Chapter 1: The Heart Sūtra — a List of Cancellations and a Mantra¶

1. Provenance¶

The Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya, ascribed to Xuanzang, runs in the Taishō text to two hundred and sixty characters. It has no opening section and no concluding section; it enters its subject in the first sentence and ends in a mantra.¹ A sūtra lacking the three customary divisions is not unique among the Chinese translations, but the fact is worth holding onto: it means the text was not framed, from the outset, to be read as the complete record of an occasion of teaching.

Several longer recensions also survive, in the versions of Fayue, Prajñā and Liyan, Facheng and Dānapāla. These add an opening and a conclusion: the Buddha enters concentration on Vulture Peak, Avalokiteśvara and Śāriputra hold their exchange, and the Buddha emerges and gives his approval. The longer recensions supply the piece with the outward shape of a sūtra. The short recension in general use has no such frame.

On the question of provenance, this book's position has already been given in the appendix on the sources of the Heart Sūtra attached to Part 10, Chapter 4 of Part I: the core passage of the short recension agrees almost word for word with the corresponding lines of Xuanzang's translation of the second division of the Large Prajñāpāramitā, and the extant Sanskrit carries marks of having been rendered back from Chinese; so on the present evidence, composition in China followed by back-translation is likelier than direct translation from a Sanskrit original. The episode recorded in the Biography of Xuanzang, in which he receives the text in Shu before setting out westward, stands in chronological tension with the formal Chinese translation dated to the twenty-third year of Zhenguan, and the biography leaves the tension unaddressed.² This chapter does not repeat the arguments of that section. It takes from it only the point bearing on what follows: in the early Tang accounts, this text is first an object carried and recited and only second a document. Xuanzang's relation to it turns less on his bringing it back than on his carrying it out.

2. What it is in fact saying¶

The sūtra falls into four passages.

The first is an announcement of the conclusion. When Avalokiteśvara was practising the deep perfection of wisdom, he "illuminated the five aggregates and saw that all are empty, and so crossed beyond every suffering and distress."¹ The sentence states both the claim and its efficacy; what follows unfolds it.

The second is the general statement, in four clauses: form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form, form is precisely emptiness, emptiness is precisely form — and likewise for feeling, perception, formations and consciousness.¹ The four are commonly read as four ascending steps; in fact the first pair and the second pair are two ways of putting the same thing. Not other than says that the two cannot be held apart; precisely is says that the two designate one thing. As applied to form the content is: an identifiable material phenomenon and its lack of intrinsic nature are not two things, nor do they occupy two levels. The text then gives a more general formulation: "these dharmas are marked with emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease."¹ The subject here is the mark of emptiness, not the dharmas; what is said is that the condition of lacking intrinsic nature does not itself fall under arising and ceasing, defilement and purity, increase and decrease. It is not said that phenomena neither arise nor cease.

The third passage is the longest in the sūtra and the most famous. It does one thing only: it sets out the whole set of standing doctrinal headings and puts a no against each. The five aggregates, no; the twelve sense-fields, no; the eighteen elements, no; the twelve links of dependent origination in forward and reverse order, no; the four truths, no; knowledge and attainment, no. The list is taken from the Abhidharma curriculum and follows the curriculum's order. There is one operation, repeated more than a dozen times.

What matters is the four characters that open the passage: "therefore, within emptiness."¹ Every no in the passage falls within their scope. The text does not say that there is no form; it says that at the level of no intrinsic nature, form does not stand as an intrinsic nature. This agrees with the reading given in Part 18, Chapter 10 of Part II of this volume: the string of negations is a list of rejections, not a declaration of annihilation.⁵ Reading the third passage with those four opening characters dropped is the commonest misreading this sūtra has attracted, and the misreading is produced almost entirely by habits of setting and recitation: the four characters are short, the negations are many, and a reader's attention settles on the latter.

The fourth passage gives the efficacy and the mantra. "Because there is nothing attained," the bodhisattva, relying on the perfection of wisdom, has "no obstruction in the mind; having no obstruction, he has no fear, is far removed from inverted and delusive thinking, and reaches final nirvāṇa"; the buddhas of the three times rely on the same and attain unsurpassed complete awakening.¹ Four lines of praise follow, declaring this teaching to be "the great spiritual mantra, the great luminous mantra, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequalled mantra, able to remove all suffering, true and not false."¹ Last comes a line of mantra: gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.¹ The received liturgical recensions generally transcribe pāra with one character here where the Taishō text uses another; the sound is the same and the graph differs.

One seam should be recorded. The fourth passage opens with "because there is nothing attained." Nothing attained picks up "no knowledge and no attainment" from the close of the third passage, a judgement made on the side of ultimate truth; no obstruction in the mind describes a state in a mental continuum, on the side of conventional truth. Between them stands a single because. Two readings can be given, each with a cost, and there is no third. If nothing attained is taken in its ultimate sense, then that because has one end in the ultimate and the other in the conventional, which is exactly the first of the three kinds of argumentative slippage recorded in Part 5, Chapter 6 of Part I: an ultimate-truth statement moved into a conventional context with its truth-level dropped.⁴ To defend the step by the distinction of the two truths — nothing attained ultimately, something attained conventionally, the two not colliding — is the expedient of the later commentators; the sūtra marks no truth-level, and the distinction the defence requires is not in it. If instead nothing attained is read as a conventional-level mind that does not grasp at marks, then the two ends are on one level and the because is licit, and the cost falls elsewhere: what does the work in the mechanism of liberation is then the not-grasping itself, and not-grasping was already in hand in the early instruction; the account of emptiness by which the Prajñāpāramitā tradition distinguishes itself from that instruction holds no place there. One road is illicit; the other adds nothing.

