The Diamond Sutra is one of the great Prajnaparamita sutras of Mahayana Buddhism, composed in Sanskrit somewhere between the first and fourth centuries CE. It is structured as a dialogue between the Buddha and the elder disciple Subhuti, set in the Jeta Grove near Shravasti, on the nature of perception, identity, and the bodhisattva path. Its full title, Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, translates roughly as the wisdom that cuts like a diamond. The sutra cuts at the very faculty of conceptual perception, dismantling, point by point, the apparently solid categories the mind uses to organise its world.
The Diamond Sutra has a particular historical place: a complete 868 CE Chinese woodblock-printed copy survives in the British Library, the oldest precisely-dated printed book in the world. It has been read continuously across the Mahayana world for nearly two millennia, with particular weight in the Chan and Zen traditions. The Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng, in the seventh century, is said to have awakened on first hearing the line one should produce a thought without abiding anywhere.
What follows is the F. Max Müller translation of 1894, originally published in volume 49 of Friedrich Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series under the title The Vagrakkhedikâ. The vocabulary is Victorian and the transliteration follows the conventions of its day, but Müller’s rendering remains a foundational English version and is in strict public domain.
A note on the central teaching
The Diamond Sutra works the same recognition as the much shorter Heart Sutra, but it works it differently. Where the Heart Sutra states the recognition compactly, the Diamond Sutra performs it. Each section of the dialogue introduces a Buddhist category — the bodhisattva, the dharma, the merit of giving, the mark of a Buddha, the very idea of beings to be saved — and then, by careful argument, shows that the category contains no graspable inherent reality. That which the Tathagata calls a bodhisattva is not a bodhisattva; therefore is it called a bodhisattva. The formula is repeated, with subtle variation, dozens of times.
The sutra is not nihilism. It does not assert that nothing exists. It asserts, more carefully, that nothing exists in the way the conceptual mind takes it to exist. The diamond is the wisdom that cuts through that mistake.
A complete translation
Müller’s full English translation is hosted by the Sacred Texts Archive. We link to it here rather than reproduce it in the present site format; the original chapter divisions, footnotes, and Sanskrit transliterations are part of how the translation reads.
The Vagrakkhedikâ — Diamond Sutra (Müller, 1894) at sacred-texts.com