The oldest dated printed book was made to be given away free
A Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra printed on 11 May 868 is widely called the oldest surviving printed book, and its closing note says it was produced for universal free distribution. That makes it the first known creative work explicitly dedicated to the public, more than a thousand years before copyright licences.
The scroll lay among the Dunhuang manuscripts until the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu found it in 1900; he sold it to Aurel Stein in 1907. Its text is the translation made around 401 by Kumārajīva, prized for flowing sense over literal precision and still the most chanted Chinese version. Scholars note that some earlier printed material on paper does exist, but none rivals this dated, complete book.
The sutra's Sanskrit name compares perfect wisdom to a vajra, a thunderbolt or diamond that slices through illusion. Nobody knows exactly when it was composed; proposals run from the second to the fifth century. It became one of the most influential Mahāyāna texts in East Asia, especially in Chan, or Zen, and by the end of the Tang dynasty in 907 more than 80 commentaries had been written on it, 32 of which survive. Chan tradition says the future Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, was a woodcutter until he heard it recited and was jolted into insight.
The text is a conversation between the Buddha and the elder monk Subhūti, who asks how someone on the bodhisattva path should steady the mind. The answer is famously paradoxical. The Buddha will lead all beings to nirvana, yet no being is actually led there, because a bodhisattva does not see anyone as a fixed self. Statements take the form that all beings are beingless, which is why they are called all beings. Hajime Nakamura called this pattern the logic of not.
The philosopher David Kalupahana reads it as a three-step move: state a concept, deny that it names any real essence, then keep it as a useful convention. Words stay meaningful for practical purposes, but clinging to them as solid things is what the sutra aims to dissolve.
Source: Diamond Sutra
