Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  In the Bay Area of San Francisco, the city associated with Kerouac and the Beats, another man has looked closely at the words of the Diamond Sutra. For the past decade, Paul Harrison, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, has been working on a new translation. His detailed study is a far cry from Kerouac’s freewheeling approach, but Harrison shares a concern about the sutra’s name. Harrison prefers the Sanskrit title Vajracchedika, rather than either the Diamond Sutra or Diamond Cutter as it is generally translated—or mistranslated, he argues. The name is based on two Sanskrit words vajra, usually translated as “diamond,” and cchedika, usually translated as “cutter.”

  “The main problem for me is the diamond bit,” he says. “Vajra isn’t really a diamond.” Vajra refers to a mythical weapon, a thunderbolt. It is the weapon wielded by powerful deities in various traditions: by the Norse god Thor in the West, by Indra in Hinduism and Vajrapani in Buddhism. This fierce protector is often depicted in Buddhist art standing beside the Buddha like a bodyguard and wielding a thunderbolt—as he is in the Diamond Sutra’s block-printed frontispiece. (The figure appears in the upper left.) In some Gandharan sculptures, with their fusion of classical and Indian images, he resembles a club-wielding Hercules.

  But vajra has another meaning. It refers to a mythical, indestructible substance, harder than anything else in the universe. Because a diamond is the hardest material known, that is how vajra has been translated. For Harrison, this is not just semantics. The mistranslation affects how the sutra is understood.

  “It’s not that it cuts things with fine precision, it actually smashes. If I was to translate it into colloquial English, I would call it the Thunderbolt Buster rather than the Diamond Cutter,” he says. “What’s important is not its precision cutting but its destructive capacity . . . It just smashes any preconception you might have had, or false view, of how the world works.”

  The title Diamond Sutra is now so entrenched in the West that any change is unlikely, as Harrison freely concedes. Yet it highlights the problems a translator faces. Rendering an ancient sacred text into English is more complicated than translating one modern European language into another. The German literary critic and translator Walter Benjamin encapsulated the difficulty when he wrote that “all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true above all of sacred writings.”

  “I think people regard it as a mechanical exercise,” Harrison says. “It’s easy enough to translate a French novel into English, so translating a Buddhist sutra must be the same only with a different language . . . But if you roll the clock back 2,000 years, in a different cultural context of which you are only dimly aware, the difficulties multiply.”

  In working on his translation, Harrison combed through numerous early versions, including Sanskrit, the language in which it was first written, as well as Chinese and Tibetan. And he found something curious. From the outset, China and Tibet took different paths with this text. When Kumarajiva made the first translation into Chinese around the year 400, he made choices the Tibetans did not. Kumarajiva’s choices have been repeated in translations ever since, including into English. Harrison believes this has resulted in misunderstandings. In his view, the Tibetan translators got it right. “Kumarajiva did a lot of very interesting and creative things with the text,” he says. “[Yet] it’s so unfaithful to the original.” Nonetheless it has been the most popular translation.

  The first English translation, by Max Müller in the 1880s, and a later one, by Edward Conze in 1957, have been highly influential. Yet they have reinforced the sutra’s reputation in English as being opaquely mystical and beyond comprehension, Harrison believes. He is keen to correct what he sees as their misinterpretations and to aid understanding of the text. He also wants to move away from the odd, unnatural style of language that infuses many English translations of Buddhist texts, not least the Diamond Sutra. “They’re often highly inaccurate, they misunderstand the text, and they’re couched in this weird kind of language that isn’t English,” he says. Translations of Buddhist sutras into English still have a long way to go, he believes.

  Harrison likens the Diamond Sutra to a piece of music that must be heard to be appreciated or a play that needs to be witnessed. Simply reading the sutra like a novel can be a puzzling experience, given its twists and repetitions. “If you just approach the text with a logical mind expecting things to be done in sequence and no repetitions to occur, it seems very weird,” he says.

