The Diamond Sutra uses a peculiar rhetorical pattern — affirming a category, then immediately emptying it — to convey the Mahayana understanding of Emptiness:
“All conditioned dharmas are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, like dew and lightning. Thus should they be regarded.”
A recitation of this sutra was what awakened Huineng. A woodblock printing of it made in 868 CE, discovered in a sealed cave in Dunhuang, is the oldest dated printed book known.