Diamonds, Thunderbolts, and the Impossibility of Translation

Some time back, on my Facebook Heart Sutra group, I argued along the lines that vajra doesn't mean "diamond" and that Sanskrit compounds in the form X-ccheda always mean "that which cuts X". And diamonds are, in any case, easy to cut. And this all meant that Diamond Sutra  was the wrong translation for Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā. A chap called Leo emailed me to say that since vajira does mean "diamond" in Pāli (at least in the PTS Dictionary), Vajracchedikā should still be translated as "Cutter of Diamonds".

I had to admit that the PTS Dictionary does give 'diamond' as a definition (s.v. vajira², p.593). However, I'm a little doubtful about arguing from a Pāli dictionary to the name of a Sanskrit text and I don't think we should always just take the dictionary's word for it. So I checked a couple of the examples the PTSD gives for this definition and this led to some interesting reflections. The first passage is:

"Just as there is nothing that a vajira cannot split, whether jewel or stone" (seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, vajirassa natthi kiñci abhejjaṃ maṇi vā pāsāṇo vā; AN 1.124).

Now this one is important because here a vajira is contrasted with vijju (Skt vidyut) which definitely means "lightning". This suggests that vajira does not mean lightning-bolt here, and it raises the question of the the relationship between vajra and vidyut. And this requires a digression to consider Indra and his vajra.

Vajra

The word vajra derives from the root √vaj "strong, powerful" with the -ra suffix to make a substantive noun: it denotes an embodiment of power and potency. Compare this with the word ugra "powerful, violent, mighty, etc", which is very likely the same word, but with a prior change of vaj > uj (by the process known in Sanskrit as samprasaraṇa).

In Vedic texts, the vajra is most strongly, but not exclusively, associated with the God Indra. According to Mayrhofer, his name probably comes from √in "to use force" and means "strong, powerful". Thus the words indra and vajra are synonyms. Indra is used in the sense of "lord" or "master" and in the word for the senses, indriya, as "capacity" or "faculty". In this sense, Indra is the archetypal kṣatriya or warrior-king. 

In Buddhist texts Indra is usually referred to by another synonym, Śakra "Mighty" or "Able", and as the Devānām Indra "Lord of the Shining Ones". He is directly addressed as Kauśika, which is a reference to myths elaborated in the Brahmaṇa texts and Epics in which the Devas are no longer masters of the universe, but are entangled in worldly affairs in the manner of the Greek Gods. The Vedic-speaking incomers have now dominated Punjab and dealt with their civil war and seem more settled. Brahmin priests are beginning to assert their social dominance over the warrior kings. Śakra is a minor character in early Buddhist texts, but one of the main characters in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras (where my working theory is that he represents the views of those who practice dhyāna meditation, because he is the Lord of the Devas and the devaloka which is equated with dhyāna). In Buddhist texts Indra seems to have lost his belligerence and his vajra, but not in Buddhist art where he is routinely depicted with both, although these attributes are more often associated with the yakṣa Vajrapāni (the one who wields the mace).

iron mace from India

Vinayak Mahadev Apte (1956) tells us that vajra does not mean "thunderbolt" in the Ṛgveda.  He also points out that there is only one rain god in the Ṛgveda and that is Parjanya; and if anything vidyut "lightning" is associated with him and not with Indra. In fact, Indra is not a storm god at all. The vajra of Indra is a weapon, one that was forged by Tvaṣṭṛ, an artificer god (= Hephaestus?). The vajra is a two-handed, metallic (āyasa) mace with 1000 spikes (sahásrabhṛṣṭi). It is thus described also in Pāḷi when wielded by Vajirapāṇi (vajirapāṇi yakkho āyasaṃ vajiraṃ ādāya MN I.231). In the Ṛgveda, the vajra is described as stable (sthavira) and durable (dharṇasi); it is habitually in the possession of Indra, along with his horse and chariot. Meaning it is unlike highly unstable and impermanent lightning.

Indra was not a storm god, but a warrior god who embodies manly virtues in a warrior society. "While Indra is many things, his exploits are overwhelmingly defined by acts of physical strength, violent contestation, or outright battle: these are his raison d'être" (Whitaker 2016: 58). Indra's weapon represents an embodiment of and symbolises these same qualities. According to Apte, other non-storm gods also wield a vajra weapon at times, especially Vedic Bṛhaspati.

The connection with lightning is puzzling. When Jarrod Whitaker argues that "in a few instances is Indra' s weapon equated poetically with lightning" (2016: 58) I am unconvinced. He cites one example (Rgveda 1.33.10cd):

1.033.10c: yújaṃ vájraṃ vṛṣabháś cakra índro
1.033.10d: nír jyótiṣā támaso gā́ adukṣat

"The bull Indra made his mace his yokemate. He milked the cows out of
the darkness with light." (Jamison & Brereton 2014: 138)

I think Whitaker may be confusing light (jyoti) with lightning (not mentioned). Apte noted that Indra is associated with "waters" in the Ṛgveda, but they have been misinterpreted as rain. In fact, they are the cosmic waters associated with light and day. The enemy of Indra, Vṛtra, who helps to define him, is not a demon of drought, as is often asserted, but of darkness (tamas). The battle between Indra and Vṛtra is the classic battle between light and dark. Milking and cows here are metaphors for the creative power (māyā) of the God. Indra is sometimes referred to as vṛtrahan (P.  vatrabhū) "the smiter or enemy of the Vṛtra". This name also appears in Iranian myth as Vṛθragna (Old Iranian), and Vərəθraγna (Avestan). (NB Skt han derives from an earlier Indo-Iranian √ghan)

Buddha accompanied by
"mace-wielder", Vajrapāṇi
as Greek God. 

There is an interesting parallel here with ancient Greece. Chief God, Zeus also wields a weapon that is popularly supposed to be a "lightning bolt". In fact, his weapon is called κεραυνός (keraunos) "smasher, crusher", not βροντή (brontí,) “thunder” or ἀστραπή (astrapḗ) "lightning". The noun keraunos seems to come from Proto-Indo-European *ker "injure, spoil" and is thus also unrelated to meteorological phenomena. As a name, "smasher" is suggestive of a club or mace.

In Rob Linrothe's Ruthless Compassion, we can see that wrathful deities, particularly Vajrapāṇi ("Holding the Weapon"), are depicted carrying a club or mace. And in Gandhāran art, the yakṣa, Vajrapāṇi is sometimes depicted accompanying the Buddha as Heracles or perhaps Zeus, often armed with a mace.

With all this clarity about what the vajra is and is not, we are left wondering how and when vajra was confused with the thunderbolt or lightning, let alone with a diamond. The mistaken reading of the celestial waters may have contributed, but it seems like a stretch to think that was all that was required to completely change the meaning of a word.

Coming back to the the diamond question, the second Pāli example is from the Dhammapada:

"For the evil done by oneself, born or produced by oneself;
Cleaves the foolish, as a vajira a stone or jewel." 

Attanā hi kataṃ pāpaṃ, attajaṃ attasambhavaṃ;
Abhimantheti dummedhaṃ, vajiraṃ ahmamayaṃ maṇiṃ. (Dhp 161). 

So there is clearly an idea that vajira (whatever it is) can split (abhejja) or cleave/crush (abhimantheti) stone or other gems. So now we need to consider what we know about diamonds.


Diamond

Our word "diamond" comes from the Greek ἀδάμας  (adamas), the mythical hardest substance; in antiquity, usually some form of metal. Marvel comic fans will be familiar with the idea of adamantium. Interestingly, the concept of the hardest substance is common to Greece and Greater India, but it is applied to very different substances. The etymology is uncertain: The OED says that it comes from dama "tame" and thus means "indomitable" (Cf Sanskrit dama) but other sources suggest it may be a loan word (from Persian perhaps?). The word was first applied to the gemstone in English in the 14th Century.

Diamond is a crystalline allotrope of elemental carbon. Natural diamonds form octahedral crystals. Such crystals have a high refractive index, a high melting point (ca. 4000 °C), and the highest thermal conductivity of any natural material. Natural diamonds were typically formed between 1 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, deep in the earth's mantle and were brought to the surface by volcanic activity. They are usually found embedded in igneous rocks. Incorporation of other atoms can give diamonds a variety of hues.

Until the 18th Century, India was the primary producer of diamonds in the world, though they were traded far and wide, even in antiquity.

Diamond is the hardest natural substance. A diamond can scratch any other mineral. We use diamonds to scratch glass, for example, before breaking it. By about 700 AD in India, shards of diamond were being used to drill holes in quartz beads (Gorelick & Gwinnett 1988). In modern industry, diamond-tipped drill bits using synthetic diamonds are used for high performance situations and for drilling very hard substances.

However, diamonds also score low on the "toughness" scale which measures the ability to absorb energy and deform. Diamonds are brittle. Hit a diamond with a hammer and it will most likely shatter. Granite, for example, is about 100 times as resistant to breaking as diamond is. Hit a stone made of granite with a diamond and the diamond will shatter. So the idea that diamonds can split stone is obviously false.

uncut diamond

In antiquity, diamonds were simply left in their natural state. They were not even used as jewelry to begin with. Around the 14th Century in India, steel tools began to be used to split diamonds so as to give them facets. This process is called "cutting". It highlights the brilliance of the gem, i.e. the way it refracts and reflects light. In the modern approach to "cutting", the faces of the crystal are polished using an abrasive wheel,  It is, in fact, extremely easy to cut a diamond, though it takes skill to do so with the necessary precision to shape the gem into one of the classic "cuts". 

In ancient India, diamonds were so rare, and thus expensive, that only kings owned them. As far as I can tell, up to the point of being called after Indra's mace, diamonds were known generically as maṇi or jewels. They were not worn as jewelry and thus most people probably never saw them but only heard about them second hand. The common people were apt to be maṅgalikā (or superstitious) so, perhaps inevitably, diamonds became associated with magical powers in the popular imagination. And the chief magical power is that the diamond can cut any other substance. It can split rocks and stones, but is itself uncuttable, unbreakable, uncrushable, and so on. 

Conclusion

In summary then indra, vajra, and śakra are all synonyms for "power". The original vajra was a two-handed, metal mace with sharpened spikes, wielded by Indra/Śakra against his foe, Vṛta. The word denotes an embodiment or instantiation of physical power. Semantically, vajra does not mean either "lightning" (which is vidyut) or "diamond". Similarly, the weapon of Zeus, also a mace, has no semantic connection with meteorological phenomena.

However, the mace of Indra became associated with lightning at some point and the name vajra was later applied to diamonds as myths of indestructibility grew up around them. The process of how this happened and the timeline are still unclear to me.

