Perfection of Wisdom Sutras

The family is conventionally catalogued by length, and the lengths are startling: recensions of a hundred thousand lines, of twenty five thousand, of eighteen thousand, of ten thousand and of eight thousand, alongside texts short enough to memorise in an afternoon. The tradition explains the range by saying the shorter texts distil the longer, so that nothing is lost in the compression.

Modern textual scholarship generally reverses the order. The eight thousand line version shows signs of being the earliest, with the vast recensions produced by expansion, repetition and elaboration of its material rather than the short texts being extracted from them. On that reading the literature grew and then contracted again, and the very short sutras belong to a late stage rather than to a primitive one. The contraction goes further than is usually noticed.

Beyond the short and famous texts there are versions running to a few lines, and the tradition includes a perfection of wisdom in a single letter, on the principle that if what is being taught is that nothing has inherent existence, then one syllable is as adequate to it as a hundred thousand lines. That is a doctrinal joke and an entirely serious statement at the same time, and the fact that the tradition preserved it as a text rather than as an anecdote says something about how it understood its own literature.

Doctrinally the literature does two things at once. It pushes the analysis of non self further than the earlier tradition had taken it, applying emptiness not only to persons but to the elements of experience and then to the teaching itself, so that even the perfection of wisdom is empty and there is nothing attained by attaining it. And it makes the bodhisattva, who postpones final release for the sake of all beings, the ideal in place of the arhat, which reframes the entire path. The two moves are connected.

A person who has understood that nothing is inherently existent has no ground for treating their own release as a separate thing to secure, so the ethical and the metaphysical arrive together. There is also a striking practical claim inside these texts: that a place where the sutra is kept, recited or explained becomes worthy of the reverence given to a relic monument. An influential line of modern scholarship reads that as evidence of a movement centred on the book itself, competing with the established veneration of relics, and locates part of the Mahayana's early social identity there. The claim about the movement is argued rather than settled, but the passages it rests on are plain in the texts.