Second in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.

(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)

The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number Two

AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING

As we discussed last week, prajna, the faculty that cognizes emptiness, is a word or term that stands on the side of the subject, and emptiness is a word or term that stands on the side of the object. The etymology of the word shunyata, which is the Sanskrit word for emptiness, implies something that is very large, but empty inside. Emptiness is like a big balloon, something that is large but empty inside; something that appears weighty, but actually is light as a feather. Thich Nhat Hanh likes to point out that shunyata is not nothingness, so “emptiness” might not be a good translation for this word, because it connotes voidness or nothing there. It is not so much voidness as boundlessness, fullness, or wholeness. We could say that phenomena are empty of substantiality and separateness, but full of boundlessness and connection. We could say that things are empty of the problems of living, but are full of flow and compassion. So, prajna is not cognizing some object in the sense that cognition implies analyzing some object, it is more a felt sense of things being empty in the way that I have been describing.

Emptiness is not that different than impermanence. It may be that emptiness is another way of speaking of impermanence, because impermanence implies that there is no separable thing that is substantial, weighty, or troublesome. Conventionally, we think that something is impermanent because it is here but then later goes away. But if you look more closely at impermanence in a radical way, you could ask at what point is it impermanent? At what point is it here and then when has it gone away? In life, this moment is here, but the next moment it is gone. We are impermanent not because we die later on, but because each moment of time is passing. There is no moment that you could find as being substantial, even though we have the illusion that this is so.

Emptiness defies our capacity to conceptualize things. We can master a kind of logic about emptiness, but to know emptiness as it really is, we have to go beyond conceptualization. In Tibetan Buddhism they extensively study the logic of emptiness. Even though they may spend twenty years on the study of the logic of emptiness, even in Tibetan Buddhism they say that this study is only preparation for the actual living of emptiness. In Zen, the logic of emptiness is studied to a much lesser degree, because the focus is on lived experience. We are paying a great deal of attention to the experiences in our lives in the hope that this ripens into a real feeling for emptiness over time.

Last week we discussed that compassion is the inescapable implication of impermanence and emptiness because things are completely bound up with each other, inseparable, with no boundaries between them. Everything is connection. Emptiness really means that there is nothing but connection. Of course the implication of this vision of reality as connection is compassion. So compassion in the emptiness teachings is not an emotional feeling of pity and affection; it is recognition and merging with the flow of reality, which is why we feel the human emotions of sympathy and love.

We also discussed how a bodhisattva is a practitioner that understands that one could not be awakened unless everyone else was awakened. How could I be awakened if others were not? So bodhisattvas are constantly working for the benefit and awakening of others, without paying heed to their own awakening. They have the capacity to work enthusiastically for a goal that seems impossibly off into the future, because they know that there is no other way to live.

So the first words of the sutra are:

AVALOKITESHVARA BODHISATTVA WHEN PRACTICING DEEPLY THE PRAJNA PARAMITA PERCEIVED THAT ALL FIVE SKANDAS IN THEIR OWN BEING ARE EMPTY AND WAS SAVED FROM ALL SUFFERING

Avalokiteshvara was practicing the prajna paramita, the perfection of this faculty that cognizes emptiness. This is already important information: the faculty of prajna is to be practiced. It is not an achievement; it is an ongoing practice. In our tradition, Dogen is famous for the thought that there is no enlightenment toward which we are practicing. Practice itself and enlightenment are identical, and they arise simultaneously. In this sutra Avalokiteshvara is going to set forth the deepest understanding of emptiness that comes from his ongoing practice of emptiness.

The first thing that Avalokiteshvara notices in this practice is that all five skandas in their own being are empty. Five skandas mean the world as we know it inside and outside, subjective world and objective world as one experience. Implied in the idea of “skandas” is that the world “out there” is irrelevant, except insofar as we experience it through our sense organs and consciousness. All we can know is what the world is to us. It is interesting that the early Buddhists were not interested in the world “out there”, because all we can ever know is through our experience; therefore, let’s look at the world as a function of our experience. The only world we know is dynamic and co-created by ourselves and what is outside of us. The five skandas are a map of the co-creation between the point where perceptual organs, thinking, and consciousness meet objects in the world. The skandas are a way of organizing an analysis of our everyday experience.

What does “own being” mean? There is a long debate in Buddhist philosophy whether anything at all has any “own being” – as defined as separate, real, and substantial existence. In the early sutras, the Buddha taught that what we call a self or person does not have own being. What we conventionally know as ourselves or others does not have own being. Of course it is not an illusion that we have an experience of our self. It is not an illusion, but we mistakenly define that experience as a separately independently existing entity. So we take an experience and impute a meaning that it does not have. So the Buddha was clear that a person does not have its own being. The self is a tentative experience which is contingent on many things: perceptions, feelings, thoughts, history. All these things arise together and we call that “myself”.

