Penetrating the Heart Sutra
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Opening the Door to Emptiness
Setting the stage for the teaching
The Heart Sutra is both one of the shortest and one of the most profound texts that I have ever come across. I never tire of reading, reciting, listening to, and thinking about it. Though concise, it is an incredibly generous discourse that can elicit a great deal of frustration, joy, challenge and—hopefully—inspiration.
We will be working with the written text based on a translation by Donald Lopez. However, it is important to understand that sutras arise from an oral tradition originating in teachings or discourses attributed to the Buddha. We recognize that texts are sutras because they start with the phrase “Thus did I hear,” or “Thus have I heard” which evokes orality; they are teachings from the Buddha that were heard, remembered, and preserved for a very long time through memorization and recitation.
To this day, we practice the Heart Sutra by reciting and listening to it. This vital text is meant to be heard and brought to life on our breath and in our ears. It is recited daily in Tibetan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and so on, in temples throughout the Mahayana Buddhist cultures of this world. Also, parts of the sutra can be printed on things; the mantra itself is often printed and worn as an amulet because it is understood to have protective power.
One of the many things I love about the Heart Sutra is that it challenges the way I relate to texts. We recite out loud when, as children, we’re learning how to read, but in our culture adults read silently, right? The process of reading becomes private and intellectual as we grow up. But the Heart Sutra is actually meant to be read out loud, to be heard and shared in community. The sound of the very text itself, quite apart from its meaning, is believed to be inherently effective.
Within Buddhist traditions, the Heart Sutra is understood to carry an enormous amount of power through its invocation of emptiness. Emptiness is the heart of the Heart Sutra, so to speak. The sutra text itself is tiny, only a page and a half long. Just as our heart, the warm vital center that keeps the lifeblood flowing and the whole thing going, is a relatively small part of the body, the Heart Sutra, though compact, holds the essence of wisdom within it.
The full title of the text we refer to as the Heart Sutra is the Bhagavati Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra. The six perfections, or paramitas, of the Mahayana or bodhisattva path are the six transcendent qualities of generosity; ethical behavior; patience; vigorous, heroic energy; meditation; and wisdom. Wisdom here suggests the insight of emptiness. The perfection of wisdom sutras are texts that connect to the most profound level of wisdom possible. No surprise then that when we read something like the Heart Sutra we can feel pretty challenged by it. It is very condensed and potentially quite baffling: not an easy read.
Going back to the full title, bhagavati is the feminine of bhagavan, a Sanskrit term that means Lord, in terms of being worthy of veneration and respect. Lord Buddha is the Bhagavan Buddha. In this context, bhagavati being feminine echoes the fact that the word for wisdom in Sanskrit, a gendered language, is prajna, a feminine word. And from the gender of the word bhagavati right down to our understanding of how wisdom is embodied in a Buddhist context, these practices are connected to some aspect of feminine energy.
This in no way implies that these teachings are for women only, or that those who identify as women will find them more accessible. Rather, the Mahayana path leads to a balance of compassion and wisdom (or method and wisdom). Prajna, wisdom, is the feminine aspect of emptiness and spaciousness. Karuna, the dynamic compassion aspect, is associated with the masculine principle. As strong energies within all of us, regardless of gender, wisdom and compassion can work together in a very complete and completing way.
Sharing the wisdom of interdependence
The setting of the Heart Sutra is an incredible story that is condensed into this page and a half. Please take the time to read it, especially if you want to develop a relationship with the text. The gist of it is this: Lord Buddha, referred to as the Bhagavan in the sutra, is seated on a hill in India surrounded by an assembly of monastics and bodhisattvas. He enters into a very deep samadhi, that is, a very deep state of meditative absorption referred to as “perception of the profound.” In this state he is so absorbed in his engagement with emptiness that he is no longer interacting with those around him.