  Memorizing or reciting the sutra might be an entirely different experience, he suggests. “These texts are not meant to be read the way we read books, where we scan pages for information. Unless we’re reading poetry, we don’t read for the sound of things. We just want to get the plot and find out what’s happened or extract some bit of information. I don’t think religious texts in a number of traditions work like that. They are meant to be deeply internalized,” Harrison says.

  There are many levels at which the Diamond Sutra can be understood, says Robert Thurman, one of the best-known exponents of Buddhism in the West. As an author, lecturer, and Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York, Thurman has pioneered a Western way of teaching Buddhist philosophy, combining scholarly discipline and contemporary parlance. He was the first Westerner to be ordained a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition after he traveled to India in the early 1960s. He later returned to lay life, married and became a father (one of his children is Hollywood actress Uma Thurman). Throughout, he has retained his commitment to the religion he encountered in the Himalayan foothills. Thurman, who is fluent in Sanskrit and Tibetan, says that at their core all the Prajnaparamita genre of sutras, including the Diamond Sutra, deal with the same question.

  “The essential part of the Prajnaparamita teachings is the relativity of everything. People get excited about the idea of emptiness, and they think that’s something very, very deep and the world must disappear,” he says. It doesn’t. Rather, it means that contrary to our everyday assumptions, everything in our lives, including ourselves, constantly changes. “People think there’s something in me that is really me, that is always unchanging. They think it was there when I was sixteen and it will be there when I’m sixty or seventy. They have this sense of a solid being there. But we’re empty of that thing. That doesn’t mean we don’t exist. It doesn’t mean we are empty of existence. We exist, but we don’t exist in a non-relational way that we feel that we do.”

  He cautions against equating emptiness with nihilism and a view that life is meaningless. This is a misunderstanding many Westerners make, he says. “The word emptiness is not wrong, voidness is also not wrong. But a more interesting one for us in a modern time would be the word ‘freedom.’ We are not frightened of that word because we hear politicians rattling on about it,” he says. “When you say sugar-free or salt-free or trouble-free, you mean lacking those things.”

  Thurman, who shares Harrison’s concern over the adequacy of English translations of Buddhist texts, says our habit of seeing the world and ourselves as unchanging has unfortunate consequences. “It leads to an exaggerated sense of self-importance. This brings one into terrible conflict with the world, because the world will not agree that one’s self is so important,” he says. People get frustrated because they think others are getting more than their share, and then become mired in aggression, fear, and greed. “Everything is stressful when one is unrealistic about one’s relationship to things.”

  When Thurman first arrived in India, he did so just as Buddhism was making one of the most remarkable journeys in its 2,500-year history: a return to the land of its origin. Buddhism was wiped out in India around the twelfth century by the spread of Islam and the ascendancy of Hinduism. Although Buddhism flourished in China, Japan, and much of South-East Asia, the religion vanished from its birthplace.

  After an absence of almost a millennium, Buddhism’s revival in Indi
a in the past fifty years has been carried largely on a tide of human suffering. Refugees fleeing China’s invasion of Tibet in 1959 have made the dangerous mountain crossing over the Himalayas into India ever since. Many have settled in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, now the center for the Tibetan government-in-exile and the seat of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Monasteries, temples, and other Buddhist institutions have been established in the former Raj-era hill station, as they have elsewhere on the subcontinent.

  No figure has drawn the West’s attention to Buddhism more than Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Since he fled Tibet half a century ago, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the world’s best known refugee has traveled the globe to deliver Buddhist teachings about tolerance and compassion. In late 2009, the Dalai Lama arrived in Sydney for a series of public talks, discussions with scientists and meetings with religious leaders.

  For the first of his public talks—in an arena more associated with rock stars than red-robed monks—the stage was decked with flowers, colored brocade, iconic paintings, and a central throne. At its feet sat several dozen monks in maroon and saffron robes, their heads shaved, who quietly chanted as they awaited the figure they regard as the incarnation of the Buddha of compassion. The scene was redolent of the Diamond Sutra’s frontispiece.