But given the usage we can make a pragmatic argument that vajra does indeed mean "diamond" in that the word is applied to diamonds and is understood to mean "diamond" in particular contexts (such as we saw in the Pāli passages above). However, the argument is weakened because the "diamonds" in question have magical properties and it is precisely these magical properties seem to be what motivated ancient Indians to redeploy the name of Indra's weapon.

So yes, we could translate vajraccheda as "cuts diamond" and vajracchedikā as "a cutter of diamond", but we have to footnote this with a reminder that the diamond in question is an imaginary magical diamond, not an ordinary carbon diamond. In other words, we can translate vajra as "diamond" it but it doesn't get us any closer to what is meant by the title since the quality being described doesn't exist in reality. 

The situation is a little worse, however, since the idea that vajraccheda attempts to convey is "cutting the uncuttable" and a diamond is eminently cuttable. Go to a jeweler and all their diamonds are cut. I gather that uncut diamonds are somewhat fashionable at present, but most people have probably only ever seen cut diamonds. Cutting diamonds is completely routine. And diamonds, while still expensive, are commonplace. So the title doesn't have much meaning when translated in a simplistic fashion. The idea of the title Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā is obviously that prajñāpāramitā cuts the uncuttable. What this means is a mystery, however, because the text never explains it. If we stipulate the meaning, the next problem is how to meaningfully convey this in English? 

Funnily enough, actually we do have an English word that means "uncuttable" which is, atomic, from the Greek temnein "to cut". And, of course, it was a big deal when the irreducible atom was split by my countryman, Ernest Rutherford, at Manchester University in 1917. Though I quite like the sound of the Atom Splitting Sutra, in fact splitting atoms is almost as routine as cutting diamonds these days and there is a veritable zoo of subatomic particles. Also "atomic" is inescapably entangled in connotations of radiation and bombs.

My own habit has been to refer to the text as the Vajracchedikā and just leave it at that. It has the advantage of being unique. I note that although we can infer what the title means, it is never explained in the text itself. When Subhūti asks what he should call the discourse, the answer is "The name of this way of talking about the Dharma, Subhūti, is Gnosis Perfected" (prajñāpāramitā nāmāyaṃ subhūte dharmaparyāyaḥ 13b). On the other hand, the colophon of 7th Century Gilgit manuscript ends with vajracchedikā prajñāpāramitā samāptāḥ. "Here endeth the Gnosis Perfected that Cuts the Uncuttable". Note that the text does not refer to itself as a sūtra.  

I'll finish with a few words about the Chinese translation. Since Kumārajīva first translated it into Middle Chinese ca 402 CE, the Vajracchedikā has been known as the 金剛般若波羅蜜經 (Jīngāng bānrěbōluómì jīng). The part that interests us us 金剛 which is a binomial and means "diamond". It's a made-up term that translates vajra. 金 primarily means "metal" and sometimes more specifically "gold". It can also convey the typical properties of metals (of which gold is an exception), i.e. hardness, durability, etc. My Middle Chinese dictionary (Kroll) has a sub-entry for 金剛 "hardness of gold, i.e. diamond". But, of course, gold is known for being a soft metal in its pure state. It is, for example, the last thing you'd make a weapon out of. As we might suspect from the previous, 剛 means "rigid, unyielding, inflexible" and in a nice twist Kroll includes "adamantine" in his definitions; on its own the character is also used for "steel".

If we translate 金剛般若波羅蜜經 fairly literally it is the Diamond Gnosis-Perfected Sutra in Kumārajīva's rendering. And this is probably why the name Diamond Sutra was popularised. We may never know if the absence of a reference to "cutting" is a deliberate omission, or if the reference that we take for granted is a later affectation that was absent from Kumārajīva's source text. In my research for this essay, I didn't find any information on how the Chinese viewed diamonds.

In the end most people are just going to keep calling it the Diamond Sutra no matter what. Still, it is interesting just to reflect on how words function and change over time. The dictionary is not the last word on what any given term means in a text because many terms are defined pragmatically. As fascinating as etymology can be, it doesn't always capture how a word is used at any given time and how that use changes.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Apte, V. M. (1956). 'Vajra in the Ṛgveda'. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 37(1/4): 292-295. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44082929

Dahlquist, Allan. (1996) Megasthenes and Indian Religion: A Study in Motives and Types. Motilal Banarsidass.

Gorelick, L and Gwinnett, A. J. (1988) 'Diamonds from India to Rome and beyond'. American Journal of Archaeology, 92(4):547-552. https://www.jstor.org/stable/505249

Jamison, S.w. and Brereton, J.P. (2014) The Rig Veda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford University Press.

Kroll, Paul. W. (2015). A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese. Brill.

Linrothe, Rob. (1999). Ruthless Compassion: Wrathful Deities in Early Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist Art. Serindia Publications.

Mayrhofer, Manfred. (1956) Kurzgefaßtesetzmologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.

Whitaker, Jarrod. (2016) 'I Boldly Took the Mace (Vájra) for Might: Ritually Weaponizing a Warrior's Body in Ancient India.' International Journal of Hindu Studies, 20(1): 51-94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44983842

Note: 29 May 2024. 

Slaje, Walter. (2024). "A Stone of Contention: Afterthoughts on the Rigvedic vájra – and Why a Mace is not an Option." Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 29.2

Abstract: The present study deals with the widely held view that the vajra was conceived by the Rigvedic poets as a club or mace — the translation terminology of the target languages is not uniform. This is largely due to a change of mind on the part of Karl Friedrich Geldner, who revised his earlier view of the vajra as a wedge (“Keil”, 1907-1909) to the translation “club” (“Keule”, 1929) without giving any reasons. The great influence of his authoritative translation, only published in 1951, is demonstrated by the fact that, with very few exceptions, his later view of the vajra as a club was unquestioningly adopted by most later Rigvedic translators and interpreters, even though no dictionary gives such a meaning for vajra. This continuous practice has strengthened the unwavering belief in its correctness to the extent that it has spread as a firm conviction to all areas of research in Indology and related disciplines. In defence of my thesis that the criteria for a mace are not answered by what the Rigveda says about the vajra, and that a vajra should therefore have been some other kind of weapon, such as a biface-like sling projectile made of stone or lead, the history and rationale of the mace theory is examined and the plausibility of both assumptions (“stone” and “club”) discussed and compared. 

This article may or may not be an interesting contribution, frankly it is so verbose, so very slow to get to the point, and so prone to digressions and taking pot shots at other scholars, that it is difficult follow the argument presented. There is no simple presentation of the author's thesis or the relevant passages. I gave up. But I am still intrigued because the sling was a devastating longish-range weapon which could be wielded with high levels of accuracy. In the David and Goliath conflict, for example, David weilding a sling had the more deadly weapon. 

Suzuki, Negation, and Bad Buddhist Philosophy

Looking again at how the influential Japanese scholar Suzuki Daisetsu Teitaro (1870 – 1966) used the (so-called) Diamond Sutra, I realised that something was amiss. Suzuki called his approach the logic of sokuhi 即非 (Ch. jí fēi). In a very recent book chapter, Yusa Michiko (2019) describes the history of this idea. As Suzuki formulated it:

To say that "A is A" is
To say that "A is not A."
Therefore, "A is A". (Yusa 2019: 860)

Yusa quotes Suzuki referring to this as "the logic of spiritual intuition... If you understand what it means, you will understand not only the Diamond Sutra but also the entire Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra of 600 scrolls" (Yusa 2019: 860).

So my first question is: How accurately does this fit with my understanding of Prajñāpāramitā?

Kyoto School Logic

This expression of "logic" was very influential on the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy via Suzuki's lifelong friend, Nishida Kitarō. The Kyoto School were implicated in the nationalistic aggression of Japan in the 20th Century and have come in for much criticism in the 21st Century.

The adoption of the logic of sokuhi by members of the Kyoto School can also been seen in the light of nationalism. On learning the way Suzuki was thinking Nishida wrote an encouraging letter to him, "We must construct it logically so that it can stand on its own to face Western logic." The idea then was to find a native Japanese approach to logic that could be positively contrasted with "Western" logic.

Remember that this predates the relativism of post-modernism; the point was not simply to undermine the applicability of logic, but to contrast Eastern and Western modes of thought. This (false) essentialist dichotomy was a feature of Suzuki's thinking throughout his life, but the quote shows that it was shared by Nishida. In other words, it looks like a trend in Japanese intelligentsia rather than an attitude particular to Suzuki. Japanese Nationalism was a major theme in the pre-WWII milieu.

Sharf (1993: 40) is emphatic that despite the influence of Suzuki and other Japanese intellectuals on the conception and practice of Zen in America and Europe, they did not represent the Japanese monastic tradition of Zen nor did they have influence in that sphere. Rather, Sharf says, "the style of Zen training most familiar to Western Zen practitioners can be traced to relatively recent and sociologically marginal Japanese lay movements." (1993: 40).

Suzuki was the originator of this logic and, at least according to Yusa, his inspiration for this Japanese logic is to be found in the Vajracchedikā. In order to try to understand this we'll need to look closely at the sūtra.

Note that I resist calling the Vajracchedikā the Diamond Sutra because vajra does not mean "diamond" in Sanskrit;  rather, it unequivocally means "thunderbolt"; i.e., the combination of lightning and thunder associated with storms and originally the weapon wielded by Indra. Moreover, in Sanskrit compounds with -ccheda as the final member, the initial member is the thing that is cut, not the thing that does the cutting. I see no reason that turning the noun into an adjective (-ikā) should alter the meaning from "cutter of thunderbolts". In Chinese, vajra is translated as 金剛 (jīngāng), i.e. "gold hard", though perversely gold is famously a soft metal. The "diamond" in fact comes from the Tibetan name for a diamond, literally "indestructible stone" རྡོ་རྗེ་ཕ་ལམ  (rdo rje pha lam)  pronounced dorjé palam. For some reason the idea that rdo rje also means "diamond" contaminated how vajra is understood. Hence the Perfection of Insight that Cuts Thunderbolts is now called The Diamond Sutra in English. 

Yusa identifies §13a of the Diamond Sutra as the key passage for Suzuki. I discussed the use of negation in the Vajracchedikā in 2013, outlining work by Paul Harrison (2006) to reinterpret the negations that characterise this text. There are a large number of such negations in the Vajracchedikā. Harrison's insights into the text are invaluable (I await his long overdue book on the Vajracchedikā with interest). 

Yusa says two revealing things. Firstly, Yusa points out that the text of Vajracchedikā Suzuki used is not the translation by Kumārajīva, i.e.《金剛般若波羅蜜經》Jīngāng-bōrěbōluómì-jīng (T.235). This is the standard translation in East Asian Buddhism. In this translation, the key passage reads 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜. To this Suzuki appends: 是名般若波羅蜜 (I'll discuss meanings below). Yusa offers the unqualified assertion that "Suzuki must have added the line 是名般若波羅蜜 after the fashion of the traditional Chinese scripture style." (871). But such an amendment can hardly be justified in such a case. Especially when the absence of the line affects the conclusion of the argument.

