The Heart Sutra

by Red Pine

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 his Heart Sutra commentary, Ming-k’uang says, “The Buddhadharma is not far off. It’s as close as your mind. Reality is not somewhere outside. How can you find it, if you turn away from yourself? Whether you’re deluded or awake depends upon you. Make up your mind, and you will be there. Whether you’re in the light or in the dark doesn’t depend on others. Have faith and practice, and you will soon know the truth. If you don’t take the medicine of the Great Physician, when will you see the light of the sun?”

The word prajna is Sanskrit for “wisdom” and is a combination of pra, meaning “before,” and jna, meaning “to know.” From the same combination, the Greeks got pro-gnosis. But while the Greeks referred to the knowledge of what lies before us, namely the future course of events, the Buddhists of ancient India referred to what comes before knowledge. Shunryu Suzuki called it “beginner’s mind.”

One of the earliest and most important texts of the Sarvastivadins was Katyayaniputra’s Abhidharma Jnana-prasthana (The Source of Knowledge through the Study of Dharmas), which was compiled around 200 B.C. and which set forth a matrix of dharmas as the basis of all that we know or can know. It would appear that it was in reaction to this emphasis on jnana that the compilation of prajna texts occurred, focusing on wisdom as opposed to knowledge. Although opinions vary as to when the text before us was compiled, the use of prajna in the title tells us this is a text that goes beyond the analysis of reality into discrete, knowable entities, such as those used by the Sarvastivadins. Thus, Zen masters ask their students to show them their original face, their face before they were born.

While mundane wisdom and metaphysical wisdom result in attachment to views, and thus knowledge, transcendent wisdom remains free of views because it is based on the insight that all things, both objects and dharmas, are empty of anything self-existent. Thus, nothing can be characterized as permanent, pure, or having a self. And yet, neither can anything be characterized as impermanent, impure, or lacking a self. This is because there is nothing to which we might point and say, “This is permanent or impermanent, this is pure or impure, this has a self or does not have a self.”

To distinguish this third level of prajna from mundane and metaphysical wisdom, it was called prajna-paramita. According to early commentators, there were two possible derivations, and thus meanings, for paramita. In Prajnaparamita scriptures like the Diamond Sutra, it is evident from usage elsewhere in the same text that the author derived paramita from parama, meaning “highest point,” and that paramita means “perfection.” Thus, prajna-paramita means “perfection of wisdom.” But we can also deduce from the use of para in the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra that the author of this text interpreted the word paramita as a combination of para, meaning “beyond,” and ita, meaning “gone,” and read the m after para as an accusative case ending. Thus, according to this interpretation, paramita means “what has gone beyond” or “what is transcendent” or, according to Chinese translators and commentators, “what leads us to the other shore.” Also, because ita here is feminine, paramita means “she who has gone beyond” or “she who leads us to the other shore,” the “she” in this case referring to Prajnaparamita, the personified Goddess of Wisdom.

Buddhists distinguished three aspects: wisdom as language, wisdom as insight, and wisdom as true appearance. According to this conception, language provides the means by which insight arises. And insight perceives true appearance.

as long as we aren’t misled by provisional names when we speak of the nature of dharmas, there is no harm in using ‘existence’ or ‘emptiness’ to describe them.

Te-ch’ing says, “What is meant by ‘heart’ is simply the heart of great wisdom that leads to the other shore and not the lump of flesh of mortal beings or their deluded mind. But because mortals are unaware they already have a heart that possesses the light of wisdom, they only see the shadows that result from their delusions. Instead, they take a lump made of flesh and blood as their real heart and cling to this body of flesh and blood as their possession and use it to perform all kinds of wicked deeds. They wander through life after life and thought after thought without a moment of self-reflection. The days and months go by, they live and die and die and live, and always subject to karma, always subject to suffering. How can they ever escape? Because the Buddha was able to realize his original true wisdom, he saw through the body and mind of the Five Skandhas as never really existing and essentially empty, and he instantly reached the other shore and crossed the sea of suffering. And because of his compassion for those who are lost, he returned to lead them through this dharma door of self-realization so that everyone might see that they already possess wisdom and that their delusions are basically void and that their body and mind are empty and that the world is but an illusion. Therefore he taught this sutra so that they might not do evil deeds but escape sansara and the sea of suffering and reach the bliss of nirvana.”

