Diamond Sutra of 868: The World's Oldest Dated Printed Book

The Diamond Sutra of 868 is a Buddhist scripture printed in Tang dynasty China and found in a sealed cave at Dunhuang on the Silk Road. A note at its end gives a date equivalent to 11 May 868, making it the world’s oldest complete printed book that carries a date. Now in the British Library, it shows how advanced Chinese woodblock printing was centuries before printing came to Europe.

The text: a short sutra on wisdom

The Diamond Sutra, in Sanskrit the Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra, is one of the best-known texts of Mahayana Buddhism. It belongs to the “Perfection of Wisdom” literature and takes the form of a dialogue between the Buddha and an elderly disciple, Subhuti.

Its central teaching is that everything people perceive, including the self and even the Buddha’s own teachings, is empty of fixed, independent existence. The image of the diamond, or thunderbolt, refers to wisdom sharp enough to cut through illusion.

The Dunhuang copy uses the Chinese translation made by the Central Asian monk Kumarajiva in about 401–402, the version that became standard in East Asia. The sutra was short enough to recite and copy, and Buddhists believed that reproducing it brought spiritual merit.

The text was especially important in the Chan (Zen) tradition. According to a well-known traditional story, Huineng, later revered as the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, was awakened on hearing a passage from the Diamond Sutra recited in a market. Whether or not the story is literally true, it shows how widely the sutra was known in Tang China.

Printing before 868

Woodblock printing developed in China during the Tang dynasty, probably by the 7th century. A page of text, or a picture, was written on thin paper, pasted face down on a smooth block of wood, and the blank areas were carved away so the characters stood out in relief. The block was inked, a sheet of paper laid on it and rubbed with a brush.

The technique built on older traditions of carved seals and ink rubbings taken from inscribed stones, and on the abundant supply of paper in China. Buddhist demand for charms, images and scriptures, which believers wanted in quantity, was a major driver.

Older printed items survive. A small dharani (protective charm) text found in 1966 inside a pagoda at Bulguksa temple in Korea had been placed there by 751, and in Japan the Empress Shotoku ordered a million printed charms, the Hyakumanto Darani, in 764–770. But these are short and undated in their own text; the Diamond Sutra is a complete book that states exactly when it was made.

After 868 printing spread rapidly. Among the Dunhuang finds are printed almanacs for the years 877 and 882, showing that printers also served everyday, commercial needs. Between 932 and 953 the minister Feng Dao oversaw the printing of the Confucian classics by the state, and in the early Song period, from 971, the entire Buddhist canon was carved in Sichuan on some 130,000 woodblocks.

The scroll and its colophon

The Dunhuang Diamond Sutra is a scroll just over 5 metres long, made of seven sheets of paper pasted together. Six carry the text; the first carries an elaborate illustration, the frontispiece.

The frontispiece shows the Buddha seated on a lotus throne beneath a canopy, preaching to Subhuti, who kneels before him. They are surrounded by monks, bodhisattvas, heavenly guardians, officials and two lions. The fine lines and complex composition show that the block-carver was highly skilled and that printing was already a mature craft.

At the end of the scroll is a colophon. In the British Library’s translation it reads: “Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.” That date corresponds to 11 May 868.

Nothing else is known about Wang Jie. His purpose was religious: by paying for copies to be given away, he hoped to earn merit for his parents. Where the scroll was printed is also uncertain; it may have been made in a larger centre such as Chang’an or Sichuan and carried to Dunhuang.

The Library Cave at Dunhuang

The scroll survived because it was sealed away. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, in today’s Gansu province, are a complex of hundreds of Buddhist cave temples cut into a cliff between the 4th and 14th centuries.

Around the beginning of the 11th century, a small side chamber, now called Cave 17 or the Library Cave, was filled with tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and printed documents and then walled up. Why it was sealed is still debated: theories include fear of invasion, storage of worn-out sacred texts that could not be thrown away, or simple reorganisation.

In 1900 a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, who had appointed himself guardian of the caves, discovered the hidden chamber while clearing sand. Its dry climate had preserved the contents in remarkable condition.

The hoard was extraordinarily varied. Besides Buddhist scriptures in Chinese, it included documents in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Khotanese, Sogdian, Old Uyghur and even Hebrew, along with contracts, letters, census records, poems, star charts and paintings on silk. The latest dated documents belong to the very beginning of the 11th century, which is why the sealing is placed around that time. For historians, the Library Cave is one of the richest windows onto daily life along the Silk Road.

Aurel Stein and the journey to London

In 1907 the Hungarian-born British archaeologist Aurel Stein reached Dunhuang during his second Central Asian expedition. Working through his Chinese secretary Jiang Xiaowan, he persuaded Wang Yuanlu to let him see and then acquire many thousands of manuscripts, printed items and paintings in return for a donation to the upkeep of the caves.

The Diamond Sutra was among the documents Stein took. They went to the British Museum, and the Chinese material later passed to the British Library when it was formed in 1973. Other explorers followed Stein, notably the French scholar Paul Pelliot in 1908, and Dunhuang documents are now spread across collections in London, Paris, Beijing, St Petersburg and elsewhere.

The removal of these treasures remains controversial. Many in China see it as a loss of national heritage taken under unequal conditions, while the holding institutions emphasise conservation and open access. The International Dunhuang Project, founded in 1994 and based at the British Library, works with partners in several countries to digitise the scattered manuscripts and make them freely available online.

Conservation and display

By the time it reached London, the scroll had been cut into sections and showed signs of damage and earlier repairs. In the 20th century it was mounted and restored several times, and some earlier interventions, including the use of adhesives and backing materials, later caused problems of their own.

Between 2010 and the mid-2010s, conservators at the British Library undertook a major treatment to remove old repairs and stabilise the paper using traditional East Asian methods. Because paper and ink are sensitive to light, the scroll is displayed only for limited periods, while a full digital copy can be viewed online.

The scroll’s fame has made it a symbol of the long history of the book. It features regularly in exhibitions and histories of printing, and it is often cited alongside later milestones such as Korea’s Jikji, the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, as evidence that East Asia led the world in printing technology for centuries.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the Diamond Sutra is the oldest printed text in the world. Older printed charms exist in Korea and Japan; the Diamond Sutra is the oldest complete dated printed book.
• Myth: printing was invented by Gutenberg. Gutenberg’s achievement in the 1450s was a practical system of metal movable type for alphabetic script. Woodblock printing in China was centuries older, and Bi Sheng invented movable type in ceramic in the 1040s.
• Myth: the scroll is a single printed sheet. It was printed from several blocks onto separate sheets that were then joined.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 401–402: Kumarajiva translates the Diamond Sutra into Chinese.
• by 751: A printed dharani charm is placed in a pagoda at Bulguksa, Korea.
• 11 May 868: Wang Jie’s printed copy of the Diamond Sutra is completed.
• c. 1000–1050: The Library Cave at Mogao is sealed.
• 1900: Wang Yuanlu discovers the Library Cave.
• 1907: Aurel Stein acquires the scroll and many other documents.
• 1973: The scroll passes to the newly formed British Library.
• 1994: The International Dunhuang Project is founded.

Why it matters

The Diamond Sutra of 868 is a landmark in the history of the book. It proves that, by the 9th century, Chinese craftsmen could mass-produce illustrated texts of high quality, long before Gutenberg’s press transformed Europe. It also reminds us how religious devotion drove the spread of technologies that would later reshape knowledge everywhere.