Secondly, Yusa says, "Here, the second reference to 'prajñāpāramitā' is shortened to 'pāramitā,' and its negation is used." (874). This allows her to read the text as saying "the perfection of wisdom preached by the Tathāgata is not a perfection of wisdom the Tathāgata preached, therefore it is called the perfection of wisdom." (Yusa 2019: 874).

This contradiction made me curious about what the text says, since it clashed with what I remembered from my earlier foray into the Vajracchedikā. So I went digging.

We have two recensions in Sanskrit. The earlier of the two is based on two manuscripts from about the 6th Century, the first from Gilgit in the Karakorum Mountains (Schopen 1989) and the second from Bamiyan in what is now Afghanistan (Harrison & Watanabe 2006). These manuscripts are both partial; however, there is a substantial overlap between the two which confirms that they are substantially the same text and combine to form a single witness of a distinct recension from that time period. The resulting Frankenstein text has been translated by Paul Harrison (2006). We also have an edition, edited by Conze (1957)—though with many mistakes (noted in Schopen 1975)—based on later manuscripts (and with some input from the Gilgit manuscript). The same manuscripts were also edited by Vaidya, though in this case I have not consulted his edition. 

Section 13a and the Negation of Prajñāpāramitā

1. The extra line

We can solve the first mystery of the origin of the phrase 是名般若波羅蜜 quite quickly by looking that Xuanzang's translation of the Vajracchedikā (T220.ix; fascicle 577):

Kj: 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜。
Xz: 如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。
S:  佛說般若波羅蜜，則非般若波羅蜜，是名般若波羅蜜。

Although Suzuki has not followed Xuanzang's wording exactly, but has modified it to look more like Kumārajīva's style of writing, it is clear that he got his inspiration for doing so from Xuanzang's translation. In his Essays on Zen Buddhism (Third Series) the essay on the Heart Sutra does cite a translation of the Xuanzang text. To be clear this method is poor scholarship. 

Before introducing the Sanskrit, let us examine the Chinese more closely:

Kj: 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜。 

The Buddha 佛 has taught 說 Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜, consequently 則 there is no 非 Perfection of Wisdom 般若波羅蜜.

Charles Muller trans. "That which the Buddha calls ‘transcendent wisdom’ is not transcendent wisdom."  

Xz: 如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。 

Thus 如是 is Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜多，the tathāgata 如來 has taught 說為 non-Perfection of Insight 非般若波羅蜜多，therefore 是故, the tathāgata 如來 is to be called 說名* Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜多。†

*  說名 to be called (Skt. ity ucyate). 

† Xuanzang adds 多 to the word because the final consonant of Middle Chinese 蜜 mid,  prominent in the 5th Century, was already fading away in the 7th; it is completely absent in modern Mandarin.

Let us now look at the two recensions of the Sanskrit (Gilgit = G  and Conze' edition = C):

G: yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | saivāpāramitā |  (Schopen 1989) 

The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. (Harrison & Watanabe 2006: 126)

C: yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā, saiva apāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti || (Conze 1957: 37-8) 

The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. He calls it Perfection of Insight. (My translation following Harrison & Watanabe).

Note that the older Sanskrit version, G, also lacks the third phrase as Kj does; which is nonetheless in C and Xz.And also note that G does not repeat tathāgatena bhāṣitā. And in this kind of syntax there is no need to repeat it because the two clauses have the same agent. The repetition only makes the sentence awkward and all the translations above ignore it. 

We know that the texts of Prajñāpāramitā sūtras were more or less constantly altered, mainly by being expanded throughout the period of active Buddhism in India. For example, Conze has speculated that this section, i.e., §13, was the original end of the sūtra and that subsequent sections were later additions. Others have speculated that the first two chapters, pages, or the first few paragraphs, were the original Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (c.f. Walser 2018).

As for the expression sokuhi, Kumārajīva alternates between using 則非 (J. nori hi) 9 times, and 即非 (J. sokuhi) 8 times. Xuanzang does not use the phrase at all, but rather his text has 如來說為非 (I will explain below). The difference here is not significant and as we will see makes more sense in the light of the Sanskrit text. 

2. Aparamitā

When we look at the two Chinese texts we see that when the negation comes, it is the whole word  般若波羅蜜 (= prajñāpāramitā) that is negated, i.e. 非般若波羅蜜 (Kumārajīva) and 非般若波羅蜜多 (Xuanzang). In other words, all the texts state that the Buddha spoke prajñā-pāramitā; the Chinese texts then deny that he spoke prajñā-pāramitā, while the Sanskrit texts only negate pāramitā. Given that Xuanzang was typically good at representing his source texts, perhaps there was a recension that negated the whole phrase prajñā-pāramitā, but this would break the general pattern observed in the text as a whole (Harrison 2006, and commented on in my blog).

The two versions of this passage have very different meanings. And Suzuki has clearly relied on the Chinese version for his sokuhi logic.

The Logic of the Vajracchedikā

Suzuki's logic of sokuhi suggests that the negations in the Vajracchedikā unlock the whole of the Prajñāpāramitā. I don't think this can be the case. Although it is likely that the Vajracchedikā goes back at least as far as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, it is not representative of the mainstream of Prajñāpāramitā thinking; striking evidence of this is that the word śūnyatā is not used in the Vajracchedikā. The style of negation we find in the Vajracchedikā only occurs there. It is not representative, but a rather obscure offshoot. Note that the Vajracchedikā was not transmitted to China until the late 4th Century (translated by Kumārajīva ca 402 CE), 200 years after the Aṣṭasāhasrikā and the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā were first translated in 179 CE and 276 CE respectively. If there is a simple key to understanding the Prajñāpāramitā, i.e. if such a thing exists, then we would expect to find it in the Aṣṭasāhasikā and probably in the first two chapters, if not the first two pages (Walser 2018). The Chinese, who privileged the Large Sutra, would have expected to find it there and arguably the Heart Sutra is an attempt to extract the central principles of Prajñāpāramitā as they were understood in China in the mid-7th Century.

But even if the "logic" of the Vajracchedikā were important, Suzuki has been misled by the Chinese translations. His formulation again is:

To say that "A is A" is
To say that "A is not A."
Therefore, "A is A".

However, the logic of the Sanskrit texts is more like this:

What the Buddha calls AB, is without B.

Later, we don't know when, but probably after the 4th Century, this logic is extended:

What the Buddha calls AB, is without B; he calls it AB.

For Suzuki, working primarily from the Chinese texts, the thing stated and negated is the same in each case: prajñāpāramitā. By contrast, as Harrison points out, the Sanskrit text (and the overall pattern of negations in Vajracchedikā) shows that prajñāpāramitā is stated and then said to be without pāramitā. This is not, as Yusa supposed, an "abbreviation" that really means prajñāpāramitā. Rather, the argument is that, though one can name six kinds of perfection, there is no dharma that corresponds to perfection.

Compounds

Harrison argues that exegetes have mistaken the nature of the word apāramitā. In Sanskrit grammar we treat such negated nouns as compounds, i.e. a-pāramitā. They can be one of two kinds of compound. If a-pāramitā is a karmadhārya compound then it means "non-perfection, not a perfection"; but if it is a bahuvrīhi compound then it means "without perfection" or "lacking perfection". While tradition usually takes these to be karmadhārya compounds, Harrison argues that the use of 非 (fēi) to negate rather than 不 (bù) suggests that Kumārajīva understood the compound as a bahuvrīhi and that this is the better reading. 

So the phrase would be saying that the Buddha preached Prajñāpāramitā, but that it is without perfection. In other words there is no entity pāramitā "perfection" that can be observed in conjunction with the idea of prajñāpāramitā. 

Tena

Why would it follow from this that prajñāpāramitā is called prajñāpāramitā (tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti)? Well, it seems that originally it did not. This final phrase is not included in the early versions of the text. Indeed, as we have already noted, Suzuki added it by modifying the passage from Xuanzang's translation while otherwise using Kumārajīva's. But this does not stop Suzuki treating the passage that he has added to the text as very important. 

In Suzuki's thinking the pronoun tena plays a large part. Yusa argues that the "logic of sokuhi" could just as well be "the logic of tena". (875) She cites Suzuki as saying "Tena here has the meaning of 'therefore' in either the sense of 'that is why' or 'for that reason,' of in the sense of 'that is how,' 'in that manner,'"

Note that tena does not occur in the Gilgit version of the Vajracchedikā or in Kumārajīva's translation. In fact, the whole sentence is missing. This doesn't prove that tena was absent from all the early recensions of the text, but it does undermine the idea that tena is central to understanding the message of the Vajracchedikā.

Even if we admit, for the sake of argument, that the late addition is somehow meaningful, it does not appear to mean what Suzuki suggests. The sentence is tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti. If we break the Sandhi then the sentence reads tena ucyate prajñāpāramitā iti. 

Ucyate is a passive form of the verb vacati (√vac). The change from vac- to uc-, i.e. from the consonant to the corresponding vowel sound, is called samprasaraṇa and happens routinely for words that begin with semivowels. Sanskrit grammar dictates that when a verb is in the passive voice then the agent of the sentence is a noun or pronoun in the instrumental case—tena is a pronoun in the instrumental case. 

Pronouns play a connective role, linking back to the agent of a previous sentence. In this case, the Buddha or the Tathāgata has spoken prajñāpāramitā (prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā) and in Buddhist Hybrid English "by him it is called perfection of insight", i.e. "he calls it perfection of insight".

Of course, Suzuki is not completely wrong, tena can form a logic connection. However, it is much more obvious in this case to take it as the agent of the passive verb. It looks like he has seriously misread the text. Or perhaps his goal of justifying the logic of sokuhi led him to this conclusion instead of the one preferred by a straightforward reading of the text.
 

Soku

Suzuki's misreading does not end here. As we have seen, sokuhi 即非 (Ch. jí fēi) is central to his exegesis of Prajñāpāramitā. Yusa cites Suzuki attempting to explain soku 即, obviously referencing the Heart Sutra.