We are urged to rely on the teaching and not the author, the meaning and not the letter, the truth and not the convention, the knowledge and not the information. Thus, if a teaching accords with the Dharma, then the teacher must have been a buddha or someone empowered by a buddha to speak on his or her behalf. For our part, all we can safely claim is that the author of this sutra was someone with an understanding of the major Buddhist traditions of two thousand years ago, the ability to summarize their salient points in the briefest fashion possible, and the knowledge of where buddhas come from.

Shravaka means “one who hears” and originally referred to those disciples who actually heard the Buddha speak. Later, it was extended to include the members of such early sects as the Sarvastivadins. And later still, it was used pejoratively by Mahayana Buddhists in reference to those who sought nirvana for themselves without concern for the liberation of others. It should be noted, though, that this depiction of the Hinayana was a Mahayana invention and doubtlessly included a certain amount of distortion of the actual practice of those at whom it was aimed, namely monks and nuns who followed the letter and not the spirit of the Dharma. Thus, a shravaka was often described as one who merely heard the teachings of the Buddha but did not put them into practice.

“Seeing the emptiness of greed, he is master of generosity; seeing the emptiness of sin, he is master of morality; the same holds for the rest of the paramitas; and seeing the emptiness of ignorance, he is master of wisdom.

Buddhism is better understood as a skill or an art to be practiced and perfected rather than as information or knowledge to be learned and amassed.

Together, the paramitas represented a regimen of positive spiritual development, as opposed to earlier more proscriptive views of religious conduct, and a regimen that gave equal weight to lay practice. But what set the Six Paramitas apart from earlier conceptions of practice was their stress on the central role played by wisdom and the non-attachment that arises from its practice.

“Since what is real includes nothing worth begrudging, practitioners give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity, they teach others, but without becoming attached to form”

Thus bodhisattvas don’t confront what opposes them but find the place of least resistance.

“To practice means to proceed according to the principle of suchness thought after thought without stopping for a moment.”

Deva says, “Prajnaparamita is the name of the dharma-kaya, the body that is neither born nor destroyed, that neither comes nor goes, that has the dimensions of emptiness, that is changeless, that fills the entire universe and includes all things and yet fits inside a mustard seed or a mote of dust, and for which metaphors fail.”

In the earliest texts that deal with meditation, practitioners are advised to begin by focusing their attention on four subjects (catvari smirti-upasthanani): form, sensations, mind, and finally dharmas, the constructs of the mind that such sects as the Sarvastivadins maintained were the underlying substance of reality.

the Five Skandhas, which also began with form and sensation but which then divided mind into perception, memory, and consciousness.

The reason Buddhists focused on the Four Smirti Upasthanas or the Five Skandhas is that they provide everything we need in our spiritual explorations. They are not only equivalent to what we normally think of as our selves; they are equivalent to the entire universe, as we experience it. They include all of creation.

The Western inquiry into reality generally follows the Cartesian dictum “I think, therefore I am.” The Five Skandhas are an early example of the Buddhist solution to the same sort of self-reflection. But instead of taking the Archimedean standpoint vis-à-vis an external world, the Buddhist analysis never goes beyond our immediate experience. And as a result of reflecting on this experience, Buddhists conclude: “I am aware, therefore I neither am nor am not.”

But instead of seeing the individual as a single skandha, the Buddha saw five skandhas, as he considered a person’s experience of the world from five different perspectives.

In his use of the word skandha, the Buddha views the universe of our awareness as supported by these five trunks or pillars, or as consisting of these five aspects, which are separate in name only, and each of which exhausts everything of which we are aware from a different point of view.

The first skandha in this analysis of our awareness is rupa, or form. Rupa is not the material world. It is simply the outside world, in contrast to what we presume is an inside world. Thus, the word rupa does not actually refer to a concrete object but to the appearance of an object. Form is like a mask that cannot be removed without revealing its own illusory identity. Such a mask might be worn by a table or a sunset or a number or a coin (the rupee), or a universe. Whether such things are real is not relevant. The important thing is that they make up a presumed outside to a presumed inside.

