The Diamond Sutra Is Printed in 868

On 11 May 868, during the Tang dynasty in China, a man named Wang Jie commissioned the production of a woodblock-printed Buddhist text on behalf of his parents. Preserved in the form of a paper scroll approximately five meters long, the work carries a precise date inscribed in its colophon: the fifteenth day of the fourth month of the ninth year of the Xiantong reign period. This artifact constitutes the oldest surviving printed book that bears an explicit date of manufacture, even though fragments of earlier printed paper survive elsewhere without comparable chronological markers.

The text printed upon the scroll is the Diamond Sutra, a foundational work of Mahayana Buddhism belonging to the Perfection of Wisdom genre. Composed originally in Sanskrit under the title Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra, modern scholars debate whether its original text dates to the second or the fifth century. Rather than a modern translation, the 868 scroll preserves the celebrated Chinese rendering produced around 400 by the monk Kumarajiva, whose fluid style prioritized core meaning over rigid literal phrasing and became the most widely recited version across East Asia.