  Nearby, in an anteroom decorated with white curtains, a white sofa and a couple of potted plants, the Dalai Lama took time for a private interview in which he reflected on the Diamond Sutra, speaking in English, although it is not his first language. The importance of the Diamond Sutra lies in what it says about the nature of reality, he explains. In particular, its insistence that nothing—and no one—has an unchanging, independent existence. “That does not mean [there is] no existence. Existence is there, but the very nature of existence is due to many other factors, not independently.” Reality exists, but not in the way we habitually think of it.

  “For example, when you look at me, you consider you are meeting or talking with the Dalai Lama,” he says. “So it appears [there is] some almost independent self. You feel Dalai Lama’s body is such and such, Dalai Lama’s mind is such and such. You feel there is some absolutely independent Dalai Lama. That is ignorance, that is misconception. There is no such Dalai Lama. When I look at you, it’s a combination of European body and white hair. There is this person, there is no doubt. I’m talking to this person. But if I investigate where is the person, I can’t find [you]. That means absence of independent self.”

  Understanding this is not merely an abstract exercise. Humanity’s problems stem from this mistaken view of reality, he says. “Why that theory is relevant is all these destructive emotions, such as attachment, anger, hatred, are based on ego, ‘I.’ The stronger the feeling of an independent ‘I,’ the more possibility of attachment: [we say] ‘I love this, I like this, I don’t want this,’ that kind of thing. The less self-centered the ego, the weaker these destructive emotions automatically become . . . Positive emotions are not based on these misconceptions. Destructive emotion, in most cases, is based on misconception. Because of that [insight], this sutra becomes important and relevant.”

  Understanding how our view of reality can affect our emotions is of such importance that the Dalai Lama reflects on it each morning. “My daily prayers do not include Diamond Sutra, but [I] meditate on that meaning,” he says. “My main practice, daily practice, as soon as I wake up, I investigate: Where is ‘I’? Where is Buddha? You can’t find him. Every day, as soon as I wake up, I think [about] that.”

  Before dawn nearly every morning in New York City, about twenty men and women assemble at a single-story suburban home. Once inside, they remove their shoes and walk down a set of steps into the heated basement where they sit on the floor and recite the Diamond Sutra. A reading takes about forty minutes, and when they have reached the sutra’s final verse, they start again.

  Depending on when they begin—some days they rise at 3 a.m., others at 4 a.m.—the group chants the Diamond Sutra in unison up to seven times. Afterwards they repeat the name of the Future Buddha known as Buddha Maitreya for half an hour. And then the members get up from their lotus and half-lotus positions and head off into the early morning light for their homes, to school or to work.

  The Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is more than twenty years old, says a current member, Yoon S. (Robert) Han, a Seoul-born lawyer who specializes in maritime law and disputes about construction projects. The group is part of the Korean community in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, one of America’s most religiously diverse communities.

  For its readings of the Diamond Sutra, the group uses the Chinese translation by Kumarajiva, the same as Stein’s printed version. The words, though, are spoken using a Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters. Despite this potential language barrier, not every member of the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is Korean. An Italian man, a pharmaceutical company executive, is among the group’s long-time members. The group does not restrict membership to the Korean community, nor does it recruit people. Those who come find it either by word of mouth or through the group’s small website, diamondsutra.org.

  In the basement room where they assemble, the words of the Diamond Sutra fill an entire wall, and a copy of the sutra is placed atop two cushions that adorn a golden lotus-shaped seat. This reverential treatment is derived from the sutra’s text. “The Diamond Sutra specifically states that wherever this sutra is located, there will be a Buddha or his disciples. So the Diamond Sutra, to our understanding, is the Buddha himself,” Han says.

