The next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing the Heart Sutra, looking at the alternate translation produced by Kaz Tanahashi and his account of the choices that a translator has to make in confronting the text. His book has a lot of historical material about when a particular manuscript was discovered or brought back to India from China and when it was first recited. Today I think I’m mostly going to focus on giving a broad outline of the text that we use in our zendo and try to point out what I think are the core issues involved. And I’ll end by reading his alternate translation, and in our discussion groups we can begin to talk a little bit about the different choices, just the different feel that these versions have.
Let me begin by reading our translation, which I assume was the version put together by Maezumi from White Plum. I think we’ll have to check that to see when this particular translation got put into use.
Heart Sutra
Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita,
Clearly saw emptiness of all the five conditions, thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.
O, Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form;
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form;
Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness are likewise like this.
O Shariputra, all dharmas are forms of emptiness,
Not born, not destroyed, not stained, not pure, without loss, without gain;
So in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness;
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena;
No realm of sight, no realm of consciousness; no ignorance and no end to ignorance;
No old age and death, and no end to old age and death; no suffering, no cause of suffering;
No extinguishing, no path; no wisdom and no gain.
No gain and thus the Bodhisattva lives prajna paramita with no hindrance in the mind;
No hindrance, therefore no fear. Far beyond deluded thoughts this is nirvana.
All past, present and future buddhas live prajna paramita,
And therefore attain anutara-samyak-sambodhi.
Therefore know prajna paramita is the great mantra, the vivid mantra,
The best mantra, the unsurpassable mantra;
It completely clears all pain – this is the truth not a lie.
So set for the prajna paramita mantra, set forth this mantra and say:
Gate! Gate! Paragate! Parasamgate!
Bodhi svaha! Prajna heart sutra!
So let’s do a quick overview of what's being said here. The first line, Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, is doing deep prajna paramita. Already we may be unsure about just what doing deep prajna paramita means. Prajna is wisdom. Paramita are perfections or practices of wisdom. It’s not clear whether that relates to anything that we would call meditation or is simply an act of realization, seeing things perfectly as they are, because the second line says, she saw emptiness of all the five conditions. This is the seeing clearly, thus completely relieving misfortune and pain. We may wonder what is the condition between emptiness and relieving misfortune and pain.
I think it would be a mistake to think of emptiness as merely non-existence, because then it’s like saying, I saw there really is no such thing as misfortune and pain. Oh really? So why is my knee hurting? What is it that’s non-existent, if that’s what emptiness means?
So this word, emptiness, is going to carry a lot of the weight of the sutra, and how we understand it is going to be crucial to how we understand the whole thing. As we’re going to see, one of Kaz Tanahashi’s really radical or at least differentiating translation choices, is to do away with this word emptiness and replace it with the word boundlessness, and we might immediately scratch our heads because on the surface of it, empty and boundless do not seem like substitutable alternatives. Emptiness seems to point to a lack of something and boundlessness seems to point to the infinite extent of something. It sounds almost like the opposite.
Let me say just a little about how we should understand emptiness, or how I understand it in the context of the Heart Sutra. In classical Buddhism, in Shakyamuni’s day in India, the dominant Hindu belief was in the permanent divinity of the atman, the soul. The idea was that in each of us there’s a spark of the divine, of the god-head, of the absolute, however you want to conceptualize that, and that the atman, the soul and the brahmin, the divine, were essentially identical. And this led to the possibility of the permanence of the soul even existing after death and through various reincarnations and so forth. One of the radical assertions of Buddha was that atman is actually nonexistent or empty. His doctrine was anatman – no self – instead of divine self.
So, the Buddha put form with the notion that self has no permanent essence. There is no inner “me” that’s going to persist after death and be reborn or even continues in the same essential way throughout the course of my life. That whatever it is I am, is constantly changing, and is constantly defined by its interaction with everything else in the world that I encounter. And that was called interdependence or interconnectedness. So the Buddhist idea of emptiness really contains three interlocking ideas or three ways of saying the same thing from a different perspective. One is non-essentialism, no permanent inner essence or definition. Two is impermanence, nothing that stays the same defines a person in or beyond life. And three, interconnectedness, which says that whatever anything is, is a function of the causal relational context in which it exists.
