The Heart Sutra Read online

  The Sangitiparyaya is a commentary on the Sangiti Sutra, which is one of thirty sutras found in the Dhirgha Agama (cf. the Theravadin Digha Nikaya). This sutra was spoken in response to the disputes that arose upon the death of Mahavira, the founder of the Jain religion. To avoid similar doctrinal dissension, in this sutra Shariputra presents a list of basic concepts culled from the Buddha’s sermons, and this list is approved by the Buddha as constituting the fundamentals of his teaching.

  As to how this came about, Erich Frauwallner puts it this way:The Buddha had not preached a doctrinal system as such; he had demonstrated the path to enlightenment and had supplied the necessary theoretical justification for it. This represented the core of his message. Throughout the long years of his teaching, as he preached this message to an increasing body of followers, constantly adapting it to the capacities of his audience, certain concepts were also touched upon which formed a valuable complement to his basic message. However, since these concepts were dispersed throughout his sermons, they could thus be easily overlooked and gradually forgotten. Therefore, it is these concepts in particular which were collected in the Sangiti Sutra in order to ensure their preservation. These doctrinal concepts did not in themselves form a system. Nor was there either intention or desire to create a system from these doctrinal concepts; the aim was merely to record the words of the Buddha. But it was only natural that a recitation of the doctrine, such as the kind contained in the Sangiti Sutra, could not simply be confined to an enumeration of the doctrinal concepts collected in the sutra. Some form of explanation was indispensable. The explanations of the Sangiti Sutra were eventually recorded in written form by the Sarvastivadins, and thus came to form the Sangitiparyaya. (Erich Frauwallner, Studies in Abhidharma Literature, pp. 14-15)

  Although these explanations were attributed to Shariputra, they were continually revised and new interpretations added. Still, for such early Buddhist schools as the Sarvastivadins, Shariputra was the fount of all wisdom concerning the Abhidharma.

  The Dharmaskandha was another seminal work attributed to Shariputra, and it was also composed around lists of basic concepts. However, here we are no longer dealing with a mere enumeration but with groups of concepts, concepts that were considered important for the practice of liberation or significant with regard to entanglement in the cycle of existence. Scholars have noted the similarity of the Dharmaskandha to the Vibhanga, a Pali Abhidharma text of equal importance to the early Sthaviravadins (ancestors of the Theravadins). Comparing the two, Frauwallner concludes, “We are thus dealing with a work from the period before the Pali (ed. Sthaviravada) and the Sarvastivada schools separated, a work which was then taken over and transmitted by both schools. Thus the Dharmaskandha proves to be a very early work from the time before King Ashoka’s missions and can therefore also be regarded as the Sarvastivadin’s earliest Abhidharma work after the Sangitiparyaya. But it takes the Sangitiparyaya ’s superficial compilation of lists and constitutes the first individual work of the Sarvastivada school” (ibid., p. 20). Karl Potter reverses the temporal order of these two texts but agrees that both were compiled around 300 B.C. (Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 7, p. 179). Regardless of which text came first, both were among the earliest and most important works of the Sarvastivadins, and both were attributed to Shariputra.

  This digression has been necessary not only to explain the focus of the Heart Sutra on the Abhidharma of the Sarvastivadins but also to explain the appearance of Shariputra in the text. Anyone who wanted to challenge the Sarvastivadin conception of the Dharma could do no better than to question Shariputra’s understanding of the basic categories of the Abhidharma. And there could be no better person to do this than the Buddha’s mother, or rather her incarnation as Santushita, for Santushita heard the entire Abhidharma, while Shariputra heard only summaries. With this in mind, I could not help but conclude that Avalokiteshvara must then be a subsequent incarnation of Santushita. As noted earlier, Avalokiteshvara follows the same sequence of Abhidharma categories used by the Sarvastivadins themselves to organize their Samyukt Agama, beginning with a consideration of the Five Skandhas, then continuing with the Twelve Abodes of Sensation and Eighteen Elements of Perception, the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, the Four Truths, and finally the attainment and status of practitioners who follow the Buddhist path.

