According to the date on the title page, an edition of the Diamond Sutra, one of the central texts of the Prajnaparamita cycle of Mahayana Buddhism, was published one thousand, one hundred, and forty-eight years ago on this day in 868. This makes it the oldest surviving printed book, more than half a a millennium older than the justly celebrated Gutenberg Bible (Acknowledging a major difference here is Gutenberg’s addition of movable type, although even that has an older version, a Korean Zen text published nearly eighty years before his probably independent invention, again justly celebrated). Returning to the Diamond Sutra, it was discovered as part of the treasure trove of documents found in the Mogao caves at at Dunhuang, China by Aurel Stein in the early part of the twentieth century.
Important throughout Mahayana Buddhism, this is a central document in the Zen way, ranking equally with that other Prajnaparamita cycle text, the Heart Sutra. In the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, the putative autobiography of Huineng, and the founding myth of our school, it was on hearing a line from this text that the young illiterate peasant had his great enlightenment experience.
As to translations into English. Red Pine has a very readable version with some interesting commentaries, and I recommend the somewhat dated but still readable translation by D. T. Suzuki. And here’s a link to the translation available through the Western Chan Fellowship, which I like in part because it includes links to other translations.
If you want to look at the actual printed Diamond Sutra which is now housed at the British Museum (ah… so much could be said…), just go here.
And if you just want to hear it, well that follows below.
(Listening to it is well known to bestow some serious good karma on the hearer. Just saying…)
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