The 'phenomenal' rupa (shiki 色) and the 'principle' dharma (hō 法) are clearly distinguished and stand in opposition, and yet in their very opposition, 'rupa is (soku) dharma' (shiki soku hō 色即法) , 'dharma is (soku) rupa (hō soku shiki  法即色). This is how it is in the world of spirituality. One may call it 'Oneness' or 'Non-duality (ichinyosei 一如性), which is different from the identity of two things. The One is the many, and the many is the One. (2019: 867) 

This is all very well, but in his translations Kumārajīva does not use 即 (jí) this way at all.  I've studied this passage in depth (See Attwood 2017). The relevant passage from the Gilgit manuscript (my transcription) followed by Kumārajīva's translation is:

na hi śāradvatīputrānyad rūpam anyā śunyatā nānyā śunyatānyad rūpaṁ rūpameva śunyatā śunyataiva rūpaṁ. (folio 21 verso)

舍利弗 色不異空 空不異色  色即是空 空即是色 (T.223: 8.223a13-24)

It is evident that Kumārajīva is using 即 to convey sanskrit eva, which is used to indicate emphasis akin to putting the word in italics, e.g. "appearance is emptiness." And this is the basic sense in Chinese as well. Kroll's Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese:

即 jí MC tsik 1. marks a noun or [verb] phrase as being exactly or precisely what is meant: exactly, precisely, just (so), the very" (183-4)

The Sanskrit omits the copular verb in rūpameva śunyatā śunyataiva rūpaṁ, and Kumārajīva could have done so in Chinese as well since it is typical to do so. However, Medieval Chinese aesthetics strongly favours four character phrases so that, rather than 色即空 空即色, Kumārajīva adds the verb 是 (shì). So despite what Suzuki says, it is the context that equates rūpa and dharma in his equation, not the character 即 which only acts as a qualifier. In Medieval Chinese, we could just as easily state: 色空空色 (This phrase is used by some modern commentators to summarise the passage.).

However, as my research further shows (Attwood 2017) this passage is garbled in the Large Sutra and the Heart Sutra. The original phrase found in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā is rūpameva māyā māyaiva rūpaṁ "the appearance is an illusion; the illusion is appearance". This, in turn, must be understood as relating back to the old Buddhist simile, rūpameva māyopama "appearance is like an illusion". 

Rūpa

Note here my translation of rūpa as "appearance". In Chinese translation this is usually 色, which also refers to outward form or appearance. In modern Mandarin it means "colour". The relation of rūpa to the eye (cakṣu) is that of taste (rasa) to the tongue, not that of food (āhāra) to the tongue (jihvā). Similarly, sound to the ear, smell to the nose. This is reinforced by the counterpart of the the kāya or body sense, i.e. spaṣṭāvya "able to be touched" or "touchability". In each case it is not the source of the sound, smell, taste, or felt sensations that correspond to rūpa, but the sensation that comes from the objects. In other words rūpa does not refer to substance or substantiality, but to appearance. 

Some high-profile commentators have erroneously translated rūpa as "matter". However, it is more subtly misleading to translate it as "form", since this has given rise to the almost universal misunderstanding that rūpa refers to substance rather than appearance. What rūpa means, according to standard dictionaries and as we can deduce from the context, is appearance. 

Conclusions

Suzuki's logic of sokuhi is based on a raft of misunderstanding. On investigation, it becomes apparent that Suzuki didn't understand how the term soku (即) was used in the Prajñāpāramitā literature or the significance of the negations in the Vajracchedikā. He didn't understand the Vajracchedikā; and he didn't understand Prajñāpāramitā. Rather, Suzuki tendentiously uses his idiosyncratic reading of the texts to pursue the goal of an indigenous Japanese logic that could compete with and confound Western logic. Indeed, his "logic" was part of a strategy to distinguish and valorise Japan. Perhaps it was this pursuit that caused him to overlook the fundamentally Indian nature of the Prajñāpāramitā and to misread the words. 

It's interesting that another elitist, Edward Conze, read Suzuki and conceived of himself as one of the elect who could understand the esoteric significance of the "Japanese" logic, even going so far as approvingly quoting Suzuki's "logic of sokuhi". 

The general problem is that, like many other Buddhist commentators from Nāgārjuna onwards, Suzuki fails to adequately distinguish between the epistemology of being in the state of emptiness (or cessation) in which no sensory or cognitive experience arises, on one hand, and an ontology in which nothing exists, on the other. 

The vital distinction that we must make is that the cessation of sensory experience does not generalise to the non-existence of sense experience. And in my experience Buddhists are deeply reluctant to abandon their metaphysical positions and are thus unable to retreat to this epistemic stance. And, as a result, Buddhists routine advocate for nonsensical philosophy, all the while insisting that it be taken seriously as an alternative to sensible philosophy. Those who refuse to adopt the nonsensical view are dismissed as lacking insight. 

In the cessation of experience we can expect the breakdown of the usual orientation of the practitioner. In the absence of sensory spatial clues, they cannot locate or orient themselves in space. In the absence of the iterative events by which we measure time, they cannot orient themselves in time or experience time passing. Thus the phenomenology of cessation is timeless and boundless. I have no quibble with this, except that it does not generalise into a metaphysics in which reality is timeless and boundless. 

Furthermore, in the absence of the mental events associated with selfhood, the practitioner undergoing cessation cannot orient themselves with respect to self and other. The subject/object distinction breaks down for them. Again, this does not generalise into a metaphysics in which there is no distinction between subject and object in reality. 

Generalising from private experience to a metaphysical position on reality is almost always bad philosophy. Metaphysical stances by definition apply to all beings in all times and places. In principle, any person can get a telescope and observe the moons of the planet Jupiter and come to the same conclusion that Galileo came to in 1610. The heliocentric model of the universe transcends belief systems; even those people heavily invested in the geocentric view had to come around in the end, even if it took a few centuries. Gravity is not affected by whether or not we believe in it and no amount of hand waving will change this.

This is not to deny that humans are capable of undergoing cessation and emptiness. Nor to deny that, for those people who do undergo it, cessation seems hyperreal and deeply satisfying, nor yet that undergoing cessation is life changing. I fully accept that cessation is within the range of human experience, albeit at the extreme of what is possible. The problem is with how we interpret this experience, and the fact that different people come to different metaphysical conclusions about cessation. 

The metaphysical arguments that Buddhists make on the basis of undergoing cessation are akin to arguing that, because it is possible to experience apparent weightlessness in an aeroplane flying along an inverted parabolic path, gravity doesn't exist. Buddhists then resort to the worst kind of hand waving to explain why we have weight except when travelling in an invested parabolic arc. One such explanation would be that weight is an illusion that we experience because we are unawakened and from the ultimate point of view we are in fact all weightless all the time. Or that in order to experience weightlessness we must all have an eternally weightless aspect of our being that only manifests when we travel in an inverted parabola, which is the true shape of reality. At worst Buddhists insist that unless we experience weightlessness in the same plane with the same pilot then it is not true weightlessness and all we can do is try to perfect flying until the pilot reincarnates some time in the future. 

In other words, Buddhist "philosophy" is the naive speculations of the ignorant elevated to the level of theology, but as a multitude of mutually exclusive speculations about which we argue endlessly. 

The central characteristic of all peak experiences is a quality of hyperreality: of this moment being more real than reality. The worst case scenario is that the peak experience leads one to spend life chasing peak experiences in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the sense of hyperreality. Meditation has a similar effect on some people. Or we see the opposite, that peak experiences are discouraged so the person who easily slips into the bliss of dhyāna starts to feel guilty and holds back from it, leading them to lose interest in meditation.

There is a strong contrast between how different meditators interpret cessation. Some, for example, attest that they have merged with absolute consciousness and discovered that everything about the universe is completely determined; that events simply unfold as they will and our apparent decisions and choices are just illusions. Others deny the existence of an absolute and argue that our choices are significant in how we experience the world; that although conditions determine how events unfold, we can change the conditions. And all kinds of variations on these views exist. Mystics can't agree on the details of mysticism.

It is too big a leap to go from "I felt that everything was part of a harmonious whole" to "I know the universe to be a unified and undifferentiated whole: the One." Just as it is too big a leap to experiencing weightlessness in an aeroplane and declaring that gravity doesn't really exist. For a start, it doesn't take into account the circumstances. 

In the end, Suzuki's "logic" is just word games and hand waving. His early experience of satori is widely remarked upon, so perhaps he experienced a sense of oneness. But this hardly qualifies him to comment on reality. 

Suzuki dressed up his hand waving as "Eastern wisdom" with terms like sokuhi but, in fact, he didn't really understand Prajñāpāramitā and was often relying on ideas drawn from European philosophy, particularly German Idealism and Neoplatonism (probably via Theosophy). Suzuki seems to have been an Orientalist in Edward Said's pejorative sense, using a artificially constructed notion of the Asian (especially, the Japanese) personality to try to ground his approach to Zen. As Robert Sharf says: "while Suzuki’s Zen claimed a privileged perspective that transcended cultural difference, it was at the same time contrived as the antithesis of everything Suzuki found most deplorable about the West" (1995: 47). And not simply "the West" in the abstract, but westerners.

Arthur Koestler was one intellectual who was not taken in by Suzuki's hand waving:

"There is one redeeming possibility: that all this drivel is deliberately intended to confuse the reader, since one of the avowed aims of Zen is to perplex and unhinge the rational mind. If this hypothesis were correct, Professor Suzuki's voluminous oeuvre of at least a million words, specially written for this purpose, would represent a hoax of truly heroic dimensions, and the laugh would be on the Western intellectuals who fell for it" (from the essay 'A Stink of Zen', cited in  Sharf 1993: 41). 

My sense is that Koestler was right to refer to Suzuki's presentation of Zen as a hoax, although I would not endorse all of the anxieties expressed in The Lotus and the Robot. Worse, the Suzuki hoax is now into its third generation and still going strong, especially when it comes to Prajñāpāramitā.  In particular, Conze took Suzuki's approach and gave it his own narcissistic spin. Where Suzuki's attempts to paint the Japanese people as the elite, Conze narcissistically sees himself in this role. The damage done by these two men has been immeasurable. One result is that the universities of Europe and America have all but abandoned research on Prajñāpāramitā texts. Where the texts are read, it is inevitably through the lens of Conze's appalling translations. 

