Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom, is one of the most remarkable figures in Mahayana Buddhism, because she is at once a body of scripture, a philosophical insight, and a goddess. The name first belongs to a class of sutras, composed over several centuries from around the first century BCE, that set out the teaching of emptiness and the path of the bodhisattva; the most famous of these, the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, are among the best-known Buddhist texts in the world. The perfection of wisdom these texts describe is the direct, liberating insight into the emptiness of all things that completes the bodhisattva's path. And this wisdom is also personified as a goddess: a serene golden figure, seated, holding a book, the sutra itself, and often making the gesture of teaching, sometimes shown with multiple arms bearing a rosary and a lotus.
The oldest and most influential of the Prajnaparamita sutras, the Ashtasahasrika, "in Eight Thousand Lines," is generally dated by scholars to around the first century BCE to the first century CE, making it one of the very earliest Mahayana texts to survive, its place of composition still debated between northern and central or southern India. The goddess's most celebrated single image is a thirteenth century stone statue from the Singhasari kingdom of East Java, found in the early nineteenth century, held for over a century in the Netherlands, and formally returned to Indonesia in 1978, where it is displayed in the National Museum in Jakarta and popularly nicknamed the Mona Lisa of Java for its serene expression.