Now all these things basically say the same thing. No essence means there’s nothing permanent that’s carried forward. No essence also means what we are is interconnected and because there’s something here, something happening, that happening is caused and is defined by causal relations and context, interdependency. So when we hear the word emptiness, we see the echo or connotation of all these three dimensions: non-essentialism, impermanence, and interconnectedness.
The most common mistake in hearing the Heart Sutra speak of emptiness, is to lose sight of those three dimensions and think that emptiness simply means absence, or void, and it’s really bad when void get’s a capital V. Then it becomes a thing. Right? And a thing is exactly what we’re trying to get away from. A thing has an essence, continuation, and is not dependent on anything else. It’s just what it is. So what we get in the Heart Sutra is this extra step in Mahayana that goes beyond focusing on just the self as empty to the assertion that everything is empty. It’s one thing to say the self is an illusion. All right. That sounds sort of mystical and a religious kind of thing we expect to hear from religious teachers.
But what happens when we say, Not only is the self empty, but the chair is empty, the table is empty, the tree is empty? Then we’re going an extra step about the nature of the whole world. We’re not making a special case for the illusory nature of self, which, you know, is mysterious, we can't pin it down, so maybe we can say that the self is unreal, but he’s extending this to everything. Form is no other than emptiness. All things are empty. That’s pushing this definition to say, Everything has no permanent essence. Everything is changing and impermanent. Everything is only definable and knowable through context. Let’s try and create a whole world view, not just a special case about the self.
Now the Heart Sutra also has a kind of radical statement about knowledge. When we think about what knowledge is, certainly in the West you can say that there are two kinds of streams of thought of trying to find foundations for knowledge, and one is DesCartes’ “I think therefore I am,” where the thing I’m most certain about is my own consciousness, my own thinking. I can be deluded about something’s happening in the world, but I can’t be deluded that I’m thinking it. The appearance is its own justification. So that’s one way to try to ground your knowledge. We’ve got to start somewhere and we’re going to start in consciousness.
The other mode, which is empiricism, says the only way we know anything is through our senses, and we build up a picture of the world by putting together little bits of information from the eye, the ear, taste, and touch. We gather all these little bits of sense data and we assemble them all into a picture of the world and we may occasionally get one or another thing wrong but it’s always testable and we can compare it to other sense data. That's the only thing we can be sure about and that leads to a scientific empirical world view. So the Heart Sutra is going to basically deny both of those positions, saying that neither of them is acceptable, and that’s what we get when we have these lines, So in emptiness there’s no form, no sensation, no conception, discrimination, awareness, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. No color, sound, smell, touch, phenomena. We don’t have any patterns of experience.
It’s basically saying there are no essential building blocks of knowledge. It’s not like the big picture is murky but we can always get down to the basics of sense perception and start there. Basically it’s saying, emptiness goes all the way down. Non-essentialism goes all the way down. We can’t rely on the veracity of any kind of sense experience. But at the same time we can’t just take consciousness as the given. No realm of consciousness, no ignorance and no end to ignorance. You can’t rely on the permanence of data from the world and you can’t rely on the certainty of permanence of anything in consciousness. So it’s a kind of double whammy of negation. Where does that leave us? It’s not very clear from this, although there is this thing, Far beyond deluded thoughts, this is nirvana.
One might say that what we’re pointing at here is the immediacy of the whole, that we and the world are inseparably present, and being present to the world as it is, in the world as it is, is the manifestation of prajna paramita, without any clinging to essentialism, permanence, or autonomy. It’s important to keep those opposites in mind. Autonomy is the opposite of interdependence, permanence is the opposite of impermanence. Something that is essential, real, is the opposite of non-essential.