~~oOo~~

Texts of §13a

evam ukte āyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavaṃtam etad avocat | ko nāmāyaṃ bhagavan dharmaparyāyaḥ kathaṃ cainaṃ dhārayāmi | evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmaṃtaṃ subhūtim etad avocat | prajñāpāramitā nāmāyaṃ subhūte dharmaparyāyaḥ | evaṃ cainaṃ dhāraya | tat kasya hetoḥ | yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | saivāpāramitā |  (Schopen 1989)

At these words, the Venerable Subhūti said this to the Lord, “What is the name, Lord, of this round of teachings, and how should I memorize it?” / At these words, the Lord said this to the Venerable Subhūti, “This round of teachings, Subhūti, is called the Perfection of Insight, and this is how you should memorize it. Why is that? The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. (Harrison and Watanabe 2006: 126)

evamukte āyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavantam etad avocat - ko nāma ayaṃ bhagavan dharmaparyāyaḥ, kathaṃ cainaṃ dhārayāmi? evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmantaṃ subhūtim etad avocat - prajñāpāramitā nāmāyaṃ subhūte dharmaparyāyaḥ | evaṃ cainaṃ dhāraya | tatkasya hetoḥ? yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā, saiva apāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti || (Conze 1957: 37-8)

Subhuti asked: What then, O Lord, is this discourse on dharma, and how should I bear it in mind? The Lord replied: This discourse on dharma, Subhuti, is called 'Wisdom which has gone beyond', and as such should you bear it in mind! And why? Just that which the Tathagata has taught as the wisdom which has gone beyond, just that He has taught as not gone beyond. Therefore is it called 'Wisdom which has gone beyond'. (Conze 1975: 51)

यैव सुभूते प्रज्ञापारमिता तथागतेन भाषिता सैवापारमिता तथागतेन भाषिता । तेनोच्यते प्रज्ञापारमितेति ॥ (Müller 1884: 29)

持  佛告須菩提是經名為金剛般若波羅蜜以是名字汝當奉持所以者何須菩提佛說般若波羅蜜則非般若波羅蜜  (T 235: 8.750a11 - 15 = Kumārajīva)

佛告須菩提：「是經名為『金剛般若波羅蜜』。以是名字，汝當奉持。所以者何？須菩提！佛說般若波羅蜜， 則*非般若波羅蜜。...」(Kumārajīva with CBETA punctuation)

* 即 in the Ming Edition of the Tripiṭaka. 

作是語已，佛告善現言：「具壽！今此法門名為能斷金剛般若波羅蜜多，如是名字汝當奉持。何以故？善現！如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。」  (CBETA T 220-ix: 7.982a7-11. Xuanzang).

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2017). 'Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra.' Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13, 52–80.

Conze, Edward. (1957) Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā. Serie Orientale Roma XIII. Roma.

Conze, Edward (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. 2nd Ed. George Allen & Unwin.

Harrison, Paul. (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra', in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p.133-159.

Harrison, Paul & Watanabe, Shōgo (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā.' in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p. 89-132.

Müller, Max. (1881) Buddhist Texts from Japan (Vol 1.iii). Oxford University Press. Online: http://archive.org/details/buddhisttextsfr00bhgoog

Nagatomo, Shigenori. (2000) 'The Logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A.' Asian Philosophy, 10(3): 212-244.

Nattier, Jan. (2003) A few good men : The Bodhisattva path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). University of Hawai'i Press.

​Schopen, Gregory. (1975) 'The phrase ‘sa pṛthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet’ in the Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna.' Indo-Iranian Journal. 17(3-4): 147-181.

Schopen, Gregory. (1989) 'The Manuscript of the Vajracchedikā Found at Gilgit,' in Studies in the Literature of the Great Vehicle: Three Mahāyāna Buddhist Texts, ed. by L. O. Gómez and J. A. Silk, Ann Arbor. 89-139.

Sharf, Robert H. (1993), "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism", History of Religions, 33 (1): 1–43. Online.

Sharf, Robert H. (1993). 'Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited.' In Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture), edited by James W. Heisig and John Maraldo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 40-51. Online.

Walser, Joseph. 2018. Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism: Emptiness, Power, and the Question of Origin. Routledge.

Yusa, Michiko. (2019). 'D. T. Suzuki and the “Logic of Sokuhi,” or the “Logic of Prajñāpāramitā”.' In The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy. New York: Springer. 859-616.

Is There Any Such Thing as 'a Text'?

Lines from a Buddhist Sutra
British Library

Most Buddhists will be familiar with the problem of finding two different translations of a text they are inspired by and discovering that the two are inexplicably different. This experience was partly what motivated me to learn Pāli and then Sanskrit (and to dabble in Chinese) in the first place. I remember reading the Bodhicāryāvatara in two translations and being puzzled at the differences. I did not realise at the time that one was a direct translation of the Sanskrit and the other was a secondary translation from the Tibetan translation, which helped to explain some of the major differences. 

If we aren't motivated to learn a scriptural language in order to see for ourselves what the text is saying, presuming it is possible to understand it, then we have limited choices. What most people seem to do is make an aesthetic judgement on which English rendering appeals more. I often hear people say that they prefer this or that translation with no reference to the source language. A monoglot Buddhist will say that some translation captures the meaning and some other translation more literal, with no apparent irony. How does one assess the success, let alone the literalness of a translation when one cannot read the language it was translated from?

Another approach I commonly see is to seek out as many translations as possible and hope to triangulate what the underlying text says. One sees quite elaborate attempts at new renderings of texts with no reference to the Sanskrit or Pāḷi, for example. I've even seen these referred to as a new 'translation'. An old friend used to study the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta by giving each participant in the study group a different translation to read from. Sometimes this is successful and other times not.

Thus we Buddhists make choices between translations on superficial and subjective bases, and we probably think of the translation we are familiar with as "the text". Do we ever stop to wonder what "the text" means if "the text" can be rendered 20 different ways in English? Aren't the different translations in fact different texts?


Critical Editions

But the situation is almost unimaginably worse than this scenario. Because most translations are from critical editions. In the process of making a critical edition one collects up all the surviving 'witnesses' (manuscripts, inscriptions, and earlier editions) and examines each one, possibly correcting scribal errors. Typically each witness is different from all the others, even when they are copies of the same 'original'. Scribes inadvertently introduce errors, large and small, and editors deliberately make amendments, subtractions and additions. Then choosing the best manuscript (best can be judged on any number of bases) one notes all the variations from the best one in the other manuscripts. Traditionally this is first done on a large grid. To produce a critical edition one selects from the variations to produce a text that is consistent and coherent. And if this does not produce a comprehensible or likely reading an editor can suggest an unattested reading that fits better (hopefully with notes to explain the logic of their choice). The editor tries to reconstruct the text as it was first transmitted, or as the author intended it to be. The result is a single text with all the variations footnoted and usually extra notes on amendments (though one of the great problems of Indian textual studies is the practice of silently amending non-standard Sanskrit forms thus obscuring dialectical variants).

And it is these critical editions which end up being translated. In the case of the Heart Sutra for example, Conze consulted more than two dozen sources all different from each other. And he made a number of decisions about the author's intention that in retrospect look doubtful at best or were simply wrong (as discussed in my series of essays on the text earlier in 2013). So each translation hides complexity, sometimes vast complexity, and an industrious process of simplification that is fully subject to human foibles. 

But still worse, some Indian texts can now only be understood by reference to commentaries, often centuries removed from the composition of the text and written by sectarians. Again in the case of the Heart Sutra the commentaries disagree on how to interpret the text along sectarian lines.For example tantrikas treat the text as tantric because it contains a dhāraṇī. And more often than not the commentary itself must undergo textual criticism in order to reconstruct the author's text because it too is subject to all the processes of change that affect a text. 

There is no Diamond in the Diamond Sutra.

Take the Sanskrit Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra as an example. For a start the title ought not to be translated as Diamond Sutra or even Diamond Cutter. This was a choice made by Max Müller in 1884 and has been slavishly repeated ever since. But as Conze remarks in the notes to his 1957 edition, the word vajra was very unlikely to be understood as meaning "diamond" by its audience. In that milieu vajra almost certain meant 'thunderbolt' (that wonderfully unscientific word that combines thunder and lightning). Really, we ought to translate vajra as 'lightning bolt'.

Chedikā is from √chid 'to cut off, amputate; cut, hew, split'. A noun form is cheda 'cutoff; cut' and the adjective is chedaka 'cutter, cutting' and in the feminine chedikā. Sandhi rules dictate that initial ch is doubled to cch when preceded by a vowel. Then we ought to ask what kind of compound vajracchedikā is.  Other compounds with -ccheda suggest that it is the first member of the compound which is cut off - i.e. guṇaccheda 'cutting the chord' or dhyānaccheda 'interruption of meditation'. These are tatpuruṣa compounds. Monier-Williams lists no other compounds ending in the feminine -cchedikā. Since "cutting off the lightening" is an unlikely rendering and it is in the feminine gender following prajñāpāramitā which is also feminine, we must suspect a bahuvrīhi compound (i.e. it is an adjective describing prajñāpāramitā): "the perfect wisdom that cuts like lightening". I think this is probably what it means. So really we should refer to it as the [Cuts like] Lightning Sutra, though it's extremely unlikely that the facts will result in a change. 

The Manuscript Tradition and Editions.

Paul Harrison and Shōgo Watanabe have provided us with a detailed account of the history of editions of the Vajracchedikā (Vaj). There are now ten published editions, including Harrison & Watanabe. The first of these was produced in 1881 in Devanāgarī by the redoubtable F. Max Müller. Müller had four witnesses of which two were copies of the same original and two were Chinese block prints. All of these witnesses post-date the composition of Vaj by at least 1500 years. They are copies of copies of copies and each copying introduced errors. It was Müller who introduced the system of breaking the text into sections. His numbering has been retained in subsequent editions, but they do not occur in any manuscript.

Not long after Müller produced his edition a number of manuscripts of Vaj were found and began to be published. Aurel Stein discovered a Central Asian ms. in 1900 that was published by F. E. Pargiter in 1916 (P). This manuscript is thought to date from the late 5th or early 6th century (though dating on palaeographic grounds can be doubtful). Five of the nineteen folios had been lost and many others were poorly preserved. The Pargiter text appears to be similar to the Chinese translation by Kumārajīva (401 CE).

A partial manuscript was found in 1931 as part of a cache of texts discovered near Gilgit (G). The seven surviving folios are dated to the 6th or 7th century. This ms. was not published until 1956 in a Roman script edition. A facsimile edition was published in 1974. Another Roman script version was published by N. Dutt in 1959 which used portions of Müller to fill in the gaps. However none of the Roman script editions were entirely reliable and in 1989 Gregory Schopen published a new edition which corrected the many mistakes. Schopen's edition is available online from the Gretil Archive.

Amongst several editions of the complete Vaj brought out after these finds, only Conze's 1957 publication has attracted any attention. Conze based his edition on Müller's, but presented it in Roman script and included amendments based on the published versions of P and particularly G. Conze introduced a number of innovations such as western punctuation and hyphenated compounds. "However, Conze did not use M consistently as his base text, occasionally making changes to the wording in which he conflated his various witnesses arbitrarily. He also failed to list the differences in his witnesses exhaustively." (Harrison & Watanabe 92). Never-the-less Conze's edition has become, as it were, canonical and most subsequent studies and translations have been based on his edition and this means, for example that "philosophical questions have also been addressed on less than solid foundations..." (92). 