When the Buddha goes into this absorption, the bodhisattva of compassion Avalokiteshvara, known as Chenrezi in Tibetan, who was also there, instantaneously has an incredible insight into the emptiness of the five aggregates, or the five heaps. The five aggregates, called skandhas in Sanskrit, are how the Buddha describes what we think of as a person, as a self: five groupings of experience. Avoiding language that alludes to a soul or a permanent essence, the Buddha describes these five aggregates that give rise to a sense of self in terms of one physical form and four main aspects of mind. These include feeling, perception, mental formations or processes, and consciousness. Avalokiteshvara has just had an insight: he has understood that the five aggregates are empty.
Then, as the Buddha remains in meditative absorption, Shariputra, another of the Buddha’s very close disciples, is inspired to ask Avalokiteshvara, “How should a son of good lineage who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom train?” And there’s this beautiful moment where Avalokiteshvara answers him saying, “Shariputra, a son of good lineage, or a daughter of good lineage, who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom, should perceive things in this way.” He starts with this statement of inclusivity.
Note that putting Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in this position of delivering a discourse on the perfection of wisdom is also helping us understand the integration of wisdom and compassion. There are other bodhisattvas whose activity is much more intuitively and immediately associated with the activity of wisdom, such as Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom or superior knowledge. It is important that Avalokiteshvara, not Manjushri, is delivering this discourse. Avalokiteshvara’s profound insight into emptiness is held in the space of compassion and delivered with the voice of compassion, which really is key.
The first thing that Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra in answer to his question is, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form. Form is not other than emptiness.”
Form is the first of the five aggregates, or heaps, and this is a shorthand way of referring to all of them. When he goes on to say, “In the same way, feeling, discrimination, conditioning factors, and consciousness are empty,” what he is saying is, ‘In the same way, feeling, the second aggregate; discrimination or perception, the third aggregate; conditioning factors, the family of emotional habits, psychological habits, the fourth; and consciousness, the fifth: these are all empty. And so form is emptiness, emptiness is form. In addition, feeling is emptiness, emptiness is feeling. Perception is emptiness, emptiness is perception.’ We go through this cycle with each of the aggregates, and we can go much deeper into each point.
What does Avalokiteshvara mean when he says that form is emptiness, emptiness is form? Form is clear enough; it’s everything that’s associated with physical elements. In our own body, for example, form is everything associated with solids and liquids; all of the elements are present in our physicality in some way. When he says that form is emptiness, he is not saying that it isn’t experienced as form. He isn’t saying that a real bodhisattva doesn’t have any physical sensations. Bodhisattvas are not disembodied. Buddhas are not disembodied. Regardless of how realized our minds are, if we manifest in samsara, we are embodied in some way.
We’re not canceling the elements, we are beginning to understand the nature of the elements. Remember, this is the Heart Sutra. We’re looking for the heart of each of these constituents. And at the very heart of every element is the absence of an essential core, an absence of intrinsic existence, an absence of essence. Every phenomenon, whether physical or mental, whether an inner experience or something you perceive as being part of the outside world, all of it depends on a coming together of a bunch of other phenomena.
The experience of seeing is the meeting of some kind of shape or color with a visual sense organ—the eyeball—which needs to be connected to the rest of your body. You need to be alive; the eyeball needs to be animated. If I am just holding a detached eyeball next to a form, it won’t create the experience of a visual impression, right? You need a functioning eye, you need light, you need a shape. All of these things have to come together for something as simple as a straight line to be perceived.
Sound is the same. We need for some kind of an external vibration to meet with a functioning ear sense organ and a consciousness or awareness related to sound. That’s what produces a sound. The sole experience of sound is shorthand for a whole bunch of things coming together and making a brief experience happen. So when we say that things are empty, that form is empty, what we mean is that form is dependently arisen; it arises because certain phenomena have come together in connection with a moment of perception involving a functioning sense organ. It is not, in and of itself, an existent thing.
