Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines

According to tradition, when the Buddha taught the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures, he entrusted their preservation to Ānanda and Vajrapāṇi, who initiated their oral transmission from an early date. But it was only centuries later, after Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 ᴄᴇ) purportedly retrieved The Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines from the nāga realm in written form, that these scriptures came to be transmitted far and wide. Today, in the Prajñāpāramitā section of the Kangyur‍—which in terms of pages takes up more than a fifth of the whole collection‍—there are twenty-three Prajñāpāramitā scriptures. Among them, the six main scriptures‍—the Hundred Thousand, the Twenty-Five Thousand, the Eighteen Thousand, the Ten Thousand, the Eight Thousand, and the Verse Summary‍—are called the “mothers,” because each of them covers the full set of eight topics outlined in Maitreya-Asaṅga’s Ornament of Clear Realization; eleven additional scriptures are called the “children” because they emphasize only certain of these topics. The six remaining scriptures are short texts that fall outside that classification scheme.

While the Tibetan and Chinese traditions consider the Hundred Thousand to be the source of the other twenty-two because it contains the most detailed exposition, traditional scholars in Nepal see the Eight Thousand as the original scripture. Western historians, too, based on the available philological evidence, have concluded that the Eight Thousand probably represents the earliest form of the multiplicity of Prajñāpāramitā texts. Whichever the case, since all the “mother” scriptures follow the same outline, there are many similarities between them, and not only the topics discussed and the order in which they are discussed, but also the principal narrative events, appearances of different interlocutors, and other features are clearly paralleled across the texts,¹ even if the Eight Thousand is notably less similar to the longer sūtras than they are to each other.²

The view that the Eight Thousand is closest to what may have been the earliest form of the scripture, initially based on analysis of passages in the earliest Chinese translations and translation records, has been supported by the evidence of more recently discovered manuscripts, such as the Kharoṣṭhī manuscript from the Split Collection, which has been carbon-dated to between 47 and 147 ᴄᴇ. Among the range of extant texts belonging to the family of long Prajñāpāramitā scriptures it seems most closely related to the Sanskrit Eight Thousand.³ It is important to bear in mind that the system of naming Prajñāpāramitā texts by numerical expressions of their length (such as Eight Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, etc.) was not used in any of the early Chinese translations, nor at the time of the earliest Indic manuscripts, and may only have been instigated by Bodhiruci in China in the early sixth century. The Kharoṣṭhī manuscript includes a section colophon in which its mentioned title, unsurprisingly, is thus only prañaparamida, but it is to the Eight Thousand subfamily that it bears the closest comparison, in contrast to the other subfamily, that of the longer Prajñāpāramitā scriptures that were later identified as the Hundred Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Eighteen Thousand.

Manuscript fragments found near Bamiyan in Afghanistan and dated paleographically to the second half of the third century are more closely comparable to the Eight Thousand, to a degree that could justify their description as the earliest known Sanskrit witnesses of the text.⁴ Nevertheless, the various versions of the scripture that we know today as the Eight Thousand show evidence of significant expansion and evolution over time, as can be seen by comparing the extant Chinese translations made successively between the second and tenth centuries (see below).

Whatever its provenance or its significance, the Eight Thousand stands out as one of the most revered of all Buddhist scriptures. The Eight Thousand is still extant in more ancient Indian manuscripts than virtually any other text, and may have held a central place in many Mahāyāna Buddhist shrines. It also seems to have been among the most closely studied of all Prajñāpāramitā scriptures. Its level of detail made it complete but also accessible for those without the time, interest, stamina, or need to study the longer versions. This too may be the reason why it was translated into Chinese and Tibetan more times than virtually any other scripture‍—a total of seven times into Chinese beginning with Lokakṣema (179 ᴄᴇ), and in many successive stages into Tibetan, beginning in the early imperial translation period in the late eighth century‍—by translators wanting to get the translation just right.