In 1961 P. L. Vaidya produced yet another edition based on Müller but, as per Conze, with "improvements" based on G as it was then (unreliably) published. This text is widely available on the internet via the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon and the Gretil Archive for example. And yet Harrison & Watanabe conclude it "can safely be set aside" (92). Similarly the edition by Joshi simply rearranges the text of previously published editions. 

Finally we have an incomplete ms. (MS 2385) discovered in the Schøyen Collection dated to the 6th or 7th century, and recently published by Harrison & Watanabe  (2006). This text is missing it's ending. Fortunately the Schøyen ms. (S) is very similar in character to the Gilgit ms. (G). Indeed S and G are closer to each other linguistically than either is to the edition of Pargiter (P). Both contain a number of similar Prakritic features (see Harrison & Watanabe (97-99) S contains sections 1-16c; whereas G contains sections 13b-14e and 15b-32b. And thus, while they are not identical where they overlap, together G and S make up a reasonably consistent single text (see below).

In addition a total of twelve identifiable fragments of Vaj have been discovered in Central Asia. Other texts have been catalogued but are presently lost somewhere in the Nepalese National Archives it seems!

So to sum up the most widely used edition of the Sanskrit Vaj is unreliable; the most widely available to those outside academia is also unreliable. An important problem in the history of this text is that the sources available to Müller are considerably longer than P, G or S. Do we treat this as one text that was added to, or do we treat this as one text in at least two recensions, one shorter and one longer? 

One of the weird things about Vaj is that it suggests that anyone who recites "even one verse of four lines" (catuṣpadikām api gāthāṃ) stands to benefit. But this text is not in verse. There's no evidence that it ever was in verse except this phrase. Is it a stock phrase that was used unthinkingly? Or did the text once exist as verse? As far as we know only one Prajñāpāramitā text is in verse: the Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā.

So far we have a Sanskrit text, available in multiple recensions and versions which may well not point back to a single point of origin, and known far and wide by the mistranslated title. The situation in Chinese is almost as complex with seven different translations of texts which vary in length and quality. 

The Text in Translation

When we read a translation it is almost always the case that this background complexity is completely suppressed or at best highly compressed. 

When it comes to translations we are similarly blessed with many options. Max Müller published his translation in 1894. Conze has published three versions of his English translation with only the most recent being widely available. As with the Heart Sutra, Conze's edition has become standard amongst Buddhists, but when examined it is problematic. My preliminary assessment is that Conze's translation of Vaj suffers from his beliefs getting in the way, just as in his Heart Sutra. Conze in particular embraces paradox and nonsense because it fits his preconceptions about Prajñāpāramitā, but this causes him to mistranslate and to obscure the ways in which the text does make sense.

Schopen has published both a translation of the Gilgit ms. and a complete translation. And translations have also appeared by Mu Soeng, Red Pine  and Richard H. Jones. Now we can add the translation by Harrison of the combined S and G manuscripts. Apart from Schopen and Harrison all the available translations are based either on Müller's or Conze's Sanskrit editions with all their faults. As one might expect there are a number of translations from Chinese also, mainly from Kumārajīva's translation.

Unfortunately the translation by Harrison is relatively inaccessible, though it is based on by far the most carefully constructed edition. There is in fact one interesting and useful presentation of the translation on the web based at Oslo University's Bibliotheca Polyglotta. Though the website in theory makes the text available to everyone, I don't think many Buddhists will find the site, and many won't feel comfortable with the presentation in multiple languages and versions, it is not formatted for easy printing for off-line study, and it lacks all the extensive discussion and notes from the publications mentioned. It would be advantageous to have a popular publication with the Sanskrit text and Harrison's translation (with notes) side by side.

One development mentioned briefly above is worth drawing attention to. Promoted as "a new translation" (it is not) the Diamond Sutra website, by one Alex Johnson, is an extreme example of using English translations found on the internet to try to triangulate the underlying text and produce something more comprehensible, though in this case he has singularly failed to find the text. What the author has done, essentially, is to produce a collage of all the versions. No attention is paid to which text has been translated into English - though translations from Chinese are invariably from Kumārajīva's version and from English from Müller or Conze. At times it strays very far from the Sanskrit and/or Chinese text as the elaborations of previous translators are incorporated to produce a rather bloated and turgid rendition of little doctrinal or literary merit (though clearly Johnson has laboured long to produce this, he'd have been better to spend his time learning Sanskrit or Chinese). Nor is any attention given to the context of the sutra. A single example should suffice: in Section 5 he has the Buddha say, "When you see that all forms are illusive and unreal, then you will begin to perceive your true Buddha nature." But "Buddha nature" is entirely anachronistic and out of place here. It is never mentioned in the text. This late Buddhist idea has been crowbarred into the text in a most inelegant way. The Sanskrit text here is "hi lakṣanālakṣanataḥ tathāgato draṣṭavyaḥ" (Harrison 115). This says: "For a Tathāgata should be seen from the non-characteristic of characteristics.” [As ever arguing against naive realism and reification of sense data] Reconciling Johnson's purple prose with this statement is impossible, and I would say, pointless. And yet if you search "Diamond Sutra" what do you find? 

Complexity

The purpose of this account based on the examination carried out by Harrison & Watanabe is to highlight how complex the manuscript traditions are and how the processes of textual production in the present suppress complexity at every stage, thus to some extent falsifying the witness statements. Vaj is actually not a complicated case, but it highlights a problem that Buddhists simply don't think about. As I said with respect to the Heart Sutra, it is not so much a "text" as a tradition with multiple, competing, variously unreliable, texts. I don't want to go down the road of post-modern textual criticism and deny the existence of the text altogether. For one thing I don't know enough about post-modernism to be credible. But we are obliged to think more about what we mean by "the Diamond Sutra". The production of the text we read is a process in which various scribes and editors have been involved. Many decisions have been made to prune the tangled mass of the tradition in order to present us with reading matter and ideas as homogeneous and simple as possible. Reality is somewhat different:

"... we ought to expect multiple branching of the manuscript tradition, with enlargement and other textual changes not fully present in some of the branches, despite the late date of their witnesses. This presents the editor of texts like this with considerable problems which cannot be gone into here, but to put it in a nutshell, the idea that the wording of any Mahāyāna sūtra can be restored to some original and perfect state by text-critical processes must be abandoned: all lines do not converge back on a single point." (Harrison 240. Emphasis added)

So according Harrison there might not be a (discoverable) single point of origin, a single authoritative text. And this is an argument against criticisms of Conze. That fact that Conze's version is popular with Buddhists is what makes it authoritative, however uncritical those Buddhists have been. Perhaps we have to consider that his version, with all it's faults, is no less valid than other versions? But wouldn't this be rather too defeatist? Ought not errors of reading and translation be repaired? Awkward and infelicitous, not to say inaccurate, translations can be improved on. Though experience does suggest that given the choice Buddhists will cling to a familiar corrupt text rather than embrace a repaired new one.

Conclusion

In the last twenty years I have gone from naive follower to engaged reader, to published scholar. I've discovered along the way that editors and editions can be unreliable. In my education as a Buddhist I was inculcated with the greatest respect for Dr Conze. My Buddhist teacher dubbed him one of the great Buddhists of the 20th century. But as a scholar his methods left much to be desired and his particular Buddhist beliefs seem to have hampered his scholarship. Most of his work is problematic and all of it needs redoing. I hope to do this for the Heart Sutra in the English speaking world (by formally publishing the material I've been blogging) and clearly Harrison, Watanabe and Schopen have done so for the Diamond Sutra. The Sanskrit edition of the Aṣṭasāhasrika-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra is apparently good enough, so we only require a re-translation of that text (several partial translations have been produced, but as yet no one has undertaken the whole task).

But all of this is simply to play the same old game and something about it nags me. A standardised text is almost a lie. It rests on the idea, drawn from Classical scholarship, of a single author sitting down and composing a text that was then corrupted by scribes over time. But Buddhist texts don't seem like this. They almost always seem to be the product of local traditions (plural) preserved in local dialects and languages.

Clearly Buddhist texts are not like Vedic texts. They are not revelations of eternally unchanging texts. They have not been preserved with the kind of fidelity that Vedic oral texts have. Given that we live 800 years after Buddhism died out in India, the home of Sanskrit text production, we must wonder how much or how little of the variation has survived the burning of Buddhist libraries. If we have this many variations now, how many more were lost? 

Buddhists are often fundamentalist when it comes to texts. We have a 'cult of the book' as Gregory Schopen terms it. The book itself becomes an object of worship (I know of at least a couple of Buddhist shrines that have never-read books on them). The book itself symbolises knowledge, but is in conflict with the anti-intellectual injunction against the written word as definitive. In this view, wisdom cannot be put into words except as nonsense and paradox. So even though the Diamond Sutra is a sacred text, it need not be read, though it is chanted from memory in many monasteries and widely studied

The Buddhist tradition is strangely hostile to complexity at times. We are always trying iron out wrinkles, usually with unintended consequences. It begins to seem a little quixotic to insist that our texts are unitary phenomena. Was the Vajracchedikā composed as single text? Did it once stop at what Conze calls "The First Ending" (§13a) only to be restarted by a latter author? How did the later authors justify adding words, lines and sections? Were they like Alex Johnson, i.e. well meaning but incompetent editors trying to resolve textual variations without really understanding the text? If Harrison is right and the lines do not converge then which Vajracchedikā do we take to be authoritative. In China it's usually the translation by Kumārajīva that is authoritative if there is a choice (though as discussed, this is not true in the case of the Heart Sutra) 

Practising Buddhists often resolve these conflicts and contradictions by changing the frame of the discussion and invoking the authority of personal experience. Which is to say they sidestep the textual issues by trumping the authority of the text with a higher authority. Only in doing so they retain the text as object of worship as the (ultimately faulty) encapsulation of "perfect wisdom". On the other hand historically merely hearing the Vajracchedikā is said to have brought about miraculous conversion: in ancient times for example for Huineng the patriarch of Zen and in modern times by Sangharakshita who, aged 17, both realised he was a Buddhist after reading an early translation from the Chinese and also had a series of mystical experiences that shaped his approach to Buddhism (and indeed to life) subsequently. 

The other frame change we like to invoke is to cite "the Absolute", a term drawn from German idealism but applied to Buddhism especially by Conze. Sometimes the term non-dual is used instead though the meaning is more or less the same. Modern Buddhists frequently believe that there is a viewpoint that stands outside the framework altogether and sees things as they are - though heaven forbid that we call this the god perspective! The Absolute is beyond words and concepts and yet encompasses all words and all concepts. And crucially the Absolute can be invoked to resolve all doubts and all disputes. If one cannot think through a problem to a satisfactory conclusion that is because not all problems are amenable to thought or reason. Some problems and doubts are only resolved by adopting the godlike perspective of the Absolute.  This is the viewpoint which insists that wisdom cannot be put into words except as nonsense and paradox.  Unfortunately credibility is strained at times when people who clearly do not have access to this perspective, use nonsense to silence questions and stifle discussion. 