  This conclusion, however, was just the beginning of my altered understanding of this heart of Prajnaparamita. The teaching of Prajnaparamita is also represented in the form of a goddess of the same name who has long been known as the “mother of buddhas.” She is called the “mother of buddhas” because buddhas become buddhas as a result of their ability to penetrate and be transformed by this teaching, which is considered equivalent to the dharma-kaya, or body of reality. But if Prajnaparamita is the dharma-kaya, then Santushita must represent its realization, or sanbhoga-kaya, and Avalokiteshvara must be its manifestation, or nirmana-kaya, and the Heart Sutra must then be Prajnaparamita’s womb, with our conception and subsequent birth made possible by the mantra at the end of the sutra.

  A mantra is like a magic lamp, which itself is often cast in the shape of a womb. But instead of bringing forth a genie, as other mantras are intended to do, this mantra draws us inside, where we become the genie. Chanting this mantra thus creates the womb from which we are reborn as buddhas. This, then, is how my understanding of this sutra has changed over the past year. Altogether quite unexpected, but nevertheless inescapable.

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  The Heart Sutra hardly fills a page, and yet it is the best known of the thousands of scriptures in the Buddhist Canon. Its fame, though, is relatively recent in terms of Buddhist history and didn’t begin until a thousand years after the Buddha’s Nirvana. During the chaos that occurred in China between the collapse of the Sui (581-618) and the rise of the T’ang dynasty (618-907), many people fled the country’s twin capitals of Loyang and Ch’ang-an and sought refuge in Chengtu, the capital of the southwest province of Szechuan. Among the refugees was a Buddhist novice still in his teens. One day this novice befriended a man who was impoverished and ill, and the man, in turn, taught him the words of the Heart Sutra. Not long afterward, the novice was ordained a monk, and several years later, in 629, he embarked on one of the great journeys of Chinese history.

  The young monk’s name was Hsuan-tsang, and he set out on the Silk Road for India in search of answers to questions concerning the Buddha’s teaching that this world is nothing but mind. In the course of his journey, Hsuan-tsang is said to have traveled 10,000 miles—west across the Taklamakan Desert to Samarkand, south over the Hindu Kush to the Buddhist center of Taxila, and down the Ganges into India and back again. And time and again, he turned to the Heart Sutra to ward off demons, dust storms, and bandits. When he finally returned to China in 645, he was welcomed back by the emperor, and stories about the power of the Heart Sutra began making the rounds.

  This account about how Hsuan-tsang first encountered the sutra was recorded by Hui-li (b. 614) in his biography of Hsuan-tsang written in 688. Several decades later, the Tantric master Amoghavajra (705-774) embellished this earlier account in a preface to the Heart Sutra preserved on a manuscript found at Tunhuang in Northwest China; this manuscript (S2464) had been sealed in a cave shrine with thousands of other Buddhist, Taoist, and Zoroastrian scriptures in the eleventh century, and was rediscovered 900 years later in the early twentieth century. Although Amoghavajra’s version was clearly fanciful and historically inaccurate, it became the seed from which sprang the series of stories about Hsuan-tsang that eventually resulted in the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West (cf. Victor Mair, “The Heart Sutra and The Journey to the West”). Hsuan-tsang also produced his own translation of the Heart Sutra in 649, and it wasn’t long afterward that the first commentaries began appearing, as his fellow monks realized that not only was this a scripture of great power, but its summary of Buddhist teaching provided the perfect platform from which to offer their own in
terpretations of the Dharma.

  Since then, the Heart Sutra has become the most popular of all Buddhist scriptures, and yet no one knows where it came from or who was responsible for its composition. Its earliest recorded appearance was in the form of a Chinese translation made by a Central Asian monk sometime between A.D. 200 and 250. The monk’s name was Chih-ch’ien, and he was a disciple of Chih-liang, who was a disciple of Chih-lou-chia-ch’an (Lokakshema). The Chih at the beginning of these monks’ names indicated that they were not Chinese, but Yueh-chih. During the second century B.C., one branch of this nomadic tribe migrated westward from their ancestral home along China’s northwest border and settled in the upper reaches of the Oxus River (Amu Darya). In the following century, they spread south across the Hindu Kush, and by A.D. 150 they controlled a territory that included all of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and most of Northern India, as well as parts of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Since their territory straddled both sides of the Hindu Kush, it was known as the Kushan Empire, and it was one of the great empires of the ancient world.

