The Heart Sutra Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Heart Sutra

  Introduction

  The Heart Sutra

  Part One - Prajnaparamita

  1. THE NOBLE AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA: arya avalokiteshvaro bodhisattvo

  2. WHILE PRACTICING THE DEEP PRACTICE OF PRAJNAPARAMITA: gambhiran ...

  3. LOOKED UPON THE FIVE SKANDHAS: vyaavalokayati sma panca skandhas

  4. AND SEEING THEY WERE EMPTY OF SELF-EXISTENCE: tansh ca svabhava shunyan ...

  5. SAID, “HERE, SHARIPUTRA: iha shariputra

  6. FORM IS EMPTINESS, EMPTINESS IS FORM: rupan shunyata shunyataiva rupan

  7. EMPTINESS IS NOT SEPARATE FROM FORM, FORM IS NOT SEPARATE FROM EMPTINESS: ...

  8. WHATEVER IS FORM IS EMPTINESS, WHATEVER IS EMPTINESS IS FORM: yad rupan sa ...

  9. THE SAME HOLDS FOR SENSATION AND PERCEPTION, MEMORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS: evam ...

  10. HERE, SHARIPUTRA, ALL DHARMAS ARE DEFINED BY EMPTINESS: iha shariptura ...

  11. NOT BIRTH OR DESTRUCTION, PURITY OR DEFILEMENT, COMPLETENESS OR DEFICIENCY: ...

  Part Two - Abhidharma in the Light of Prajnaparamita

  12/13. THEREFORE, SHARIPUTRA, IN EMPTINESS THERE IS NO FORM, / NO SENSATION, NO ...

  14. NO EYE, NO EAR, NO NOSE, NO TONGUE, NO BODY AND NO MIND: na cakshuh shrotra ...

  15. NO SHAPE, NO SOUND, NO SMELL, NO TASTE, NO FEELING AND NO THOUGHT: na rupa ...

  16. NO ELEMENT OF PERCEPTION, FROM EYE TO CONCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS: na ...

  17. NO CAUSAL LINK, FROM IGNORANCE TO OLD AGE AND DEATH: na avidya na avidya ...

  18. AND NO END OF CAUSAL LINK, FROM IGNORANCE TO OLD AGE AND DEATH: yavan na ...

  19. NO SUFFERING, NO SOURCE, NO RELIEF, NO PATH: na duhkha samudaya nirodha ...

  20. NO KNOWLEDGE, NO ATTAINMENT AND NO NON-ATTAINMENT: na jnanan na praptir ...

  Part Three - The Bodhisattva Path

  21. THEREFORE, SHARIPUTRA, WITHOUT ATTAINMENT: tasmac shariputra apraptitvad

  22. BODHISATTVAS TAKE REFUGE IN PRAJNAPARAMITA: bodhisattvo prajnaparamitam ...

  23. AND LIVE WITHOUT WALLS OF THE MIND: viharaty acitta-avaranah

  24. WITHOUT WALLS OF THE MIND AND THUS WITHOUT FEARS: citta-avarana nastitvad ...

  25. THEY SEE THROUGH DELUSIONS AND FINALLY NIRVANA: viparyasa atikranto nishtha ...

  26/27. ALL BUDDHAS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE / ALSO TAKE REFUGE IN ...

  28. AND REALIZE UNEXCELLED, PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT: anuttaran samyak sambodhim ...

  Part Four - The Womb of Buddhas

  29. YOU SHOULD THEREFORE KNOW THE GREAT MANTRA OF PRAJNAPARAMITA: tasmaj ...

  30. THE MANTRA OF GREAT MAGIC: maha-vidya mantro

  31. THE UNEXCELLED MANTRA: anuttara mantro

  32. THE MANTRA EQUAL TO THE UNEQUALLED: asama-sama mantrah

  33. WHICH HEALS ALL SUFFERING AND IS TRUE, NOT FALSE: sarva-duhkha prashamanah ...

  34. THE MANTRA IN PRAJNAPARAMITA SPOKEN THUS: prajnaparamitayam ukto mantrah ...

  35. ‘GATE GATE, PARAGATE, PARASANGATE, BODHI SVAHA’

  Names, Terms, and Texts

  The Heart Sutra

  Copyright Page

  The Heart Sutra

  The Heart Sutra

  1 The noble Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva,

  while practicing the deep practice of Prajnaparamita,

  looked upon the Five Skandhas

  and seeing they were empty of self-existence,

  5 said, “Here, Shariputra,

  form is emptiness, emptiness is form;

  emptiness is not separate from form,

  form is not separate from emptiness;

  whatever is form is emptiness,

  whatever is emptiness is form.

