In a method for driving an AC surface discharge plasma display panel a parallel driving method is used in which the addressing and discharge sustaining are performed simultaneously. Periods between the discharge sustaining pulses applied to the scanning electrodes and the common electrodes are set as the address time slots periods, a plurality of data pulses are applied in the address time slot periods, and a number of common electrodes equal to the number of data pulses are wired as one common electrode group and are driven by the same signal.