So, is there any such thing as 'a text'? I spend my time reading and studying and creating texts. However, the sacred Buddhist text as a unitary object with well defined boundaries is a fiction. With a tradition like the Prajñāpāramitā we have a number of texts which represent the tradition in different ways at different times, but are themselves far from stable or fixed. The modern day obsession with fidelity of transmission does not seem to have been shared by our Indian antecedents. Texts were changed as expedient. Mistakes were as likely to be conserved as correct readings were. Better to think of a text as a sketch of a tradition from a particular place and time, seen after several generations of copying. It may be clear and focussed and relatively helpful in understanding the tradition which produced it, or it may be obscured and blurred and unhelpful. Sometimes it's hard to know which. Most Buddhist texts in fact seem to continue to be composed over a considerable period of time that may only have stopped with the destruction of Buddhism in India.

~~oOo~~

The use of Negation in Vajracchedikā

Paul Harrison

This essay will reproduce and, to some extent, critique an argument put forward by my countryman, Paul Harrison, in his 2006 English translation of the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā or Diamond Sutra. My thanks to David Welsh for bringing this article to my attention and providing me with a copy of it. 

The Vajracchedikā was first translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in ca. 402 CE (one also sees the date given as 401 and 403). The text that Kumārajīva translated was somewhat shorter than the one edited by Max Müller in 1881, suggesting that the text continued to change after it was first composed. The dating of the initial composition of Vajracchedikā is now disputed. Conze had argued that it belonged, with the Heart Sutra, to the period ca. 300-500 CE which follows the expansion of the basic text from 8000 to 100,000 lines. We now know that the Heart Sutra is a special case and was composed in the 7th century in China. Some scholars now argue that Vajracchedikā belongs to the earliest strata (see Schopen 1975: 153, n.16; Williams 1989: 42). According to one source cited by Schopen "...the latest date of establishment of the Diamond Sutra will be 200 AD or probably 150 AD" (153, n.16). It may be that, contra Conze, Vajracchedikā predates Aṣṭasāhasrikā (Schopen n.17). Jan Nattier has proposed that the Vajracchedikā was composed in a very different milieu (2003: 180, n. 18) "one of many reasons" is the difference in terminology: where Aṣṭa prefers experiential terms like na saṁvidyate 'is not found' and nopalabhyate 'is not obtained, Vajracchedikā is more confident using the verb 'to be' (asti, nāsti). For Nattier, this suggests that the Vajracchedikā is more at ease with ontology. Another of the quirks of Vajracchedikā is that it never mentions śūnyatā or svabhāva, which is odd for a supposedly late Prajñāpāramitā text.

In his notes to the revised edition of the (partial) Gilgit ms., Greg Schopen (1989) has listed the many problems in Conze's Sanskrit edition of Vajracchedikā (1957), along with previous editions. Conze has been too eclectic with his source materials and paid insufficient attention to chronology. His notes also leave much to be desired. We have reason to be suspicious of Conze's edition and thus of his translation of, and commentary upon, this text.

In 2006, Harrison & Watanabe published a new (partial) edition of the Vajracchedikā based on a manuscript (probably) from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and held in the Schøyen Collection.  Like the edition by Schopen, this new edition is considerably shorter than previously published editions and close in content to the Chinese translation of Kumārajīva. In the same publication Harrison combined the Gilgit and the Schøyen partial manuscripts to create a single hybrid which represents the text as it circulated in Greater Gandhāra (roughly Northern Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan) in the 6th or 7th centuries. This hybrid manuscript was then the basis of a new translation (Harrison 2006). The text and translation (sans Harrison's extensive notes and comments) are available online via Biblioteca Polyglotta at the University of Oslo.

In his notes, Paul Harrison tackles the vexed subject of paradox. His very interesting contribution is to provide a detailed argument for reassessing the idiom which is so particular to the Vajracchedikā, which he sums up as "X is non-X; hence it is called X." In particular, Harrison cautions against reading "some kind of mystical subversion of language" into this idiom. Richard H. Jones also resists the conclusion that the text was illogical or not meant to be understood, an idea which he says is "...frankly baffling and insulting to the ingenuity of the authors of this and other Perfection of Wisdom texts" (190, 220-3). I go along with this.

The mystification, even obfuscation, of Perfection of Wisdom texts has been actively pursued in some quarters. Correcting such misreadings will no doubt take time and will probably be resisted by those who enjoy the status quo. I put Harrison's case here, slightly modified with insights from Jones, in the hope that it will cause the more thoughtful amongst us to reconsider the Perfection of Wisdom. My own agenda is to try to demonstrate that the Vajracchedikā is another text which makes more sense when read using what I have called the hermeneutic of experience.


Negation

Buddhists will be familiar with the idea that prefixing a- (or an- for words beginning with vowels) to a noun or adjective negates it. (However, I have argued against the popular perception that this is the function of the syllable 'a' that gives it a central place in Prajñāpāramitā. See The Essence of All Mantras). Harrison begins by pointing out that such negated words can be treated as compounds of either of two types: as a karmadhāraya (not-X, no X, non-X) or as a bahuvrīhi (X-less, Lacking X, having no X). In his example the word aputra can be read as describing a person who is 'no son', with the possible implication of being unworthy of his parents; or the person might be 'sonless' or 'have no children'. Either reading is possible and only context can tell us which reading applies in any given case.

English translations of Vajracchedikā and other Prajñāpāramitā texts almost always opt for the karmadhāraya reading. Thus in Conze's (1975) translation we find:

And this world-system the Tathāgata has taught as no-system. Therefore it is called a 'world system'. (52; §13c)

I think everyone agrees that this is nonsense, even if we disagree on the significance of such nonsense. See, for example, Shigenori Nagatomo (2000) for an attempt to make "make intelligible the logic that is used in this Sutra in which a seemingly contradictory assertion is made to articulate the Buddhist understanding of (human) reality" (213).

There exist at least four Sanskrit variations on this sentence, 8 Chinese translations, and one Tibetan. The Gilgit Sanskrit manuscript reads:

yo 'py asau lokadhātur adhātuḥ sa tathāgatena bhāṣitas tenocyate lokadhātur iti | (Harrison 137)

We've mentioned that the English practice is to treat the compounds as karmadhāryas ("no-system"). Harrison points out that the Chinese also read karmadhārayas, because they negate the terms using 非 fēi rather than 無 wú (cf the negations in the Heart Sutra which all use 無). What interests Harrison is that the Tibetans treat the compounds as bahuvrīhi (X med pa or X ma mchis pa) and that this seems to be the better reading. In the case of lokadhātu/adhātu we might, with the Chinese, construe this as 'the world system (or realm, sphere, element, etc.) is not a system'; or '...is a non-system'; or '...is no system at all.' However, we may also read it as saying that lokadhātu lacks a system or that there is no system in it (138). Harrison translates:

"Any world system there is has been preached by the Realized One as systemless. Thus it is called a world-system" 

The obvious question is whether we can chose either option arbitrarily? Harrison thinks not. He thinks we must chose to read these compounds as bahuvrīhis, i.e., as adjectives of the unnegated term. In this case, adhātu is an adjective describing the substantive lokadhātu. In order to show this, he first lists all thirty of the terms that are negated in the text. In each case what is negated is the second part of the compound: where we have a compound of the form XY, the negative is almost always aY, though sometimes aXY with an implied negation of Y. For example, lokadhātu > adhātu; puṇyaskandha > askandha; ātmabhāva > bhāva and so on.

Reading the Negations in Vaj

The key to understanding this idiom, according to Harrison, is in the phrase nirātmāno dharmā 'dharmas are selfless', which is found in the Vajracchedikā (17h) but echoes an Āgama phrase. It's also expressed anātmakāḥ sarve dharmāḥ, 'all dharmas are selfless'. The Pāli counterpart of this phrase, sabbe dhammā anattā, is more ambiguous and is frequently read as 'all dharmas are not-self'. However, Harrison argues that the ambiguity is not present in Sanskrit, so that a term like nirātma must be read as a bahuvrīhi (i.e., as self-less, rather than non-self).

"Thus nirātmāno dharmā means that all dharmas lack a self or essence, or to put it in other words, they have no core ontologically, they only appear to exist separately and independently by the power of conventional language, even though they are in fact dependently originated" (139)

I'm largely in agreement with Harrison. One of the key features of Prajñāpāramitā thought is a trenchant critique of substance ontologies which became a feature of Buddhist Abhidharma thought in North India around the beginning of the common era.

However, I differ from Harrison in attributing the problem to "appearance" and "conventional language". Clearly, we do have experiences. This is not a matter of appearance or convention. The use of the term "illusions" (indicating that experience is not real) is itself an aspect of the shift of attention from dharmas qua experience to dharmas qua reality. The latter leads to the necessity to split reality into relative and absolute (or conventional and real). If we do not go down the path of real dharmas the issue of conventional vs real language does not arise. In other words, the split of language into conventional and real is dependent on framing the discussion in terms of real or unreal. The early Buddhists deny the validity of this dichotomy with respect to experience (e.g., Kaccānagotta Sutta SN 12.15) and thus imply that the conventional/real split is not valid, either. Thus, if we accept the early Buddhist argument, and I do, then we need not invoke conventional language and illusions. 

The Buddhist model of cognition itself shows why this is so: cognition (vijñāna) is always sense-object, sense-faculty and sense-cognition working together. "Direct knowledge of objects" is simply not possible in this model as sense-cognition is always part of Buddhist knowledge production. "Reality" gets crowbarred into Modern Buddhism, but in early Buddhism there seems to be no concept that corresponds to our concept of reality. Early Buddhists accepted no noumena behind phenomena. The Buddha was always concerned with experience and understanding the nature of experience.  

Thus, the problem is not one of "appearance", but one of interpretation. The naive realist feels themself to be in direct contact with reality. And, as part of this interpretive framework, the sense of self is also interpreted as real (giving rise to a number of false notions such as disembodied consciousness; pure subjectivity; a true self; i.e., a substantial entity behind what feels like subjective experience; and persistence of consciousness after death). When we understand that these ideas were meant to be applied to the domain of experience, rather than the broader domain of reality, then we eliminate a great deal of confusion both in language and in metaphysics. 

This difference aside, Harrison's proposal to read negated compounds like adhātu in the Vajracchedikā as bahuvṛhis is very interesting and useful. In the case of a term like prajñāpāramitā we get the negated term apāramitā. As he says, prajñāpāramitā "does not contain any perfection [pāramitā] within itself, it is devoid of perfectionhood, so to speak, which would constitute its essence."

