http://idp.bl.uk/archives/news_current/news_current.a4d
http://idp.bl.uk/downloads/newsletters/IDPNews38.pdf
Sam van Schaik, The Diamond Sutra: History and Transmission
http://idp.bl.uk/archives/news_current/ ... rent.a4d#1
Apart from articles on the conservation of the scroll, etc., IDP News lists a number of recent works on the Diamond Sutra. Here is a link to one online translation:When the seventh-century Buddhist master Huineng was a boy, he worked in a marketplace selling wood. One day he heard a customer reciting the Diamond Sutra, and experienced a sudden clarity of mind. He asked the man where he had learned the sutra. The man replied that he had been to see the fifth patriarch of the Chan school, Hongren, who had told an audience of monks and laypeople that by merely memorizing the Diamond Sutra they would see their true natures and become Buddhas. So Huineng went to find Hongren, joined his monastery, and ultimately became the sixth patriarch of the Chan school.
This story shows the high regard in which the Diamond Sutra was held by Chinese Buddhists. For centuries this text has been thought to encapsulate all that is important in the Buddha’s teachings. Its pithy and paradoxical text is thought to provide the insight into the nature of reality that turns an ordinary being into a Buddha. To understand why the Diamond Sutra was revered in this way, we need to understand its place in the Buddhist tradition. For Buddhists, a sutra is a record of the teachings of the Buddha himself, and every sutra begins with the phrase, ‘thus have I heard’ (in Sanskrit: evaṃ mayā śrutam). The sutras were first written in the local languages of India, and later in the sacred and literary language of Sanskrit.
The Diamond Sutra was part of a Buddhist movement known as the Mahāyāna, or ‘greater vehicle’. By the first century AD followers of the Mahāyāna were writing down new sutras. The content of these texts was quite varied, but some key themes came to characterise the Mahāyāna. One was the altruistic motivation of the bodhisattva, a follower of the path who aims for the enlightenment of all living beings. Another was the doctrine of emptiness (Skt. śunyatā), that all things exist only on the basis of causes and conditions, and therefore nothing has an independent existence.
The latter theme was expounded in a group of texts known as the Perfection of Wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sutras. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the perfection of wisdom is one of the six perfections: generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. The Sanskrit term pāramitā actually signifies transcendence, rather than perfection. This indicates that the ideal is not to perfect each of these six, but to transcend the concepts of oneself as an independent self performing a truly existent action. This again brings us back to the idea of emptiness....
Diamond Sutra - A New Translation
http://www.diamond-sutra.com/diamond_su ... ation.html
