Prajnaparamita

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.

The most striking of Prajnaparamita's titles is the Mother of all the Buddhas. The reasoning behind it is precise and important: since it is the perfection of wisdom, the realisation of emptiness, that makes a buddha a buddha, and since every buddha of the past, present and future attains awakening through that same wisdom, the perfection of wisdom is the womb from which all buddhas are born.

To personify it as a mother-goddess is thus not decoration but doctrine: it names the feminine principle of wisdom as the source of enlightenment itself. This gave the Mahayana a great female figure at the very centre of its understanding of awakening, and Prajnaparamita became an object of both philosophical study and devotional visualisation, contemplated as a means of realising the wisdom she embodies. She holds together, in a single figure, the three things a tradition most reveres, its scripture, its highest insight, and a divine presence, and stands as one of the clearest expressions in Buddhism of the sacredness of wisdom.