  The same holds for sensation and perception,

  memory and consciousness.

  10 Here, Shariputra, all dharmas are defined by emptiness

  not birth or destruction, purity or defilement,

  completeness or deficiency.

  Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form,

  no sensation, no perception, no memory and no

  consciousness;

  no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body and no mind;

  15 no shape, no sound, no smell, no taste, no feeling

  and no thought;

  no element of perception, from eye to conceptual

  consciousness;

  no causal link, from ignorance to old age and death,

  and no end of causal link, from ignorance to old age and death;

  no suffering, no source, no relief, no path;

  20 no knowledge, no attainment and no non-attainment.

  Therefore, Shariputra, without attainment,

  bodhisattavas take refuge in Prajnaparamita

  and live without walls of the mind.

  Without walls of the mind and thus without fears,

  25 they see through delusions and finally nirvana.

  All buddhas past, present and future

  also take refuge in Prajnaparamita

  and realize unexcelled, perfect enlightenment.

  You should therefore know the great mantra of Prajnaparamita,

  30 the mantra of great magic,

  the unexcelled mantra,

  the mantra equal to the unequalled,

  which heals all suffering and is true, not false,

  the mantra in Prajnaparamita spoken thus:

  ‘Gate gate, paragate, parasangate, bodhi svaha.’”

  Introduction

  THE Heart Sutra is Buddhism in a nutshell. It covers more of the Buddha’s teachings in a shorter span than any other scripture, and it does so without being superficial or commonplace. Although the author is unknown, he was clearly someone with a deep knowledge of the Dharma and an ability to summarize lifetimes of meditation in a few well-crafted lines. Having studied the Heart Sutra for the past year, I would describe it as a work of art as much as religion. And perhaps it is one more proof, if any were needed, that distinguishing these two callings is both artificial and unfortunate.

  Whoever the author was, he begins by calling upon Avalokiteshvara, Buddhism’s most revered bodhisattva, to introduce the teaching of Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom, to the Buddha’s wisest disciple, Shariputra. Avalokiteshvara then shines the light of this radical form of wisdom on the major approaches to reality used by the Sarvastivadins, the most prominent Buddhist sect in Northern India and Central Asia two thousand years ago, and outlines the alternative approach of the Prajnaparamita. Finally, Avalokiteshvara also provides a key by means of which we can call this teaching to mind and unlock its power on our behalf.

  With this sequence in mind, I have divided the text into four parts and have also broken it into thirty-five lines to make it easier to study or chant. In the first part (lines 1-11), we are reminded of the time when the Buddha transmitted his entire understanding of the Abhidharma, or Matrix of Reality, during the seventh monsoon following his Enlightenment. We then consider Avalokiteshvara’s reformulation of such instruction to correct Shariputra’s misunderstanding of it. The basis for this reformulation is the teaching of prajna in place of jnana, or wisdom rather than knowledge. Thus, the conceptual truths on which early Buddhists relied for their practice are held up to the light and found to be empty of anything that would separate them from the indivisible fabric of what is truly real. In their place, Avalokiteshvara introduces us to emptiness, the common denominator of the mundane, the metaphysical, and the transcendent.

  In the second part (lines 12-20), Avalokiteshvara lists the major conceptual categories of the Sarvastivadin Abhidharma and considers each in the light of Prajnaparamita. Following the same sequence of categories used by the Sarvastivadins themselves, he
reviews such forms of analysis as the Bodies of Awareness, the Abodes of Sensation, the Elements of Perception, the Chain of Dependent Origination, the Four Truths, and the attainment or non-attainment of Nirvana, and sees them all dissolve in emptiness.

  In the third part (lines 21-28), Avalokiteshvara turns from the Sarvastivadin interpretation of the Abhidharma to the emptiness of Prajnaparamita, which provides travelers with all they need to reach the goal of buddhahood. Here, Avalokiteshvara reviews the major signposts near the end of the path without introducing additional conceptual categories that might obstruct or deter those who would travel it.

