Printing and salvation: The Diamond Sutra, 868 CE

Commentary
Printing and salvation: The Diamond Sutra, 868 CE

Discovery. During restoration work in 1900 at a Buddhist monastery near the town of Dunhuang, in Chinese Central Asia, a sealed door was revealed which opened to a previously unknown cave containing 40,000 Chinese scrolls. The cave had been sealed in about 1000 CE and had remained hidden ever since. The dry desert air had provided excellent conditions for the preservation of the paper and silk scrolls inside, which were also protected by the insecticidal properties of the yellow dye (a sacred colour) used to colour the paper of Buddhist sutras. Amongst the tens of thousands of scrolls was the first dated printed book yet discovered, which is preserved today in the British Library. The full scroll (pictured below) can be viewed here, along with a lengthier account of the text, the scroll and its discovery. The following commentary derives largely from that text and the accompanying podcast provided by Susan Whitfield.

 

The Diamond Sutra. A sutra is a sermon spoken by the historical Buddha, many thousands of which survive. The Diamond Sutra, a central text of Indian Buddhism, was first translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in about AD 400, some four centuries before the development of printing. Like many of these texts, this sutra consists of a dialogue between the Buddha and a disciple, in this case, an old man known as Subhuti. In the central section, the Buddha names his sermon 'The Diamond Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom'. The diamond is a symbol of indestructibility and power over illusion, and 'The Perfection of Wisdom' places it within a larger group of sutras, all preaching the core doctrine that the world is illusory. 'This fleeting world', the text explains, 'is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream'. These similes convey the core teaching that this material world, and the suffering which characterises it, are illusory.  The purpose of Buddhism is to escape the cycle of repeated rebirth into this world by ridding oneself of karmic debt and gaining enlightenment. At each rebirth, the initiate can rise through the hierarchy of living beings toward the pinnacle of Buddhahood by acquiring merit through good deeds and words, which atone for previous bad deeds and words.
 
Printing the sutra. In this text, the Buddha explains that more merit is attained through understanding four lines of this sutra and explaining them to others, than through any amount of charity. One way of obtaining and disseminating such merit – practiced by monks, nuns, and pious lay people – was to chant sutras of this kind. Scribes could likewise gain merit by copying the sutras for others to read, and artists and their patrons could gain merit by creating images of the Buddha for others to see. Printing mechanised this process, multiplying the amount of merit one could send out into the world, rather like a prayer wheel. For this reason, Buddhists seized upon the new technology of print shortly after its invention in the eighth century and helped refine it into the advanced state evident in this scroll.
 
Frontispiece and text. The frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra (depicted above) reproduces just such an image of the historical Buddha by means of a woodblock print. On it, the elderly disciple Subhuti can be seen sitting on his prayer mat in the lower left-hand corner, listening attentively to the Buddha, who stands surrounded by other disciples. The frontispiece was printed on a separate piece of paper, which was then pasted to six others on which the text had been reproduced by means of a further series of woodblocks. A Chinese text in this period arranged characters in vertical columns which were read from top to bottom and in sequence from right to left, so the frontispiece was positioned at the right-hand end of the scroll.
 
Colophon and date. At the extreme left-hand end, the last few lines of text (known in the West as the ‘colophon’) record that this object was 'Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents’ and all sentient beings in the world – that is, as an act of devotion and charity, in pursuit of Buddhist merit. The printer does not record how many copies of the sutra were produced, but the date, 11 May 868, makes this the earliest, dated, printed book in the world.

Further resources. The podcast linked from External Resources provides an authoritative brief introduction  For further detail, see Frances Wood and Mark Barnard, The Diamond Sutra: The World’s Earliest Dated Printed Book (London: British Library, 2010).

Credits. Howard Hotson, May 2018; drawing on the text at the British Museum, the podcast by Susan Whitfield, and the book noted above.