| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £2.20
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £2.20, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
No other text is as important to Buddhists, especially Zen Buddhists, and this translation includes commentary from major Chinese and Japanese historical sources. Zen Buddhism is often said to be a practice of "mind-to-mind transmission" without reliance on texts --in fact, some great teachers forbid their students to read or write. But Buddhism has also inspired some of the greatest philosophical writings of any religion, and two such works lie at the center of Zen: The Heart Sutra, which monks recite all over the world, and The Diamond Sutra, said to contain answers to all questions of delusion and dualism. This is the Buddhist teaching on the "perfection of wisdom" and cuts through all obstacles on the path of practice. As Red Pine explains: "The Diamond Sutra may look like a book, but it's really the body of the Buddha. It's also your body, my body, all possible bodies. But it's a body with nothing inside and nothing outside. It doesn't exist in space or time. Nor is it a construct of the mind. It's no mind. And yet because it's no mind, it has room for compassion. This book is the offering of no mind, born of compassion for all suffering beings. Of all the sutras that teach this teaching, this is the diamond. "
About the Author
Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) is the translator of the complete poems of Cold Mountain (Han-shan), Pickup (Shih-te), and Big Shield (Fen g-kan), as well as works by Stonehouse (Shih-wu), Sung Po-jen (awarded a PEN West translation prize) , and Lao-tzu (a PEN West finalist). He lives in P ort Townsend, Washington.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
ONE: Thus have I heard: Once the Bhagavan was dwelling near Shravasti at Anathapindada Garden in Jeta Forest together with the full assembly of 1250 bhikshus and a great many fearless dodhisattvas. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
ONE: Thus have I heard: Once the Bhagavan was dwelling near Shravasti at Anathapindada Garden in Jeta Forest together with the full assembly of 1250 bhikshus and a great many fearless dodhisattvas. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Diamond Sutra, along with The Heart Sutra (also available translated by Red Pine), are arguably the two most popular works of the Prajnaparamita group of Sutras. Indeed they are among the most popular Sutras within the Mahayana cannon as a whole.
I own a number of copies of the Diamond Sutra but this is my favourite. It is certainly the one I come back to the most. Red Pine, an award winning translator, always seems to take great care and give a good deal of thought to all his translations. I certainly value all the works of his that I own. I don't think that any translation of a text can be considered definitive but I think this one may come as close as any translation can.
Unlike most English translations of the Diamond Sutra, which are typically based on a single text, Red Pine has consulted a wide range of source texts. The texts consulted were the Sanskrit texts of Muller and Conze; two incomplete editions (the Stein and Gilgit editions); six Chinese translations and Tibetan and Khotanese translations. The result is an excellent rendering of the text. Included within the commentary is a comprehensive list of variant readings from the various sources used, for those who are interested. For those who are specifically after a translation of Kumarajiva's text, which is probably the most widely used single source for translations of the Diamond Sutra, I recommend Describing the Indescribable: A Commentary of the Diamond Sutra. Red Pine does, however, include Kumarajiva's variations, as this is one of the six Chinese translations consulted for this edition.
Not only do I like the translation of the core text but I find the introduction, extensive commentaries and glossary extremely helpful and interesting too. The commentary draws on the work of a number of Buddhist commentators on the Sutra, including Hui-neng (638-713), the sixth patriarch of Zen, who produced one of the most influential commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. In The Platform Sutra: The ZEN Teaching of Hui-Neng (Hui-neng's most well known work, which is also available in a fine translation by Red Pine), Hui-neng relates how it was upon first hearing this Sutra that he first left home and it was upon hearing this Sutra that he later became enlightened.
An excellent work. Thank you Red Pine.
I own a number of copies of the Diamond Sutra but this is my favourite. It is certainly the one I come back to the most. Red Pine, an award winning translator, always seems to take great care and give a good deal of thought to all his translations. I certainly value all the works of his that I own. I don't think that any translation of a text can be considered definitive but I think this one may come as close as any translation can.
Unlike most English translations of the Diamond Sutra, which are typically based on a single text, Red Pine has consulted a wide range of source texts. The texts consulted were the Sanskrit texts of Muller and Conze; two incomplete editions (the Stein and Gilgit editions); six Chinese translations and Tibetan and Khotanese translations. The result is an excellent rendering of the text. Included within the commentary is a comprehensive list of variant readings from the various sources used, for those who are interested. For those who are specifically after a translation of Kumarajiva's text, which is probably the most widely used single source for translations of the Diamond Sutra, I recommend Describing the Indescribable: A Commentary of the Diamond Sutra. Red Pine does, however, include Kumarajiva's variations, as this is one of the six Chinese translations consulted for this edition.
Not only do I like the translation of the core text but I find the introduction, extensive commentaries and glossary extremely helpful and interesting too. The commentary draws on the work of a number of Buddhist commentators on the Sutra, including Hui-neng (638-713), the sixth patriarch of Zen, who produced one of the most influential commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. In The Platform Sutra: The ZEN Teaching of Hui-Neng (Hui-neng's most well known work, which is also available in a fine translation by Red Pine), Hui-neng relates how it was upon first hearing this Sutra that he first left home and it was upon hearing this Sutra that he later became enlightened.
An excellent work. Thank you Red Pine.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having read the previous translation of this book (sorry I don't remember the translator now) reading this version is like breathing fresh air. It is light, fluid and invigorating. I can't express enough my gratitude to Red Pine. Absolutely brilliant job, a masterpiece, he must have spent thousands of hours comparing different editions of Diamond Sutra and making sure he finds the right words to translate it into English. It's not just words, or, rather, not words at all that he managed to pass onto a reader, but the essence and the spirit of this timeless Sutra, it is being felt totally alive.
For obvious reasons I can not comment on Sutra itself, and quite possibly when I can comment, it will be the last thing on my mind (or what's left of it anyway) :)
Million thanks again (or as many as there are grains of sand in the great river of the Ganges) to Red Pine for his selfless efforts.
For obvious reasons I can not comment on Sutra itself, and quite possibly when I can comment, it will be the last thing on my mind (or what's left of it anyway) :)
Million thanks again (or as many as there are grains of sand in the great river of the Ganges) to Red Pine for his selfless efforts.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Diamond Sutra is a tricky one to grasp even on an intellectual level (which I know is not the underlying purpose, but even so...!) beautiful, repetitive, endlessly contradictory, and yet as the name suggests, it is the ultimate teaching that cuts through the other teachings to deliver the Buddha's final message. I have read several versions and I have to say that Bill Porter's translation is first rate. It has a sense of poetry about it and parts are so beautiful that i found them quite moving.
Having said that, it is really his interpretation of the meaning that makes this book stand out. Each chapter builds on the last, showing how the Buddha's most senior disciple (the likeable Subhuti) grasped some but not all of the teaching, and how the Buddha helped him to make the final leap in understanding. Bill Porter makes sense of the repetitions and contradictions and left at least one reader feeling a little more enlightened by the end.
If you share my fascination for the early works of Chinese Zen then I would recommend all of Bill Porter's (Red Pine's) work on the subject.
Having said that, it is really his interpretation of the meaning that makes this book stand out. Each chapter builds on the last, showing how the Buddha's most senior disciple (the likeable Subhuti) grasped some but not all of the teaching, and how the Buddha helped him to make the final leap in understanding. Bill Porter makes sense of the repetitions and contradictions and left at least one reader feeling a little more enlightened by the end.
If you share my fascination for the early works of Chinese Zen then I would recommend all of Bill Porter's (Red Pine's) work on the subject.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