In the Buddha’s system of analysis, the skandha of form includes not only appearances but also the means by which those appearances are apprehended. Thus, form is not an objective category but a subjective one extrapolated from a person’s own experience and beyond which it has little, if any, meaning.

Quantum physics!!!

Essentially, form is a conceptual category established in order to give meaning to mind. Form does not represent a separate reality outside of mind, merely a stage on which to proceed with the analysis.

The skandha of sensation looks at our experience as a process of evaluation. This is not the same as sensory input but rather the evaluation of input, which the Buddha rarely described in any more detail than positive, negative, or neutral. For the most part, our experiences are neutral and ignored. But certain experiences appear to satisfy a need or pose a danger and are classified accordingly. As we walk through a forest our eyes take in countless appearances, but we quickly focus on a snake or a wildflower or some object that might affect our continued existence. Thus, Buddhists do not understand sensation as the passive collection of data from an outside world but as the active sorting and grading of appearances and their transformation into objects according to categories supplied by the third skandha.

The third skandha is perception, or sanjna.

The word sanjna is derived from san (together) and jna (to know) and refers to our experience as a kaleidoscope of conceptual combinations. Without the skandha of perception, our sensations cannot be classified as positive, negative, or neutral. Perception supplies the framework that allows us to make such judgments as well as the framework that allows us to objectify or subjectify our experience. It also supplies the means that allow us to manipulate our sensations, so that we see what we want to see and don’t see what we don’t want to see.

The fourth skandha is sanskara, which I have translated as “memory,”

What this term basically refers to is our karmic genome, the repository of all that we have previously intended, whether expressed in the form of words, deeds, or thoughts. Thus, sanskara embraces all the ways we have dealt with what we have experienced in the past and that are available to us as ways to deal with what we find in the present.

Thus, the fifth and final skandha is consciousness (vijnana).

vi-jnana emphasizes knowledge that results from separation, separation of subject from object and one object from another. Hence, vijnana is often translated as “discrimination.” In terms of the skandhas, vijnana refers to the faculty of the mind in general, the ability to be aware, aware of anything, but always something—form, sensations, perceptions, memories, and, of course, a “self.”

Basically the skandhas represent an attempt to exhaust the possible paths we might take in our search for a self, for something permanent or pure or separate in the undifferentiated flux of experience. They are five ways of considering our world and looking for something we can call our own. This is why Avalokiteshvara looks upon the Five Skandhas. The Five Skandhas are the limit of reality. If we are going to find anything real, this is where we are going to find it. But no matter how often or how long or how intently we search through the skandhas, we come up empty-handed. Thus, the skandha of form is often compared to foam, because it cannot be grasped; the skandha of sensation to a bubble, because it lasts but an instant; the skandha of perception to a mirage, because it only appears to exist;the skandha of memory to a banana tree, because it has no core; and the skandha of consciousness to an illusion, because it is a well-concealed deception. And yet the skandhas are not separate from what is real.

George Leonard asks, “Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity … there is only the dance” (The Silent Pulse, p. 34).

From the point of view of Mahayana Buddhism, this is the greatest of all delusions, the belief that something exists. Upon close analysis, nothing exists by itself. Any given entity can only be defined in terms of other entities in time, space, or mind. And these in turn can only be defined in terms of other entities, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, nothing exists by itself, and nothing exists as itself. There is no such thing as a self.

Emptiness does not mean nothingness. It simply means the absence of the erroneous distinctions that divide one entity from another, one being from another being, one thought from another thought. Emptiness is not nothing, it’s everything, everything at once. This is what Avalokiteshvara sees.

