Guide to This Part¶

Where this part stands. The ten parts before this one deal with treatises. A treatise is someone speaking on the scripture's behalf: Abhidharma drawing up headings for the Āgamas, Madhyamaka setting out proofs for the Prajñāpāramitā, Yogācāra supplying emptiness with an account of mind, Tiantai and Huayan fitting a body of scriptures with an order of classification. A treatise has its merits, in that it puts matters into a form that can be checked; it also has its price, in that the scripture a reader meets has usually already passed through a treatise-master's hands. This part deals with the scriptures themselves: not relayed by a treatise-master, but read for what they say on the face of it.

What this part sets out to do. There are two customary ways of reading a Mahāyāna sūtra. One is to praise as one goes, taking every line for a depth; the other is to dismiss the whole as verbiage, taking every line for rhetoric. Both are easy and neither yields information. This part takes a third course: restate the literal content of a sūtra in plain language and see how much is left after the restatement; then look at what it intimates beyond the letter; then look at where those intimations have actually led readers. Each chapter accordingly has four sections: provenance; what it is in fact saying; what it intimates; where it may lead a reader.

Where the impression of profundity comes from. The profundity a Mahāyāna sūtra conveys can usually be traced to identifiable sources, and the sources are not mysterious. First, the density of negation. The received Heart Sūtra runs to two hundred and sixty characters; the character wu (no, without) occurs twenty-one times, bu (not) nine times, kong (empty) seven. Negation at that rate leaves a reader no time to settle on any single item, and reverence arrives before comprehension. Second, the repetition of a single sentence-pattern, as with the Diamond Sūtra's "is not" and "is called." Once a pattern repeats, a reader concludes that a rule is concealed in it and turns to guessing the rule instead of asking what the sentence says. Third, the cancelling of a whole set of headings at one stroke. What the Heart Sūtra cancels is the entire doctrinal scheme of Abhidharma — aggregates, sense-bases, elements, dependent origination, the four truths, knowledge and attainment — each with a "no" set against it. The more complete the set of headings cancelled, the weightier the act of cancelling appears. All three belong to the arrangement of the writing. An arrangement of the writing is itself a claim, and deserves to be described as it stands, without a prior verdict of deep or shallow.

A few self-imposed limits. First, what this part reads is the Chinese translation, read as a Chinese translation. Sanskrit, Tibetan and the alternative Chinese versions diverge at some joints; where the divergence bears on a judgement it is noted in place, and where it does not, no word-by-word collation is offered. Second, to point out that a sūtra may mislead is not to judge that it has said something false. The letter of a scripture is often strict; the misleading mostly happens outside the letter, in the stretch a reader fills in from ordinary usage. Telling the two apart is this part's main work. Third, this part does not smooth things over on a scripture's behalf. Where a scripture is not consistent with itself, the fact is described and not sutured.

Scale and format. This part is written as analysis, restating section by section, and not as a treatment in brief. Scripture is quoted from the Taishō text; where the received liturgical recensions differ, the variant is noted in place. Quotations are given in simplified characters, in keeping with the practice already established in Parts 4 and 5 of Part I and in Part 18. References follow at the end of each chapter.

How the two chapters run. Chapter 1, the Heart Sūtra. It is a list of cancellations plus a mantra; the structure of the whole is simpler than is generally supposed, and the difficulty lies in how far the list of cancellations extends, and in what relation the mantra section stands to what precedes it. Chapter 2, the Diamond Sūtra. Its core is the pattern later known as the triple formula; this chapter first sets out the five wordings that pattern takes within the scripture, and on the strength of the textual facts holds that it is not a single logical operator, and then treats the weighing of merit, which occupies a great deal of the scripture and is seldom discussed. These two chapters are what the part now contains. Other widely circulated Mahāyāna sūtras will be entered by their important sections; given their bulk, none will be treated entire.

A seam the two chapters share. The two chapters the part now contains are both Prajñāpāramitā texts, and they share a seam of the same shape, which is worth recording here in advance. Each makes a thoroughgoing denial on one side while still undertaking to deliver an efficacy on the other. The Heart Sūtra passes from "no knowledge and no attainment" to "because there is nothing attained," and thence directly to no obstruction in the mind, no fear, final nirvāṇa. The Diamond Sūtra says that no being whatever has been brought to extinction, and in some ten places weighs the merit of upholding the scripture. If the denial never reaches the deliverable side, these two sūtras add nothing to what the early instruction already held; if it does reach it, a further account is required, and neither sūtra gives one: what the Heart Sūtra lacks is a distinction of truth-levels, and what the Diamond Sūtra lacks is a distinction of function between the language that urges upholding and the content upheld. Chapter 1, on the strength of Part 5, Chapter 6 of Part I, judges the former to be the first kind of argumentative slippage; Chapter 2 records the latter as two orientations set side by side and does not judge it a self-contradiction. Neither chapter answers on the scripture's behalf. The point belongs to the manner of exposition of the Prajñāpāramitā tradition and is not a general rule for Mahāyāna sūtras; the scriptures entered later will have joints of their own, not necessarily this one.