Chapter 2: The Diamond Sūtra — Variants of the Triple Formula and the Weighing of Merit¶

1. Provenance¶

The Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā, translated by Kumārajīva in the Hongshi years of the Later Qin, is the version in general use in China.¹ There are five others, by Bodhiruci, Paramārtha, Dharmagupta, Xuanzang and Yijing, six in all. Yijing's is titled The Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Perfection of Wisdom That Cuts Like a Diamond.²

The Sanskrit title is Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā. Vajra is the diamond or adamant; cchedikā is "cutting." The title means the cutting of the adamant by wisdom: the diamond here is what is cut, not the instrument that cuts. Kumārajīva's rendering leaves both readings open on the face of it, and in China the reading generally taken has been that of the diamond as hard and keen and proof against everything. Yijing's title, adding the words "that cuts," is meant to make the order explicit.

The received recensions are divided into thirty-two sections with section titles, such as "The Occasion of the Assembly, Section One" and "Subhūti Makes His Request, Section Two." These divisions do not appear in the body of Kumārajīva's text as carried in the Taishō canon; they are traditionally credited to Xiao Tong, Crown Prince Zhaoming of the Liang. The attribution is very widely repeated, but no pre-Tang source has been found to attest it, and it is left here in doubt.³

The earliest surviving printed book bearing an explicit date is a Diamond Sūtra scroll from Dunhuang, cut and printed by Wang Jie in the ninth year of Xiantong (868), now in the British Library.⁴ That a single sūtra should have become the first object of mass printing at the outset of the block-printing technique is itself a piece of side evidence for the scale of its circulation.

2. What it is in fact saying¶

There is only one question. The sūtra opens with a question from Subhūti. The question is put twice, with slight differences of wording: once as "how should one dwell, and how should one subdue the mind?" and once with the first two words reversed.¹ The difference in word order does not affect what is asked: where should a person who has raised the aspiration to unsurpassed complete awakening place his mind, and how should he subdue it. The whole sūtra answers this question over and over.

There is only one move in the answer. The answer the Buddha gives is, from beginning to end, a single move applied to different objects. On delivering beings: "having thus delivered immeasurable, innumerable, boundless beings, in fact no being has been delivered."¹ On giving: "a bodhisattva should give without dwelling on anything."¹ On seeing the Buddha: "whatever has marks is deceptive; if you see that the marks are not marks, you see the Tathāgata."¹ All three do the same work: they grant that the act stands in conventional designation and simultaneously cancel any reading that takes its object to possess intrinsic nature.

The so-called triple formula is in fact a family of wordings. The commonest expression of this move in the sūtra is the pattern later called the triple formula. What matters is that the pattern occurs in the sūtra not in one wording but in the following five.

Five wordings stand side by side, and ji and ze alternate. The received liturgical recensions mostly regularise every ze not into ji not, so that what a reader meets is uniform; in the Taishō text the two are used together, and in two places no name is restored and the verdict is laid down directly. If this pattern were a strict logical operator, discrepancies of this order should not occur within a single sūtra. Since they do occur, calling it a special logic lacks support on the textual side. It is a pragmatic format applied repeatedly: take up the other party's way of speaking, cancel at once the reading that takes it as really existent, then issue the same designation back into use unchanged.

This book's reading of the format has already been given in Part 18, Chapter 10 of Part II: the three members X, not-X, called-X are on distinct levels — the reading of X as really existent is rejected, and the designating force of X is preserved.⁵ What this chapter adds is the state of affairs on the textual side: the format is not fixed in the sūtra, and the differences among the five wordings have seldom been addressed by the commentators.

Two points where the move touches practice. Two sentences bring the move down to practice. The first: "he should give rise to that mind without dwelling on anything."¹ The first half cancels, the second half initiates; the two halves are performed at once, not in sequence. The second: "one who is not alarmed, not frightened, not afraid — know that such a person is most rare."¹ This offers the reader an index: to hear this said and not take fright is itself the mark of rarity.

The weighing of merit occupies a great deal of the sūtra. Passages comparing merit occur close to ten times. Giving the seven treasures filling a great trichiliocosm is less than receiving and keeping four lines of this sūtra and expounding them to others; giving one's body and life as many times as the sands of the Ganges is less than receiving and keeping this sūtra; giving one's body as many times as the sands of the Ganges in the first, middle and last parts of the day, and so on for immeasurable millions of aeons, is less than hearing this scripture with faith unopposed. Another passage says that one who is "slighted by others" while keeping this sūtra is a person whose "sinful deeds in former lives should have brought him to an evil destiny," and that the slighting in this life expunges the former deeds.¹ Taken together these passages occupy no smaller a share of the sūtra than the doctrinal ones. Any faithful restatement has to count them in.

One sentence does the opposite work. "All the noble and the sagely are differentiated by the unconditioned."¹ The sentence assigns the ranking of the sagely to differences in the unconditioned, not to the quantity of conditioned meritorious works performed. It stands in the same sūtra as the passages weighing merit, and the two run in different directions.

