Haribhadra was an Indian Buddhist writing in about the year 800 during the reign of Dharma-pala, the greatest of the Pala kings who held sway over northeast India from the 8th to the 12th centuries. His works have been largely ignored, up until this point, by Western scholarship, even though they had a great influence on the course of later Indian and Tibetan scholastic Buddhism.

Haribhadra's major work is the Abhisamayalamkaraloka Prajna-paramita-vyakhya, Commentary on the "Perfection of Wisdom" With the Light (Provided by Maitreya's) "Ornament for Clear Realization" (abbreviated title AAA). It is not so much a single book as a composite of three: (a) the Asta-sahasrika-prajna-paramita, Perfection of Wisdom in 8.000 Lines (A), considered to be a revelation, (b) the Abhisamayalamkara, Ornament for Clear Realization (AA), an aphoristic codification, at least according to Haribhadra's point of view, of the topics in the revelation, and (c) the AAA itself, Haribhadra's explanatory sentences or commentary which links the A and AA together.

To overcome the difficulty that results from the need to retain in a translation (a) the integrity of the book as a religious text, and (b) the historical reality that words, and particularly technical terms, often mean different things at different periods, the following strategies are employed: (i) The Sanskrit text of the translated portion (two-thirds of the first chapter or a little over 80 of the AAA's nearly 1000 pages) has been presented in Devanagari based on a comparison of the earlier editions and the Tibetan translations. (ii) The text itself is presented, as far as possible, in an unbroken literal translation that lets Haribhadra speak for himself. (iii) By using modern technology the different layers of the text are consistently identified and separated by use of bold, italic, underline and quotation marks. (iv) The important historical issues the text raises, and the central concepts discussed in the three texts, are identified and discussed in a sufficiently detailed introduction.