The crossing is not a step that can be avoided. Everything the fourth passage undertakes to deliver lies on the conventional side: absence of obstruction in a mental continuum, absence of fear, final nirvāṇa, and the attainment of the buddhas. What is not crossed here must be crossed later. The sūtra supplies the plainest evidence of this itself: the third passage closes with no attainment, and some fifty characters further on the fourth passage says that "the buddhas of the three times, relying on the perfection of wisdom, attain unsurpassed complete awakening."¹ The same word attain is first cancelled and then affirmed. If both occurrences are taken in the ultimate sense, the second is denied by the first; if the second is taken in the conventional sense, then somewhere between the two sentences a passage from the ultimate to the conventional has taken place, and the sūtra does not mark where. The because is where that passage first shows itself; attain unsurpassed complete awakening is where it can be deferred no further.

The text does not choose between the two. What it writes is a because. The weight of the whole piece rests on that one character. Not choosing does not make either cost disappear; it only leaves both unwritten.

Levelled out, the restatable content of the sūtra is one sentence: if a person no longer takes himself and the world for an assembly of real components, fear has nothing to fasten on. The first three passages supply the reasons; the fourth gives the result. The remainder is that sentence rendered into headings and into liturgy.

3. What it intimates¶

The first intimation lies in the seating. The whole sūtra is spoken by Avalokiteśvara to Śāriputra. In the Āgamas and the Abhidharma tradition Śāriputra is foremost in wisdom and the representative figure of the curriculum. To have a bodhisattva expound to him, and to have the content of that exposition be precisely a no set against every heading of the curriculum he represents, is itself an act of doctrinal ranking, and it is never stated. A reader who does not know who Śāriputra is loses half the weight of the piece.

The second intimation lies in a shift of grammar. Before the third passage the verbs are illuminate and see, is not other than, is precisely — verbs of cognition and predication. From the fourth passage the verbs become rely on, attain, remove all suffering — verbs of dependence and efficacy. The piece turns here from knowing to relying. The first three passages read like an analysis; the fourth asks for acceptance in faith. The text gives no notice of the turn, and a reader working straight through commonly takes it on without noticing.

The third intimation lies in the register of the passage of praise. Great and spiritual, great and luminous, unsurpassed, unequalled: four titles in series, the last a superlative doubled. To place a text of some two hundred characters under titles of this order is to announce that it is not one teaching among others. Self-ranking of this kind recurs throughout the Prajñāpāramitā literature; the density is higher here because the text is short.

The fourth intimation lies in the title. Xin, Sanskrit hṛdaya, carries both "essential core" and "heart" as an organ, and in the tantric literature it frequently denotes a dhāraṇī itself; a recent study treats this text straightforwardly as a dhāraṇī.³ Heart Sūtra can accordingly be read as the essential core of the Prajñāpāramitā, or as its spell. Both readings are present within the text: the first three passages suit the former, the fourth the latter. This is the source of the sūtra's having served in China at once as a summary of doctrine and as an object of recitation.

4. Where it may lead a reader¶

First, "form is precisely emptiness" is regularly read as an assertion in substance-ontology, as though it said that the substrate of matter is some thing called emptiness. The four clauses are framed precisely to forestall that reading: not other than first, then precisely is, each side stated once, cancelling the possibility of emptiness as a second substance. In circulation, however, precisely is always outweighs not other than, and the impression a reader carries away is that there is a thing called emptiness and form is its surface. The reading runs against the text and is nonetheless very hard for the text to prevent, because in ordinary Chinese usage the is precisely construction does duty for judgements of identity.

Second, the negations of the third passage are read as ontological denials. As noted above, "therefore, within emptiness" governs the whole string. Once those four characters lapse, "no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind" becomes a denial of the senses, and "no suffering, arising, cessation, path" a denial of the four truths. The commentators through the centuries have spent great effort explaining these away, and that effort is itself evidence of how widespread the misreading is.

Third, "no suffering, arising, cessation, path" stands in a harder position than the rest. The aggregates, sense-fields and elements are frameworks of analysis; to say they lack intrinsic nature does not prevent their standing as expedient designations. The four truths, however, are the route of practice itself. The sūtra places them on the list of cancellations, and absent further explanation a reader may infer that practice too is without support. The Madhyamaka tradition developed the account of the two truths in answer to this — the four truths hold at the conventional level and lack intrinsic nature at the ultimate. That account comes later; the sūtra itself does not supply it. The gap is not a problem invented by commentators. It is left by the text.

Fourth, the mantra section is regularly taken for the conclusion of the whole. In the order of the text the mantra comes last; in doctrine there is no relation of inference between the analysis of the first three passages and the syllables. The text says this is the great spiritual mantra, meaning that the teaching called the perfection of wisdom has the efficacy of a mantra; it does not say that the analysis of the first three passages can be replaced by the syllables. But the practice of recitation has no need of the distinction. The result is that the most widely circulated use of this sūtra has little to do with the analysis its first three passages carry out.

Fifth, an illusion produced by length. Two hundred and sixty characters make the sūtra easy to commit to memory entire, and easy to feel one has mastered. In fact, without prior knowledge of what the five aggregates, twelve sense-fields, eighteen elements, twelve links and four truths severally denote, the third passage is a string of unfamiliar terms with a string of negations attached, and what a reader receives is rhythm rather than content. The sūtra's readability depends on a reader's already commanding the very curriculum it cancels. Used as an introduction to Buddhism, it comes in exactly the wrong order.

References¶