The Diamond Sutra was printed over 1,100 years ago by Wang Jie. According to an article in the Smithsonian by Jason Daley in 2016, Jie commissioned the block printer to create a 17-and-a-half-foot-long scroll of the sacred Buddhist text on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong (ie 868 A.D.) Today the scroll is at The British Museum.
The Diamond Sutra is a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese and hidden in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas around the year 1,000. It is called Diamond as “the sutra helps cut thru perceptions of the world and its illusions” explains Susan Whitfield. “We just think we exist as individuals but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” she writes.
Just as snowflakes are individually unique, they are made of the same water, and these water vapors pass through the same process of freezing around a nucleus turning into the six-armed crystalline form of snowflake. And then when each melts and joins the others, they flow together to the ocean, melding into one, into the source of all we know.
I am working on my grandmother’s archives. Stashed in boxes rather than caves, they carry a family trajectory across time and place. They talk of lineage and exploration, of daily details and social order. They bring me to a time of writing and reflection. Each letter, article, journal is unique but the same; they are mere words on a page. They are not illuminated manuscripts, yet they do stand for a moment in a life, a full life…. one full of storytelling, adventure, good humour, and elegance. And so we create the path we walk.
