The Prajnaparamita Literature

Edward Conze's The Prajnaparamita Literature is a scholarly survey of the Prajnaparamita, Perfection of Wisdom, corpus of Mahayana Buddhist texts, published by Mouton and Company. Conze was one of the twentieth century's most productive Western scholars and translators of Prajnaparamita literature specifically, and the book's authority rests on that sustained career long specialization, including his own translations of many of the texts it surveys. It remains a standard reference point in Buddhist studies for orienting a reader across this large and complex textual corpus. Its limit is age, more recent Buddhist studies scholarship has refined the dating and textual history of some individual sutras within the corpus using manuscript evidence not available to Conze, so a fine grained dating claim benefits from checking more recent specialist scholarship alongside this foundational survey.