Buddhist commentators distinguish five kinds of emptiness: the emptiness of pre-existence, the emptiness of post-existence, the emptiness of non-existence, the emptiness of mutual exclusion, and the emptiness of self-existence. Avalokiteshvara is referring to this last form of emptiness.

form is not simply empty, it is so completely empty, it is emptiness itself, which turns out to be the same as form itself. The logic of this, which has become the most famous statement in Mahayana Buddhism, goes like this: Form, or any other entity of the mind, is defined by the mind and exists only because we claim it exists. The only thing that exists, in this case, is our definition of form. Form itself is empty of anything that could be called self-existent. Whatever we use to define form, it is dependent on something else. Thus, the essential nature of form is emptiness. But emptiness is simply another name for reality—not just a part of reality, for reality has no parts, but all of reality—though neither can reality be considered to be a whole. The essential nature of reality is that it is indivisible, or empty of anything self-existent. But if form is equivalent to emptiness, or the indivisible fabric of reality, then emptiness must also be equivalent to form. Thus, Avalokiteshvara goes beyond the understanding of early Buddhists, who understood that form is empty, and surprises Shariputra with the statement “emptiness is form.” Avalokiteshvara turns Shariputra’s understanding of the Abhidharma upside-down and tells him that in the light of wisdom the seamless fabric of reality is equivalent to any attempt to separate reality into parts, including parts, such as form, that themselves are attempts to account for all of reality, as we experience it. The absence of an...

The problem that arises when we reflect on our experience is that we reflect on our experience. We think, therefore we are. And once we are, we are in trouble, forever divided by what we use to define our existence.

But we can’t say that they do not exist, because they exist as delusions. And we can’t say they do not not exist, because they are completely empty. Thus, as used by Avalokiteshvara, and by Mahayana Buddhists in general, the word “emptiness” does not mean nothingness. It is a double negative that stops short of establishing a positive. Emptiness means indivisibility.

All separations are delusions.

‘Because of emptiness, all things are possible.

“The statement ‘form is not separate from emptiness’ destroys the ordinary person’s view of permanence. This is because ordinary people think that only their material body is real. And because they consider it permanent, they make hundred-year plans and don’t realize their body is an empty fiction and subject to the ceaseless changes of birth, old age, illness, and death. But even when it reaches old age and death and finally becomes impermanent and turns out to be empty, this is still the emptiness of origination and cessation and not yet the final truth. Consequently, the illusory forms of the Four Elements are basically no different from true emptiness. But ordinary people don’t know this. Thus, it says, ‘form is not separate from emptiness.’ This means that the physical body is basically not different from true emptiness.

The existence of form is not denied, nor its non-existence. It exists as a category of analysis. But every analysis involves the use of terms that are essentially the same. For example, in mathematics, if we are actually able to write the perfect formula and establish the coefficient of x and y as 1, that is, if any given movement on the x axis is reflected by an equal movement on the y axis, not only are they equal, their original differentiation as x and y must be a mistake. Thus, however we define form or emptiness, they are one and the same in all times and in all places and under all conditions.

Conze says, “Aristotle pointed out in his Metaphysics that the rejection of the principle of contradiction must lead to the conclusion that ‘all things are one.’ This seemed to him manifestly absurd. Here, conversely, the insight into the oneness of all is the great goal, and only by contradictions can it be attained”

Form is usually listed as the first of the Five Skandhas into which early Buddhists analyzed any given state of awareness. This is because we have become so trapped by our materialistic delusions that our first line of defense in contesting attacks on the validity of our existence is our “body.” Certainly this body of ours exists, or so we think. But trying to define our selves in terms of form, we find only emptiness and cannot overcome the indivisibility of “our” form with all forms (the entire external world). Thus, we look elsewhere for a self by considering the remaining four skandhas.

The Sarvastivadins, as their name indicates, believed the doctrine (vade) that all (sarva) dharmas exist (asti) and that the self-existence (svabhava) of dharmas traverses the three periods of time. The Sarvastivadins were quite familiar with the Buddha’s teaching that the skandhas are empty of a self, but they were not willing to admit that the skandhas were completely empty. They believed that each dharma included an underlying substrate, a defining characteristic that persisted through time. The Heart Sutra counters this by saying that all dharmas are empty of any self-existent quality, substance, or entity that would set them apart in time, space, or mind, and that the only sense in which they are real is as emptiness, and that it is only in terms of their emptiness that we can distinguish them at all. Thus, all dharmas are marked, characterized, and distinguished by emptiness and emptiness alone.

the Buddha’s teaching of the Three Insights (tri-vidya) into what characterizes a dharma, or fundamental entity of the mind. These are impermanence (anitya), suffering (duhkha), and no self (anatman).