To readers unimpressed with the Google eBookstore’s ancient sutras offerings (search for “sutras” and you get primarily books about yoga), the British Library has an antidote: the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest (known) printed and dated text, from 868 A.D., which the library has recently digitized and put online. The sutra was rediscovered in 1900, in a cave in Dunhuang, China. It is a transcript of an oral sermon delivered by the Buddha, was originally transcribed in Sanskrit, translated to Chinese around 400, and is printed on silk scrolls with many beautiful illustrations (you can read a brief history here).
Now anyone with a computer who chooses to download the required Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.9.615 can use the mouse to digitally unroll the scrolls right to left (as they are intended to be read). Boxes and audio narration pop up throughout to give context and provide rough translation for readers whose ancient Chinese is rusty.
It takes a while to get through the whole thing, but it’s worth it, if only for the oddly postmodern colophon, which reads: “Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents, 11 May 868.”
It’s now thoroughly crackpot to suggest that any single person invented or predicted the Internet (though the claim that Jorge Luis Borges invented it remains a favorite), but I read the colophon and had to imagine that somewhere in his calligraphic mind, Wang Jie foresaw the Diamond Sutra’s digitized, translated, Adobe-enabled future of universal free distribution.
In addition to the Diamond Sutra, interested readers can peruse sketches by Leonardo DiVinci, pages from William Blake’s notebooks, pages from the Golden Haggadah, and many other seriously ancient texts on the British Library’s simply amazing Turn the Pages.
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(Image: “Elder Subhuti addresses the Buddha. Detail from the Dunhuang block print,” via Wiki.)_
