wordplay—difficult to convey in a translation—are integral to how it conveys its intended message.
There is nevertheless an established tradition, mentioned in the text itself, of simply reading or reciting the sūtra respectfully without analysis, allowing its words to bring about their subtle effect by themselves.
This English rendering, made principally from the Sanskrit but with reference to the Tibetan translation, is the first full translation of the Eight Thousand. It is presented here so that readers of all kinds may read or study it, with or without guidance from the notes, in whatever way they wish. In particular, we hope that the Eight Thousand’s own interpretable but playful use of language may amuse, intrigue, and inspire.
What follows in this introduction is a more detailed presentation of contextual and historical material, and some explanations of the approaches taken in translating the text.
Two synopses of the content, one according to the topics of The Ornament of Clear Realization and one set out chapter by chapter, can also be found at the end of the introduction. Although in many respects the Eight Thousand is less similar to the longer Prajñāpāramitā sūtras than they are to each other, it follows almost the same order as them in terms of narrative events, appearances of different interlocutors, topics discussed, and so forth. Some remarks and links to the passages paralleled in the Eighteen Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Hundred Thousand have been included so that interested readers may compare all these closely related accounts of the same material.