Form is impermanent. It changes. It is dependent on other phenomena, on causes and conditions. The same goes for feelings; for all of the factors that make up our personality; for perceptions; and for awareness or consciousness.
And though we may find it useful to investigate and define our selves in terms of these five skandhas, they themselves are all processes. They are all constantly in motion. They are all momentary perceptions that we experience and make sense of by pasting a more solid identity onto them. This inference is a reflexive activity of the mind that helps us function in the world; it also deludes us deeply. It is very wonderful to pursue and explore this kind of thing in a meditative context. Not so helpful, though, when we’re just trying to catch a bus.
Going deeper into emptiness
After talking about “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” Avalokiteshvara’s discourse continues. He says, “Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no conditioning factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.” And he continues through all of these factors of perception. “No ignorance, no extinction of ignorance. No suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path.”
One of the things that is very striking about this short text is how many negations are in there. More specifically, in the context of the Buddhist path, it is literally written in this text that all of the things that we have been thinking about and studying and analyzing— the four noble truths, the elements that make up a person, the functioning of the 12 links of dependent arising, and so on—are, in a sense, being negated. This helps explain why a lot of the Perfection of Wisdom literature in general and the Heart Sutra in particular have, at different times, been branded as being rather nihilistic.
What’s really important to remember is that the negation—the no—is not saying that we don’t experience things or that those experiences are not important. It’s saying that our experience of self and of the world doesn’t have an essence, it doesn’t have intrinsic existence. Nagarjuna makes the point that the reason why the Buddhist path functions, the reason why we can have confidence that each of us can grow and change and eventually become awakened, is because we don’t have an essence. The path is based on impermanence and on things being interdependent. The fact that things don’t have a lasting core gives us confidence that change is possible. And because change is possible, awakening is possible.
If this were not so, if we are fundamentally ignorant and suffering is part of our nature, then we can never not suffer. Whereas if suffering is an impermanent experience that arises because of a mix of internal and external factors, this means that when those factors change, the experience changes. And so this set of negations is not canceling the Buddha’s teachings. It is not going into a kind of nihilistic denial of the experience of perception and feelings. It is pointing out that in order for us to be able to really develop, really stay wide open, and really be able to change and be transformed by this path that we’re embarking on, we need to understand that there is no core.
Going to the heart
I would say that the true heart of the Heart Sutra is that there is no heart. There is no essence. There’s a lot of heart in terms of being sustained in a space of compassion and love. But there is no essence, which is what makes the entire path possible.
Returning to the thread of the story in this tiny, complicated text, the Buddha enters a deep state of meditative absorption. Avalokiteshvara has a realization. Shariputra asks him a question. Avalokiteshvara delivers this incredible discourse on emptiness, and then at the end of it, the Buddha comes out of his meditation and says, “Yes. It is just like that.”
This is an extraordinary setting for a sutra: the Buddha goes into the state of deep meditation that inspires a dialogue between a bodhisattva and a very close disciple of the Buddha. While incredibly profound, it incorporates familiar concepts from the point of view of conventional reality. And then, at the end of Avalokiteshvara and Shariputra’s conversation, the Buddha comes out of his meditative absorption and affirms and praises what Avalokiteshvara has said, showing us this incredible interplay between the ultimate and the conventional. This demonstrates that this absorption in the ultimate doesn’t cancel conversations; it doesn’t stop conventional reality from arising and appearing; it doesn’t negate interactions and beings and bodies and words. A buddha can be awakened and in a state of deep absorption, and at the same time all of these things can still be going on.
The Heart Sutra brings the conventional, or relative, and ultimate truths together; this is probably what makes it so difficult to make sense of intellectually. Ideally, this presentation will open the door for you to approach this magical text and not feel put off by it. I hope I’ve conveyed enough excitement and enthusiasm that you are inspired to begin the process of building a relationship with the Heart Sutra and to discover what it can offer you in your practice and in your being in the world.