So the form of the first part of the argument is now: Any X kind of Y is Y-less according to the Buddha. In other words, just because we can talk about various kinds of dhātu (loka-dhātu, dharma-dhātu, mano-dhātu etc) does not make dhātu a thing; does not make dhātu real; does not imply a substantial entity. There is no dhātutva or dhātu-ness, no noumena lurking in the background to give our experiences the qualities of permanence, satisfactoriness or substance.

Final Affirmation

Harrison's explanation of the final affirmation ("thus is it called Perfection of Wisdom") I find less convincing, precisely because I'm unconvinced by the arguments about so-called conventional language.

"If there was perfection in the perfection of insight, then perfection would exist apart from the perfection of insight, and we would have two things, not one, and we could no longer speak about anything as the perfection of insight... However, there is no perfection existing as an entity in and of itself apart from the perfection of insight..." (139-40).

This approach echoes discussions in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and does draw out an important aspect of the critique in the sense that it is critical of essence or noumena. However, I think Jones does better. The form of the affirmation in Sanskrit is:

tenocyate lokadhātur iti; i.e., (without sandhi) tena ucyate "lokadhātuḥ" iti.

Jones points out that the tendency of previous translators to render tena as 'hence, thus, that is why' introduces a paradox. He argues that in fact no paradox is implied (222). What translators, including Harrison, it seems, are doing here is making the final statement a direct logical consequence of the previous: XY is Y-less, therefore it is called XY. But as we have already observed, this inference is not logical. The fact that a world-system is not a system does not logically infer that we should call it a world-system. In this case the word "therefore" seems out of place, to say the least, and this raises the question of how we translate tena.

Conventionally, tena in this position can be translated as "therefore". Apte's dictionary sv. tad has "...tena the instrumental of tad is often used with adverbial force in the sense of 'therefore', 'on that account', 'in that case', 'for that reason.'" Jones is arguing that tena does not have adverbial force here. Jones construes the sentence as being in the form: "XY is not a (real) Y. The word 'XY' is used this way." 

The iti following lokadhātuḥ is equivalent to putting the word in quotes. The Sanskrit: lokadhātur iti corresponds to English [the word] 'World System'. The verb ucyate is a third person singular passive from √vac, 'to say, to speak'. Here, the passive requires the weakest grade of the root vowel and √vac undergoes samprasaraṇa to become uc; and ucyate means 'it is said, it is spoken'. And here we understand that it is the word lokadhātu (in the nominative) that is being spoken. With a passive verb the agent will be in the instrumental case and tena is the only word in the instrumental case. Thus, here we can take tena 'by him' to be the agent of the verb rather than an adverb. The use of the pronoun tena would usually refer to a previously mentioned agent, in the previous phrase i.e. tathāgatena 'by the Realised'.

So the phrase reads: 

tena ucyate lokadhātuḥ iti
by him / is said / "lokadhātu"
The word 'lokadhātu' is said by him [i.e., the Realised].

Jones argues that this means that the Tathāgata uses a word like lokadhātu always keeping in mind that there is no substantial, really existent kind of 'dhātu'. This is emphasised later in the text: a bodhisattva perceives no ātma, satva, jīva, or pudgala, which here translate roughly as 'substance, essence, soul or homunculus' (Vaj §6 ). Or, to put it another way, the names we give to persistent and repetitious experiences cannot hide the truly ephemeral, unsatisfactory and insubstantial nature of experience. I've argued before that this is only true (or only straightforwardly true) when the domain under consideration is experience. Hence, I see a continuity here with one of the most important threads of early Buddhist thought that is epitomised by the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15) and the Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23).


The Role of Translator

I think what both Harrison and Jones are getting at is that the translator is also an interpreter. A translator assumes that the text made sense to the author and tries to understand the sense and communicate it in another language. Conze's interpretations unconsciously colour every line of his translations. However, he frequently choses unclarity precisely because it suits his interpretation (this was, for example, how I understood his misreading of the first sentence in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra resulting in a simple grammatical error). Faced with a sentence that presents a difficult reading, the translator's job is to try to get across what they think the author was getting at. Slavishly sticking to a literal rendering of the words is seldom helpful, especially if one also uses the foreign syntax. Buddhist authors use both the Sanskrit language and sectarian Buddhist idiom to convey ideas; the text is embedded in the context of a worldview. It's not sufficient to translate an idiom literally because idioms are not used literally. Consider English idioms like "I'm going to see a man about a dog", or "he'd lose his head, if it wasn't screwed on". Literalism only leads us astray and yet Conze admits he has translated as literally as possible to the point of reproducing the Sanskrit syntax. This approach has marked Conze as a leading exponent of what has been called Buddhist Hybrid English.

Of course, for Conze, perhaps influenced by Suzuki and late Buddhist commentators, the quotient of nonsense in his texts seemed to give him a certain amount of pleasure. It gave him scope to play the gnostic and insinuate that he understood this text in a nonconceptual way through (deep) meditation, whereas his academic readers, approaching Buddhism intellectually, had to be content with illogical nonsense. There are constant digs at the plodding intellectual non-meditator in Conze's commentaries. As his memoirs make plain, Conze felt, with some justification, deeply aggrieved at his treatment by the academic establishment of the UK and USA and was contemptuous of most of his colleagues. Conze is thus a complex figure and his work is complicated by such factors as well.


Conclusions

Thanks to Harrison and Jones, we now have two possible interpretations of this and similar passages: one which conveys nonsense and implies occult profundity; and one which conveys some sense and is no less profound but in a more obvious way.

Taking the whole sentence again:

yo 'py asau lokadhātur adhātuḥ sa tathāgatena bhāṣitas tenocyate lokadhātur iti |  

The Tathāgata taught a world-system that is without a [noumenal] system, the word 'world-system' is used this way by him.

I think it's worth repeating that this statement is not less profound than Conze's gnostic interpretation or more mystical readings. That fact that we can understand the statement does not make it less valuable.

Of course, whether we can experience a "world-system" is moot. With cosmological terms like lokadhātu we are in an abstract realm. Even in modern cosmology everything we know about the universe is inferred rather than experienced. The object of the senses here is an abstraction formed in the mind on the basis of sense data; i.e., it is an object of the mind-sense (manas). The Vajracchedikā is, in fact, equivocating on this element of Buddhist cosmology. "OK," it is saying "even if you believe in a world-system (or any other cosmological or metaphysical entity), your experience of it is still subject to the laws of experience: impermanence, disappointment and insubstantiality." Whatever categories, abstractions, ideas, entities you can come up with, your experience of them is subject to these constraints because it is only through experience that you know anything at all. Here the relatively unsophisticated Buddhist approach to psychology has distinct advantages. By lumping all mental experience under the heading of manas we are less likely to get caught up in finessing the details of the aspects of humanity that make us feel special. Our ability to think abstractly is remarkable, but to Buddhists it's just another kind of experience about which we make epistemological mistakes. 

Whatever ontology we might subscribe to, there are always these epistemological constraints that leave us off balance. Though we might make apparently valid ontological inferences, commitment to any particular ontology as an individual is always premature because knowledge proceeds from experience, not from reality, and experience is always a co-creation (pratītya-samutpāda) of objects, our sensory apparatus and our mind. This is directly contradicted by Buddhist mystics, who sometimes claim that direct knowledge of reality is the goal of Buddhism, but it is what the Buddhist texts say over and over; and it is also what my friends who go deep into meditation also say. In this view the problems of human existence are due, in effect, to epistemological errors which can be corrected by careful observation of experience under controlled conditions and the guidance of an experienced mentor. The problems addressed by Buddhist practice are, on the whole, not caused by ontological errors. With some caveats, what we experience is not an illusion, but we do have illusions about what we experience. Of course, we do make ontological errors, but the Buddhist texts do not seem overly concerned with this type of error, which is relatively easily corrected.

I've said that ontological commitments based on individual experience are always premature. However, we can get around this by pooling our resources. One of my frustrations with philosophy and, in particular, Buddhist philosophy, is that it always seems stuck in the point of view of an absolutely isolated individual and takes no account of our collective endeavours. In fact, we social primates almost always work in teams. We can have reliable knowledge about the world around us through comparing experiences, though even when this collaborative effort is coordinated and formalised (as in the sciences) most knowledge is still considered provisional, because there is always the possibility of a "black swan event". Most importantly, by communicating with others we do know that objects exist apart from our perception of them, even though we might be slightly fuzzy about the details of that object. One only has to watch the heads at a tennis match - turning this way and that as they follow the action - to know that the ball is not something that we alone are perceiving. The only way to maintain that objects do not exist, is to artificially disallow the evidence of others.

But the whole focus of the Buddha's teachings is away from the objects and on the experience itself. And in experience neither 'real' nor 'unreal' apply. Even if the object were permanent, the experience itself would still change because it relies partly on us - our sense organs and sense cognition. These simple facts can be used to direct our practice of Buddhist techniques in an effective direction. The Prajñāpāramitā teachings continue this focus.

As a final aside aside, Jan Nattier has an interesting take on this type of negation: "[In the Aṣṭa and the Vajracchedikā] the initial negations are directed not at 'dharmas' or at things in general, but at the bodhisattva and the practices in which he is engaged. It is my strong suspicion that this 'rhetoric of negation' first emerged as a tactical attempt to undercut the potential for bodhisattva's arrogance, and was only later generalized to what came to be considered to be a new (anti-abhidharma) ontology" (2003 135-6, n.62). Hopefully in the future Nattier will collect her thoughts on the Vajracchedikā and publish them.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward. (1957) Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā. Serie Orientale Roma XIII. Roma. 

Conze, Edward (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. 2nd Ed. George Allen & Unwin.

Harrison, Paul. (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra', in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p.133-159.

Harrison, Paul & Shōgo WATANABE (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā.' in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p. 89-132.

Jones, Richard H. (2012) The Heart of Buddhist Wisdom: Plain English Translations of the Heart Sutra, the Diamond-Cutter Sutra, and Other Perfection of Wisdom Texts. New York: Jackson Square Books.

Shigenori Nagatomo. (2000) 'The Logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A.' Asian Philosophy, 10(3): 212-244

Nattier, Jan. (2003) A few good men : The Bodhisattva path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). University of Hawai'i Press.

​Schopen, Gregory. (1975) 'The phrase ‘sa pṛthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet’ in the Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna.' Indo-Iranian Journal. 17(3-4): 147-181.

Schopen, Gregory. (1989) 'The Manuscript of the Vajracchedikā Found at Gilgit,' in Studies in the Literature of the Great Vehicle: Three Mahāyāna Buddhist Texts, ed. by L. O. Gómez and J. A. Silk, Ann Arbor, pp. 89-139.

Williams, Paul. (1989) Mahāyāna Buddhism: the Doctrinal Foundations. London, UK: Routledge.