Avalokiteshvara says that everything, including the five skandas and everything that is in them, are absolutely empty. None of it has separate, substantial, concrete existence at all. It is all only connection and flow and movement, with nothing that is moving. Our experience is not illusory, it is all happening, but it isn’t the way it seems. Often the analogy is given of a snake and a rope. A rope is coiled up on the path, and you are scared, thinking it is a snake. But it is not what you think it is. It is a rope. So something is there, but you completely misunderstood what it is. That is the case with human experience: something is there, but it is empty, but we don’t know that.

So the world is empty of appearance and full of inconceivability, freedom, and beauty. Since Avalokiteshvara, through her practice of prajna paramita, sees the actual nature of the world, she is naturally free from suffering, because suffering is caused by mistaking the world for something that it is not. Avalokiteshvara does not need to do the laborious work of purification, practices, and studies that was done previously. She does not need to work on her emotions and develop positive qualities, because through practicing the empty nature of phenomena, she is already free of defilements. She does not need to make a special effort to cultivate good qualities, as seems to have been the case in early Buddhism.

Avalokiteshvara is practicing seeing the world as empty, boundless, perfect. Unfortunately, we do not see the world in this way. We are convinced that the rope is really a snake. We think that one thing is separate from another. We do not know that things are empty; otherwise, why would we fear death and illness? Why would we be attached to our desires? Why would we think that the unhappiness of others does not matter to us, or that the happiness of others is not our happiness?

The reason why Avalokiteshvara is relieved from all suffering when she practices emptiness is that seeing separateness is the cause of all human problems. We have a conviction from the bottom of our souls that we are not the world and the world is not us.
In terms of the subjective self, what would our world be without food, family, culture, friends, thoughts, experiences, or events? Who would we be? What we call “my self” is a focal point around which unique set of ever-changing influences coalesces. But with the practice of emptiness, the world of matter and the world of subjectivity are seen as empty of separation or solidity. Once you practice this, and not just think it, and integrate it as a whole way of living, then you are saved from suffering.

In actual practice, this is not some “aha” moment of seeing emptiness. There may be many such “aha” moments, but this is mainly cultivated over time. There are three kinds of prajna: the prajna that comes from hearing, teaching, and studying; the prajna that comes from your own thoughts about the empty nature of things; and the prajna that comes from a deep turning inside and having an experience of emptiness. We need to practice all three, regularly, over time, like polishing a jewel until it shines.

Our troubles and suffering are the most instructive study of all. The more that we study the direct relationship between suffering and seeing the world as separate, the more we train ourselves in living and feeling the empty nature of phenomena. Little by little, we have more confidence in this and begin to live in this way. This confidence is not conceptual; it is more a feeling about living. Over time there is a lightness in our living, and it becomes possible to feel ease and joy, even when things are difficult.

O SHARIPUTRA FORM DOES NOT DIFFER FROM EMPTINESS EMPTINESS DOES NOT DIFFER FROM FORM THAT WHICH IS FORM IS EMPTINESS THAT WHICH IS EMPTINESS FORM THE SAME IS TRUE OF FEELINGS PERCEPTIONS FORMATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The rest of this sutra is a quotation in which Avalokiteshvara is speaking to Shariputra. Who is Shariputra? The Mahayana sutras are slightly satirical, and they were making fun of all these old guys going around analyzing the dharma. Shariputra is the leading expert of abhidharma. He represents the tradition of laborious analysis of dharmas that seem to have a big load of “own being”. The Heart Sutra is a kind of light hearted romp though the abhidharma. So Shariputra is the fall guy, and that is why the whole sutra is directed at him. In Buddhist psychology, there had been a shred of “own being,” as represented by Shariputra, but here Avalokiteshvara is trying to straighten him out.

Now we come to the naming of the five skandas. “Form does not differ from emptiness and emptiness does not differ from form.” Form just happens to be the first skanda named, but the same is true for the other skandas: feelings, perceptions, formations, and consciousness. The whole world, all of our experiences, can be neatly categorized into these five heaps. It is actually a practice to view your experience as forms, feelings, perceptions, formations, or consciousness, instead of in terms of “me”.

I will briefly define these five. It is interesting that form is defined as “that which can be molested” – molested as meaning “pushed out of shape.” Think about it: you can’t take a feeling and break it or bend it. A feeling cannot be grabbed and pushed out of shape. The same is true of perceptions, formations, and consciousness. But form, or stuff in the world, can be bent or broken. This definition of form especially includes the body.

Feelings are deep, unconscious, gut reactions that we have as soon as there is cognition of anything that is inside or outside. This gut reaction comes from past conditioning – positive, negative, or neutral. What do we do next? We see it, perceive it, and then call it some object. Perception is a fairly complicated operation based on a form, an organ meeting that form, a feeling arising, and then an interpretation. Perception is an interpretation, and once we make that interpretation, we put it together in our personality or field of life, resulting in formations, or samskaras. We then have impulses and strategies for dealing with these formations that are added onto the identification of what something is. Consciousness is the field of awareness in which all this is happening.

According to the Abhidharmists, this is what constituted a personality – the flow of these five kinds of experiences. It was the arising and passing away, moment by moment, of a whole concatenation of experiences, which we fail to see in their complexity. What is really going on is form, feeling, perception, and formation of impulses in the field of awareness. Our way of experiencing our lives could change if we see ourselves in terms of the five skandas.

