Full Transcript

Okay. Hi everyone out there. Good morning. Every time we meet here, we chant the Heart Sutra. Alternating weeks, we chant one week the English version, another week the Sino-Japanese version. I'd like to talk about it now and we'll see how it goes after this. We'll just focus on the very beginning.

The Heart Sutra is totally ubiquitous. It's all over the place in all Mahayana traditions. That's Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and now in America and Europe as well. It's recited at every service. Bill can probably tell us how old it is. My research on that great expert Google came up with the first surviving manuscripts from China in around the 600s in Chinese. Another was discovered maybe 100 years later in Sanskrit. There's a big fight apparently over whether it was first written in China or India. Who knows? Bill probably knows, but I don't. Oh, he's not talking. Oh no, I'm in trouble.

It's a difficult text, so as I said we'll only talk a little about it and we'll start with the context. The sutra is entitled the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra, which means basically the heart or the essence of perfect understanding. It's a condensation and summary of the Prajnaparamita Sutras of which there are many. I think they must total thousands of pages. This one page is a kind of condensation of all their teachings. To understand the heart sutra is a very dubious claim, which I can't claim.

I think of Newton having discovered the laws of gravitation, who said this wonderful thing: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." And so we'll do the best we can.

The sutra begins, "Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva practicing deep Prajnaparamita clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty, transforming all suffering and distress." I think it's crucial to realize that this entire sutra is spoken by Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of great compassion. In India, Avalokiteshvara started as masculine; in East Asia - China, Japan, Korea - as Guanyin, feminine. It encompasses all the dualities, I would say, compassion.

Mel, my teacher, once told me that the heart sutra is the equivalent of the metta, the loving kindness sutra, which we recite every week up in Santa Ynez. It addresses the same problem: How can we relieve suffering? How can we find kindness for ourselves and for others? The metta sutta addresses this in terms that sound very reasonable. It says we should be able and upright, straightforward and gentle in speech, contented and easily satisfied. Traditionally, practitioners are told to repeat in meditation certain simple phrases: May I be free from fear? May I be happy? May I be healthy? May I dwell in peace?

This is one of the very earliest sutras. The heart sutra, composed centuries later, reflects a very different understanding of the same task of ending suffering and developing loving kindness. For the early Buddhists, suffering was caused by thirst for things to be other than they are. The cessation of that thirst would bring suffering to an end. In other words, the Four Noble Truths, specifically the second and third.

Early Buddhism made all sorts of lists. You have the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Six Paramitas. I think it was a very helpful, very skillful pedagogy on the part of Shakyamuni. It was a mnemonic device, easier to remember, to have a list. Buddhism for the first several hundred years had no writings. It was all, according to tradition, handed down generation after generation, starting with Ananda, who was said to have memorized every word Shakyamuni spoke, which would be quite a feat.

The Heart Sutra cites many, in fact, all the most crucial of these lists and says they're empty. In this sutra, Shariputra, one of Buddha's early disciples, is taken as the spokesperson for these early teachings. The later teachings came to be looked on as sort of narrow or incomplete, which created schisms and problems that continue to some degree to this day.

There are really three characters in the Heart Sutra: Buddha, Avalokitesvara, and Shariputra. This becomes clear in the Tibetan version, which has two introductory paragraphs and a brief conclusion. According to this version, "The Blessed One, the Buddha, entered the samadhi that expresses the Dharma called profound illumination. And at the same time, noble Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva Mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature." The five skandhas are a teaching of how we are ourselves, our bodies, our thoughts, etc.

In this description, the Buddha entered a deep state of meditation, and Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, was moved to a new understanding. Essentially, he said all things were empty of nature. We'll get into the skandhas later, probably assuming this continues more next time than this time.

The sutra goes on, "Through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to the noble Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva Mahasattva, 'How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?'" Here you have the Buddha in deep meditation, inspiring Shariputra, the embodiment of several centuries of Buddhist teachings, to ask Avalokitesvara how this new understanding should be practiced. The Buddha's deep meditation inspired Avalokitesvara to come to this new understanding. Shariputra asked for this teaching, and Avalokitesvara answered it. The version we chant is Avalokitesvara's answer.

We might think Avalokitesvara is the only person speaking in the sutra, but it's not quite true. The Buddha actually says not a thing. I think that's a profound reflection of the sutra, of the sense of emptiness, of the sense that ultimately anything you say is not quite right, because it's a thing, and it's actually empty of self-nature.

Now we can get into the sutra we actually chant. It starts with "Avalokitesvara practicing deep prajnaparamita." Prajna might be said to be wisdom beyond wisdom, wisdom that has given up all stuckness, all solidness. It's not saying, "I know." It's saying something more like "I don't know," which is wisdom. Or "I might know things, but I know that it's not going to be quite there." It's very intuitive. It's not a matter of lists necessarily. We could utilize them, perhaps, but in the end the lists are empty of real being, whatever that might mean.