So we’re asking, is there some kind of immediate presence that doesn’t cling to any kind of false certainty, and in the deepest way goes with the flow of moment by moment existence? Among the certainties that we have to let go of, or are negated, are even the certainties of Buddhism. One of the things that’s negated in the Heart Sutra are the four noble truths. We have that as the original basic teaching of the Buddha. Life is suffering, the root of suffering is attachment or desire, but there’s a cause, and the end of suffering, and there’s a path, an eightfold path of practice that relieves the suffering. The Heart Sutra will have none of it. No suffering. No cause of suffering. No extinguishing, no path, no wisdom, and no gain. So even the certainties of Buddhism are subject to this seeming negation but really a kind of inclusiveness that everything is in this flux of interdependence and impermanence.
The Heart Sutra ends with what seems like a very strange way, because after having told you there’s no path and nothing to gain, it ends by saying, But there’s this mantra, and if you recite the mantra, then that will completely clear all pain. How does that not contradict everything that goes before? Well, what I’ll leave you with is the suggestion that the mantra is not a technique. It’s not something to do in order to make something happen. What the mantra is supposed to be, is an enactment, and embodiment of impermanence. The words of the mantra, Gate, Gate, Parasamgate, they’re all about Going, Going, Gone. It’s just the expression of impermanence, and when you chant the mantra, you’re enacting impermanence, you’re saying a word and then it disappears. Say another word and then it disappears. Say another word and then it disappears. Nothing is anything but this moment itself, then it changes, and something else happens. To chant the mantra is to let yourself go into this world of moment after moment changing experience. Gate! Gate! Parasamgate!
All right. I will leave you with that and just to end, I’m going to read Kaz’s and Joan Halifax’s alternative translation, and I want you to listen to what happens when you take emptiness out of this version and put in boundless. Now, boundless might be a perfectly good word for interconnectedness. Whatever everything is, it’s a boundless web of causal interconnection. So it emphasizes that third of this triad of non-essentialism, impermanence and interconnection. And if something is boundless, it doesn’t have a single essential nature, because it is not definable or containable in any little box or definition. You have to include the whole thing. Impermanence is a little questionable, though, because the danger with boundlessness, like the danger of void, or empty, is that it becomes reified into a big thing. It becomes the universe. It starts to sound like something grand and permanent out in the world that we’re going to get in touch with. It starts having connotations like oneness, as if oneness was an underlying substance to everything rather than a description of the web. So we have to be careful that whatever word we use is going to have a pitfall but it’s also going to have the advantage of highlighting the side that might be obscured by a different translation. So let’s hear how it sounds in this other version and we will talk about it in the discussion group.
Sutra on the Heart of Realizing Wisdom Beyond Wisdom
Avalokiteshvara, who helps all to awaken,
moves in the deep course of
realizing wisdom beyond wisdom,
sees that all five streams of
body, heart, and mind are without boundary,
and frees all from anguish.
O Shariputra,
[who listens to the teachings of the Buddha],
form is not separate from boundlessness;
boundlessness is not separate from form.
Form is boundlessness, boundlessness is form.
The same is true of feelings, perceptions, inclinations, and discernment.
O Shariputra,
boundlessness is the nature of all things.
Boundlessness neither arises not perishes,
neither stains nor purifies,
neither increases nor decreases.
Boundlessness is not limited by form,
nor by feelings, perceptions, inclinations, or discernment.
It is free of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind;
free of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and any object of mind;
free of sensory realism, including the realm of mind.
It is free of ignorance and the end of ignorance.
Boundlessness is free of old age and death,
and free of the end of old age and death.
It is free of suffering, arising, cessation, and path,
and free of wisdom and attainment.
Being free of attainment, those who help all to awaken
abide in the realization of wisdom beyond wisdom
and live with an unhindered mind.
Without hindrance, the mind has no fear.
Free from confusion, those who lead all to liberation
embody profound serenity.
All those in the past, present, and future,
who realize wisdom beyond wisdom,
manifest unsurpassable and thorough awakening.
Know that realizing wisdom beyond wisdom
is no other than this wondrous mantra
luminous, unequaled, and supreme.
It relieves all suffering.
It is genuine and not illusory.
So set forth this mantra of realizing wisdom beyond wisdom.
Set forth this mantra that says:
GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAMGATE, BODHI! SVAHA!