  In their conquest of this region, the Yueh-chih made use of a network of roads first created by the Mauryan Empire (321-181 B.C.) of Candragupta and Ashoka and expanded by a series of short-lived dynasties ruled by Bactrian Greeks, Scythians, and Parthians. This network also served the purpose of administrative control and provided the revenue from merchants and guilds that financed the Kushan state. The same guilds and merchants also supported hundreds, if not thousands, of Buddhist monasteries along the same network of roads and towns, and Buddhism flourished under the Kushans. King Kanishka (fl. A.D. 100-125) even put the images of Shakyamuni and Maitreya Buddha on his coins.

  Although Buddhist monks began arriving in China as early as the first century B.C., it wasn’t until the height of the Kushan Empire, or around A.D. 150, that they began translating the texts they brought with them or that others brought to China on their behalf. The Yueh-chih monk Chih-lou-chia-ch’an is said to have begun working in the Han dynasty capital of Loyang around this time on some of the earliest known scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, including the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines. Between A.D. 200 and 250, his disciple’s disciple, Chih-ch’ien, also translated a number of Mahayana scriptures, including the first translations of the Vimalakirti Sutra and the Longer Sukhavativyuha Sutra of Pure Land Buddhism, as well as a second rendition of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and the first translation of the Heart Sutra, which he titled the Prajnaparamita Dharani.

  In his Maha Prajnaparamita Shastra, written at the end of the second century A. D., Nagarjuna says the ideas and inspiration of such early Mahayana scriptures, if not the scriptures themselves, originated in Southern India and later spread west and then north. Most of Northern India was controlled by the Kushans during this period, and such teachings and scriptures would have moved easily along the trade routes under their control through what are now Pakistan and Afghanistan, then north through Uzbekistan, and finally east along the major arteries of the Silk Road to China.

  Although the teachings that make up the Prajnaparamita are thought to have originated in Southern India in the first or secong century B.C., the Heart Sutra was most likely composed during the first century A.D. further north, in the territories under the control of the Kushans: if not in Bactria (Afghanistan) or Gandhara (Pakistan) then perhaps in Sogdia (Uzbekistan) or Mathura (India’s Uttar Pradesh).

  Not long after Ashoka inherited the Mauryan throne in 268 B.C., he sent Sarvastivadin missionaries to Gandhara. Ashoka had been governor of Gandhara during the reign of his grandfather, Candragupta, and his decision to send Sarvastivadin monks there was a sign of favor. The cities in this part of India were at the center of a network of transcontinental trade routes and among the richest in the subcontinent. Thus, it is not surprising that the Sarvastivadins soon became the dominant Buddhist sect in this region. Over the course of the next several centuries, preferential patronage by merchants and the ruling elite extended their dominance beyond Gandhara to Bactria, Sogdia, and Mathura—basically the boundaries of the Kushan Empire. And since the Heart Sutra was clearly organized as a response to the teachings of the Sarvastivadins, it was probably a Sarvastivadin monk (or former Sarvastivadin monk) in this region who composed the Heart Sutra upon realizing the limitations of the Sarvastivadin Abhidharma. This was Edward Conze’s conclusion concerning other Prajnaparamita texts (cf. The Prajnaparamita Literature, p. 94), and most likely it was also the case with the Heart Sutra.