  In the fourth part (lines 29-35), Avalokiteshvara leaves us with a summary of the teaching of Prajnaparamita in the form of an incantation that reminds and empowers us to go beyond all conceptual categories. This teaching has with good reason been called “the mother of buddhas.” Having survived a yearlong journey through the jungle of early Buddhism to the secret burial ground of the Abhidharma, I would add that the Heart Sutra is their womb. With this incantation ringing in our minds, we thus enter the goddess, Prajnaparamita, and await our rebirth as buddhas. This is the teaching of the Heart Sutra, as I have come to understand it over the past year.

  KARMIC BACKGROUND

  In the fall of 2002, I was working on a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra when my friend Silas Hoadley asked me if I would contribute a new English version of the Heart Sutra for a meditation retreat he was organizing just outside the small town where we live. I was glad to take a break from the Lanka and began comparing Sanskrit editions and Chinese translations and poring over commentaries. Although I had first encountered the Heart Sutra more than thirty years earlier and had read the standard explanations of its meaning, I had never thought of it as anything more than a superficial summary of the Buddhist concept of shunyata, or emptiness. I failed to see anything in it of interest beyond the line: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” not that this made much sense to me.

  This time I didn’t even get past the name: the Heart Sutra. I discovered that there was no record of this title until Hsuantsang’s Chinese translation of the text appeared in 649, four hundred years after the first translation into Chinese. This in turn led me to wonder how the Chinese word hsin, or “heart,” ended up as the name of what has become the best known of all Buddhist scriptures. Since hsin is the standard Chinese translation of the Sanskrit word hridaya, I began poking around and found three Sanskrit works whose titles also contained the word hridaya. Known collectively as the hridaya shastras (a shastra being an exposition of doctrine by later followers of the Buddha), these were among the most influential accounts of the Abhidharma of the Sarvastivadin sect of early Buddhism. They included a work by Dharmashri (c. 100 B.C.), another by Upashanta (C. A. D. 280), and a third by Dharmatrata (C. A. D. 320). These three shastras were considered essential reading for members of the Sarvastivadin sect, and they eventually formed the basis of an Abhidharma school in China. I couldn’t help wondering if their popularity had something to do with the name change that occurred sometime between the appearance of Chih-ch’ien’s Heart Sutra translation around A.D. 250, when he gave the text the title of Prajnaparamita Dharani, and 649, when Hsuan-tsang titled it Hsin-ching, or Heart Sutra.

  This inquiry into titles led me to other scriptures of the Sarvastivadins, and I discovered that this early Buddhist sect had compiled the Buddha’s sermons into a series of texts known as agamas, or “foundations.” I found the Samyukt Agama of particular interest. Compiled around 200 B.C., this work contained all the sermons of the Buddha and his most important disciples that dealt with subjects considered worthy of meditation. What intrigued me was that this work was organized according to a sequence of subjects that corresponded exactly with the sequence that occurs in Part Two of the Heart Sutra. Since this sequence differs in the comparable texts of all other Buddhist sects whose canons have survived or about which we know, I couldn’t help wonder if the Heart Sutra wasn’t initially composed and didn’t later receive its more popular title in reaction to the Abhidharma of the Sarvastivadins. And this, in turn, led me to embark on an inquiry into the Abhidharma, something I had avoided ever since trying to make sense of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha thirty years earlier. As far as I could see at the time, the Abhidharma didn’t have anything to do with Zen, and that’s where I left the Abhidharma, at least until the fall of 2002.

  This time I began at the beginning, with the word abhidharma. Some commentators have interpreted this to mean “higher dharmas,” and others have insisted it means the “study of dharmas,” or “dharmology.” In either case, the higher dharmas that are the subject of study are the entities of the mind through which Buddhists gain their understanding of reality. According to such a conception, any given object or individual is viewed as nothing but a construct of the mind fashioned out of these dharmas, or building blocks of reality. In the past, some Buddhists even held that such dharmas constituted reality itself, which was true of the Sarvastivadins. But as I began exploring the Abhidharma, I soon learned that during the forty-five years of the Buddha’s ministry, he taught the Abhidharma to only one of his disciples.

