The Prajnaparamita Literature and the Concept of Emptiness

The Prajnaparamita ("Perfection of Wisdom") literature forms one of the largest and longest-developing textual corpora in the Mahayana canon, expanding continuously from its earliest core, the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita ("Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines," c. 1st century BCE–1st century CE), through progressively longer redactions reaching the Satasahasrika ("in One Hundred Thousand Lines") by around the 3rd–4th century CE, before later tradition compressed the doctrine again into famously terse summaries such as the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita Hridaya) and the Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita), both probably reaching something close to their circulated form by the 2nd–4th centuries CE, though the Heart Sutra's precise compositional history, including a proposal by Jan Nattier in 1992 that it was originally composed in Chinese and only later back-translated into Sanskrit, remains debated.