Paramita means perfection. We speak of the six perfections: generosity, ethics, patience, energy, concentration, and wisdom. The wisdom is the prajna. These paramitas are basic to the life of a bodhisattva. From one way of looking at it, a bodhisattva, an awakened being, is on one level kind of like Avalokitesvara herself, but on another level it's, on a baby level, all of us trying to practice the way of life of Mahayana. So in a way we're all baby Buddhas, or baby bodhisattvas in any case.

As he practiced, Avalokitesvara "clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty, transforming all suffering and distress." That's our translation. We should simply say, "overcame all pain" or "relieved all suffering." So something wonderful happened there. The skandhas encompass our whole life as human beings, kind of rivers of our experience, always flowing. In a narrow sense, traditionally form was our bodies. But the next lines of the sutra imply a much wider understanding. It goes on to say "all dharmas are marked with emptiness."

Here, dharma is in the lower case, and that means everything we encounter. Everything we encounter is a dharma in the lower case. Of course, dharma in the upper case is the teachings of Buddha. Maybe that implies to some degree that everything we encounter is a teaching of the Buddha.

Avalokitesvara starts by discussing this first skanda, form. And she says that "form is empty. Form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness no other than form." So what is form? What is emptiness? And Thich Nhat Hanh poses the next rather obvious question, empty of what? Emptiness is lacking something. It's tricky because, say, we have a cup, and it has water. We pour the water out, and we say the cup is empty. But actually, the cup is still filled with air. So it's a bit tricky. And it does not mean nothing. Avalokitesvara says all five skandhas are empty. He does not say none of the five skandhas exist. They exist, and they're empty at the same time.

Google lists about 18 or 20 different definitions of emptiness in Buddhism. I recall Mel once saying that there are 30 or more. We'll take the easiest, the simplest. The most basic way is paradoxical. It's to see how much is contained within all things, all dharmas.

When we chant the Heart Sutra, we are looking at a piece of paper. In our case, it's enveloped in plastic, but whatever, piece of paper. And the piece of paper is inconceivable. It's part of a tree. The stuff of the paper we're reading is a tree. And so the tree is contained within this paper on which we're reading the Heart Sutra. It also contains the sun. Because without the sun, the tree couldn't exist. It contains the air. It contains the soil. It contains the rain. Without these things, the tree could not exist.

Beyond that, a logger came and logged the tree, which we have some problems perhaps with now. The logger is part of the paper. The paper can't exist without the logger, nor without the truck he came in, or the ax he cut down the tree with, or his father and mother. Without them, the tree wouldn't be here. The paper wouldn't be here, and so on. So the paper contains all of those things. You can't find, I think, ultimately, if you look at it, something that's not contained within the paper.

It reminds me of the Diamond Net of Indra, which we've talked about, where the universe is conceived of as a net, kind of like a spider's net, where each connection in the net has a jewel. And each jewel reflects every other jewel in the net. And the net is infinite. So there are infinite jewels, each reflecting infinite jewels, which are then reflected back to the other jewels. That's, in Mahayana, a metaphor used to describe the universe.

In one sense, you could say the universe is contained in this piece of paper. Thich Nhat Hanh has a marvelous word for this. He says, "interbeing." Everything is present within everything else. The technical term is dependent co-arising. Everything arises dependent on everything else. And so the paper is filled with all sorts of things.

So what was Avalokiteshvara possibly thinking of when he said it was empty? It contains everything in the universe. But the one thing it does not contain, precisely because of that, is self-nature. It's utterly part of all the stuff that is part of it. There's no independent existence of the piece of paper. It's all part of everything. We can name the tree and the sun and the soil, but it goes way beyond that. So the word "paper" is shorthand for all the interrelations of all things in the universe that brought it into being.

Sometimes it's said that Buddhism contains no nouns. It contains adjectives. It contains verbs. So that the word "empty" is an adjective that we ascribe to paper. We ascribe it to the skandhas. We ascribe it to everything. We ascribe it to ourselves. We are empty of self-being. We're full of all sorts of stuff, in fact, the universe. But we're empty of independent self-existence.

So there's no thing called emptiness. Emptiness describes everything. It's an adjective. For me, for a long time, I was looking, what is this thing called emptiness? How can I realize it? But you might not realize. There's no emptiness out there to realize. What you realize is the nature of all things, which is empty of self-being.

When we point to the interbeing of everything, we could use the word "suchness." Every being is contained in the piece of paper. And when we point out that the paper lacks a separate self, we say there's emptiness. The emptiness characterizes the paper. So suchness and emptiness, they interbe. They're referring to the same thing from a different angle. Form is referring to one aspect, emptiness to the other. Form is referring to the thingness of us or the paper. Emptiness is referring to the nature of the paper or of us, lacking any independent existence.

The sutra goes on to say that having come to this insight, Avalokiteshvara relieved all misfortune and distress. And so we can stop there and continue. Questions, comments? It's kind of a nice place to stop. Thank you, everyone. Well, I think we're, for me, we could start, but maybe it's illegal in some ways.