  Despite their familiarity with the text, the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group does not memorize the sutra’s words. Rote learning the Buddha’s words would be seen as lacking respect. “We recite it very reverently,” he says. “The mindset we have is as if we are in front of the Buddha more than 2,000 years ago, actually listening to his lecture, the dialogue between Buddha and Subhuti.”

  Throughout the day, members practice what they call “housekeeping of the mind” in an attempt to avoid cultivating self-importance. “As I go through my daily routine, I see a lot of things arising in my mind as I face my adversary, as I face my client,” the New York attorney says. “The practice is about training your mind in each of those situations.”

  Such acts are a continuation of practices that saw Wang Jie commission his printed Diamond Sutra of 868 for the merit of his parents. But intervening centuries and geography have not diminished the sutra’s relevance. In Australia, forty minutes from central Sydney, in a building sandwiched between high-rises, the sacred text continues to be used to create merit for the dead.

  The Nan Tien temple is an offshoot of Australia’s largest Buddhist temple, located in Wollongong, New South Wales. But this modest center, in suburban Parramatta, serves a community of mostly Asian migrants who have settled in the city’s sprawling western suburbs. Aside from a pair of lion statues that guard the entrance, the white building has little to distinguish it. But about once a month, nuns, monks, and lay members convene to chant the Diamond Sutra.

  The Sunday morning ceremony begins with an offering of incense to a white ceramic Buddha that sits on a platform at the front of the room. Under a ceiling of angelic apsaras that would not look out of place on the walls of the Mogao Caves, the congregation then sits on red velvet cushions and begins chanting.

  Led by two nuns and accompanied by a steady staccato beat tapped out on a wooden block, the group of about fifty people recites the sutra in Mandarin. For about forty minutes, the text reverberates hypnotically off the wooden floor and walls that are covered with miniature bas-reliefs of the Buddha.

  When the sutra’s recitation is finished, the assembly chants the Buddha’s name and slowly weaves single file between the rows of red cushions several times, their palms pressed together in reverence. Then the lights are dimmed. A gong, a bell, and a drum sound. Finally, they dedicate the merit of their act for the deceased.


  Just as Buddhism has evolved as it has traveled, adapting to local cultures and conditions, the Diamond Sutra is also being discovered, recited and studied in the West today beyond the traditional confines of temples.

  A Sydney lawyer, Andrew Fisher, began reading the Diamond Sutra before high-pressure legal cases. A Buddhist friend suggested he do so to calm intense anxieties Fisher felt ahead of complex judicial proceedings. It was an unorthodox introduction to the Diamond Sutra. But Fisher, who died in 2008, never charted a conventional course. As a young man in London he had worked for the influential 1960s underground magazine Oz, which became the subject of an infamous obscenity trial. He later wrote a play about those turbulent years, A Taste of Oz, which was produced at Britain’s National Theatre. His career also saw him venture into film, publishing, and television presenting, but Fisher was in his sixties before he embarked on his unusual way to cope with professional pressures.

  “Andrew started reading the Diamond Sutra and made a strong connection with it. He found it actually did calm him down,” says Fisher’s widow, Renate Ogilvie. He particularly liked the figure of Subhuti in the Diamond Sutra, the disciple said to have had an ungovernable temper before he encountered the Buddha. Fisher continued reading the sutra even when he was not preparing for difficult cases. Ogilvie, a German-born psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher who married Fisher in 2000, read the sutra daily as part of an orderly practice. Fisher’s approach was different.

  “He read it in a completely unstructured way,” Ogilvie says. “He read it in the evening in bed before he went to sleep. It is true to say it was his only Buddhist practice.”

  Fisher continued to enjoy reading the Diamond Sutra until Alzheimer’s claimed his ability to do so. Yet it remained a part of his life until the end. As his long illness worsened, he fell into a coma and it was clear he had only days to live. Ogilvie moved into his hospital room to tend to her husband around the clock. Friends came to visit, and her students performed Buddhist rituals. But afterwards, when Ogilvie and Fisher were alone in the quiet room filled with flowers and candles, she returned to a familiar practice.