  This occurred just before the onset of the annual monsoon in the seventh year after his Enlightenment, or in 432 B.C. (to use the dating of the Buddha established by Hajime Nakamura). In this year, while the Buddha was still in Rajgir, he told King Bimbasara that he would perform a miracle in Shravasti, the capital of the adjacent kingdom of Kaushala, under the royal gardener’s mango tree. Hearing of this prediction, members of rival sects preceded the Buddha to Shravasti and cut down all the mango trees. But the royal gardener managed to find a single fruit and offered it to the Buddha. After eating the mango, the Buddha gave the seed to the gardener and asked him to plant it. Once it was in the ground, the Buddha washed his hands above the spot. As the water touched the ground, the seed sprouted into a huge tree that burst into blooms that then turned into fruit. According to Pali accounts dating back to the third century B.C. (Patisambhidamagga I: 125), the Buddha sat down below the tree and suddenly appeared at the center of a huge lotus flower from which his image multiplied a millionfold. Then he rose into the air with fire coming from the top half of his body and water from the bottom half. This was then reversed, with water coming from the top half and fire from the bottom half. This process was repeated along his left side and his right side. Then the Buddha stood up and walked along a jeweled terrace that appeared in the sky. After sitting down and reclining, he finally stood back up, and as buddhas before him had done following the performance of such feats, in three great strides he ascended to Trayatrinsha Heaven at the summit of Mount Sumeru.

  Trayatrinsha is Sanskrit (Pali: Tavatimsa) for “thirty-three.” According to Buddhist cosmology this was the name of the celestial residence of thirty-three devas, including Indra, their king, and another deva whose name was Santushita. Prior to being reborn at the summit of Mount Sumeru, Santushita was Maya, Shakyamuni’s mother, who died a week after giving birth. According to both Pali and Sanskrit accounts (Atthasalini, Mahavastu III: 115), out of compassion for his former mother, the Buddha spent the entire rainy season at the summit of Mount Sumeru teaching Santushita the conceptual system known as the Abhidharma, which is often described as “the way things appear to the mind of a buddha.”

  While he was on earth, the Buddha taught lessons suited to whatever audience he was addressing. But much like a doctor, his instructions were primarily intended to put an end to suffering. He never bothered trying to explain the system that formed the basis of his spiritual pharmacology, which was the Abhidharma. As later disciples and their disciples came to understand the Abhidharma, they claimed that it explained reality as a matrix (matrika) of dharmas, or fundamental entities of the mind, much like the table of atomic elements used in chemistry. From such a perspective, our familiar world of objects and persons was viewed as nothing but a conceptual construct fashioned out of dozens of these dharmas—seventy-five in the case
of the Sarvastivadins. And to know things as they really are, a person needed to develop the ability to know the characteristics and connections among these entities. In his sermons, however, the Buddha nowhere advanced such a system, for it was simply too vast an enterprise to attempt on earth. Only on Mount Sumeru could the Buddha explain the immense and intricate scheme of the Abhidharma. This is because only such a place was sufficiently removed from the coarser levels of the Realm of Desire.

  Thus, the Buddha taught the Abhidharma to Santushita at the summit of Mount Sumeru. But every day, he reappeared briefly on earth and gave his disciple, Shariputra, a summary, for a summary was all that was possible to teach or to understand on the earthly plane far below Trayatrinsha Heaven. Shariputra had distinguished himself for his wisdom, and the Buddha chose him, and him alone, to receive such instruction. Finally, after three months, the monsoon season came to an end, and the Buddha descended to earth at Sankasya, an event depicted with great imagination in Buddhist art, and he resumed his teaching but never spoke of the Abhidharma again.

  Meanwhile, having heard the Buddha’s complete exposition of the Abhidharma, Santushita advanced to the first stage of Buddhist attainment and became a srota-apanna, or one who “reaches the river,” the river of impermanence. Among the Buddha’s early followers, this was considered the first of three insights necessary for liberation. The other two concerned suffering and the absence of a self. While Santushita was cultivating this new awareness, far below at the earthly level of the Realm of Desire, Shariputra began compiling what he had learned into the first works on the Abhidharma. Early Buddhist schools attributed two such texts to this wisest of the Buddha’s disciples: the Sangiti-paryaya and the Dharma-skandha.