  As noted above, the Heart Sutra’s earliest appearance was in the form of a Chinese translation made by Chih-ch’ien sometime between A.D. 200 and 250. This was followed by a second version by Kumarajiva around A.D. 400. In his translations, Kumarajiva often incorporated whole sections of Chih-ch’ien’s earlier work, and he may have done so on this occasion as well. We’ll probably never know. Chih-ch’ien’s translation was listed as missing as early as A. D. 519. Hence, it must have been Kumarajiva’s version that Hsuan-tsang first learned to chant as a young novice. Later, after returning from India, he produced his own translation of the Heart Sutra. But except for making a few character changes peculiar to him and deleting a few phrases negating the Sarvastivadin conception of time, Hsuan-tsang followed Kumarajiva’s translation word for word, which is what we would expect of a text whose spiritual efficacy Hsuan-tsang had witnessed firsthand and whose wording he was, no doubt, reluctant to alter. More than a decade after publishing his own version of the Heart Sutra, Hsuan-tsang and his assistants also completed a translation of the encyclopedic collection of Perfection of Wisdom texts that make up the Maha Prajnaparamita Sutra, including the fourth and final Chinese version of the Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five Thousand Lines, which, for the sake of brevity, I will follow Conze in referring to as the Large Sutra.

  What has come to interest some scholars of late is that the first half of Kumarajiva’s and Hsuan-tsang’s translations of the Heart Sutra also appears in an expanded guise in their translations of the Large Sutra. This would not be unusual, especially since the Large Sutra is a collection of many separate texts and the passage in question is quite short, amounting to only about eight lines in the Chinese Tripitaka (or lines 5-20 in my Heart Sutra translation).

  But while Kumarajiva’s and Hsuan-tsang’s Chinese translations of certain lines in these two passages are identical, scholars have noticed that the surviving Sanskrit versions of the corresponding lines differ in these two sutras. Although the significance of such differences depends on one’s point of view, it has been argued that because they are alike in Chinese but different in Sanskrit, the most likely scenario was that the first half of the Chinese Heart Sutra was extracted and condensed from the Chinese Large Sutra, additional material added to the beginning (where the Buddha is replaced by Avalokiteshvara) and a mantra (already in circulation) added to the end, and the resulting Chinese text then taken to India, where it was translated into Sanskrit, resulting in the differences we see today in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra and the Sanskrit Large Sutra. Eventually, so this theory goes, the Sanskrit translation made its way back to China, where it was translated by others into Chinese again. A full account of this rather convoluted argument appears in Jan Nattier’s article “The Heart Sutra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?” (in The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 1992, pp. 153-223).

  Despite the brilliance and depth of scholarship involved in Nattier’s presentation of this thesis, we are shown no proof that the Heart Sutra was originally composed or compiled in Chinese, that any part of the first half was extracted from the Large Sutra or any other Chinese text, or that the mantra was added later. Instead, we are asked to believe that this is what must have happened because certain lines in the two Chinese texts agree and those in the two corresponding extant Sanskrit texts don’t, and it should be the other way around, with the Sanskrit texts agreeing and the Chinese texts diverging in the usual course of translation.

  My o
wn solution to this apparent inconsistency is to assume that the lines in question in the Sanskrit texts of the Heart Sutra and the Large Sutra used by Kumarajiva and Hsuan-tsang were identical. Thus, there was no need, nor any basis, for divergence in the Chinese. In fact, there is no evidence, only speculation, that the two Sanskrit texts used by Kumarajiva and Hsuan-tsang differed at the time they made their translations of this passage in these two sutras. The differences we see today in the two Sanskrit texts, I would suggest, were the result of subsequent corruption or simply reflect the existence of variant editions.

  Conze noted that the Large Sutra must have existed in a variety of versions (The Prajnaparamita Literature, p. 35), and this is also the conclusion of Shogo Watanabe (cf. “A Comparative Study of the Pancavinshatisahasrika Prajnaparamita” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1994, pp. 386-396). This variation among Sanskrit editions is further reflected in the differences in the Chinese translations of the Large Sutra by Dharmaraksha in A. D. 286, Mokshala in A. D. 291, Kumarajiva in A.D. 404, and Hsuan-tsang in A.D. 663, where it is sometimes hard to believe these four monks were translating the same text. For example, Dharmaraksha’s translation occupies 70 pages in the standard edition of the Tripitaka, Mokshala’s 146 pages, Kumarajiva’s 208 pages, and Hsuan-tsang’s 426 pages. Thus, we have to ask why we should believe a scenario involving one version of the Sanskrit Large Sutra, when there must have been at least half a dozen versions of varying lengths and textual coherence in circulation.