3. What it intimates¶

The first intimation lies in the identity of the questioner. In the Āgamas and the sectarian tradition Subhūti is renowned as foremost in the understanding of emptiness, and he is a śrāvaka disciple. The whole sūtra proceeds from his questions and the Buddha's answers, and what the answers cancel is exactly the śrāvaka tradition's purchase on terms and marks. Set beside the Heart Sūtra, where a bodhisattva expounds to Śāriputra, the arrangement here is the gentler: the questioner is a śrāvaka, the respondent is the Buddha, and the cancelling is performed by the Buddha himself rather than administered to a śrāvaka by another.

The second intimation is that the reader's reaction is graded in advance. The sūtra says that one able to give rise to genuine faith in these lines has planted roots of goodness under more than one or two buddhas; and it says that one who hears this said and is "not alarmed, not frightened, not afraid" is most rare.¹ This draws both the reader's acceptance and his non-acceptance inside the sūtra's own account: the believer has prior roots, and the unbeliever was anticipated. An arrangement of this kind makes a text difficult for external doubt to touch.

The third intimation is that the weighing of merit runs against the sūtra's own tendency. The sūtra's claim is that there is nothing attained, nothing to dwell on, no being in fact delivered; the comparison passages use the language of merit as measurable, comparable and cumulative, and the terms compared grow steadily larger, from the seven treasures of a trichiliocosm to bodies and lives as many as the sands of the Ganges, to immeasurable millions of aeons. A sūtra maintaining that nothing is attainable states its own value in measurable language. This need not amount to self-contradiction: the weighing is the language of exhortation to keep the text, the doctrinal passages are the content to be kept, and the two belong to two functions. But the sūtra does not state the difference of function, and what a reader meets is two tendencies set side by side within one text.

The fourth intimation is that adversity is taken in beforehand. To be slighted while keeping the sūtra is, on the sūtra's account, not evidence that keeping it has failed but evidence that former misdeeds are being expunged.¹ The arrangement leaves no room for empirical disconfirmation. It is very common in religious literature; it deserves to be named, and not passed over on account of being common.

The fifth intimation lies in the subtraction performed by the sentence on the unconditioned. If the differentiation of the sagely lies in the unconditioned, then the various undertakings on the conditioned side do not ground any ranking. The tension between this sentence and the passages weighing merit is left unreconciled by the text.

4. Where it may lead a reader¶

First, "he should give rise to that mind without dwelling on anything" is read as an instruction in meditation. Huineng was awakened by this sentence, and the Chan school has taken it as a warrant ever since; see Part 10 of Part I of this volume.⁶ But in the sequence of the sūtra the sentence answers Subhūti's question about where the mind should dwell, and says that in raising the aspiration a bodhisattva should not become attached to form, sound, scent, taste, touch or dharmas. It is a stipulation about raising the aspiration, not a method of practice. Later use of it as a formula for seated meditation is a transfer of application. It is not a misconstrual of the doctrine, but it does leave readers supposing that the sūtra contains a system of practice, which it does not.

Second, "whatever has marks is deceptive" is read as the claim that the world is an illusion. The second half of the sentence is "if you see that the marks are not marks, you see the Tathāgata."¹ Read together, what is said is that the Tathāgata cannot be apprehended by way of marks; it is not said that marks do not exist. The Chinese word rendered "deceptive" carries the sense of deceiving, and readers infer from it something real standing behind the marks, and turn to expecting a permanent reality apart from them. This path has already been described in Part 5 of Part I of this volume.⁷ One variant may also be noted: at this point the Taishō text of Kumārajīva reads ze see the Tathāgata, while the received liturgical recensions read ji see the Tathāgata, and quotations elsewhere in this book follow the received recensions with ji. Here the two are synonymous — and this is one more instance of the alternation between ji and ze described in the previous section.

Third, the six similes and the nine. Kumārajīva's closing verse reads: "All conditioned things are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow; like dew and like lightning — thus should they be contemplated,"¹ known as the six similes. Yijing's version reads: "like a star, a cataract of the eye, a lamp, an illusion; dew, a bubble, a dream, lightning, a cloud,"² nine similes in all, agreeing with the extant Sanskrit. The number six issues from Kumārajīva's manner of translating, not from the shape of the sūtra. That China took the six as fixed, to the point of naming pavilions and collections after them, rests on the choice of one translator.

Fourth, "not dwelling on anything" is read as a release from obligation. What the sūtra says is that one should not dwell on dharmas, meaning that one should not become attached to the marks of what one does; and it says in the same breath that a bodhisattva should deliver immeasurable beings, should give, should receive and keep and recite. What is cancelled is grasping at the objects of action as really existent; the actions themselves are not cancelled. But the three words on their own, in circulation, are very easily read as taking things as they come and finding nothing that must be done. The later Chan tradition repeatedly identified this as an abuse; see Part 10 of Part I of this volume.⁶

References¶