And now we are told in this sutra that even these experiences are empty of own being. They are not what they seem to be. In early Buddhism the goal was nirvana: to let go and to find peace. But now nirvana also is a kind of emptiness. In early Buddhism the idea was that the skandas still has a shred of “own being” that we could eliminate through laborious practices and purification, and then we would finally enter nirvana. With the Heart Sutra, the fact that all these skandas are empty to begin with tells us that no laborious transformation is necessary. Since the nature of dharmas is empty, it is already nirvana. Practices still may be necessary. Maybe you still practice meditation, but what is different is the attitude you have about it. You can see that you would have a more easygoing, lighthearted spirit. It’s a much better attitude than, “Oh I am so bad, and I am trudging toward goodness, and it is a lot of hard work!” It is a more light hearted spiritual practice when you start out with the good news of Avalokiteshvara.

So then, as Dogen says, your practice becomes the unfolding of enlightenment. It is a delight and a joy, even if it is hard work. So the attitude is different, even if to the outside eye the practice appears to be the same. We know that it is all emptiness and it is all an illusion, but still, what else is there to do?

Third in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.

(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)

The Heart Sutra
Lecture Three

The style or method of teaching in the Heart Sutra is actually deceptive because it looks like it is logical and something that you can philosophically unpack, but in fact the whole sutra is like a mantra. It works on you mantrically and gets into your bones when you chant it. In the beginning of my practice we chanted this sutra everyday for years before we had any idea of its philosophical background. The chanting itself is probably a truer message of what the Heart Sutra is saying than any philosophical discussion. So the Heart Sutra is a mantric, magic teaching. It is good to study it, but it is much better to feel it in your bones more as dharma poetry, as something that comes out of the experience of sitting.

The Heart Sutra is all about emptiness as a lived reality of our lives, so in all my talks I have been trying to express the meaning of this term shunyata, or emptiness. It means that everything in the world – objects, persons, thoughts, feelings, outer space – is empty of what is called “own being”, which means it is empty of a separate, fixed, independent existence. To say that something is empty is not to say that it does not exist. Things do exist, but not in the way that we think. Everything is empty of separateness, fixedness, and independence, so everything is radically connected, fluid, and interdependent. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing can be ripped out of the fabric of being because everything is interdependent.

We also are empty. It is not that we look around and see all those things that are empty. We are part of that emptiness. Isn’t this great, and aren’t you happy to hear this! You are empty of own being, and so therefore the pressure is off. You don’t need to feel alone and that you are bearing the weight of responsibility of your own life, not to mention the weight of the world. We all feel this crushing weight of the responsibility to be the person we are, but the good news is that we don’t have to worry about that, because we are not that kind of person and we don’t have that kind of responsibility. But also, the pressure is really on, because the empty nature of oneself and everything else means that all our actions, thoughts, and feelings are everywhere interconnected and cannot be ripped out of being. Everything matters. Every thought and feeling, even if we don’t think they are important, matter in making the world moment after moment. So we are participating in the world, and therefore the pressure is on. So we need to work toward the good, and we are not off in our own corner. But, on the other hand, this pressure is not so bad if we recognize that we are interdependent beings, and the pressure is not fixed on us alone. There is great joy in belonging to the world. We may be responsible for everything, but we have lots of helpers and are never apart from them.

An introductory remark I would like to make concerns the translation of the Heart Sutra from Sanskrit to Chinese. In translating the word for emptiness, the Chinese used the wonderful character “sky”. So when you are reading or chanting the Heart Sutra in Chinese, you use the word “sky”. This contributes to its mantra – like and poetic quality, because you are repeating over and over the word “sky”. Everything is sky. The whole world is sky. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness are all sky. The whole world is not nailed down, heavy, or weighty. The whole world is sky – vast, clear, transparent, open, empty. So it might be good to forget the word “emptiness” and think, “sky life, sky world”. All our troubles are sky troubles.

The final introductory remarks I would like to make concern the examination of the nature of the self in the Heart Sutra. In order to talk about this, we backed up into pre Heart Sutra Buddhist psychology against which the Heart Sutra is arguing. The Buddha was concerned with suffering in human life. He wanted to know how we could see through suffering, and he realized the most obvious thing: that it is we who cause are own suffering, not the world. For example, if your car breaks down or your bank account disappears, there is no inherent problem in that if you weren’t there! Maybe you can’t do anything about your bank account, but you can do something about you. So the Buddha thought that he would not worry so much about things in the world that cause suffering, but he would worry about the person who finds these things to be the cause of suffering. Nothing that happens is inherently good or bad; it is a matter of how we feel about it. So, since you can’t fix the world or control what is going to happen, let’s look more deeply at the self.

The Buddha saw that the problem is that we are all deeply conditioned from early life to believe that we have a self that is fixed, separate, and independent. This is a self, by its very nature, which is extremely vulnerable in the world. The Buddha wanted a way that a person could train himself to see the self in another way. That is why he taught the practice of analysis of the five skandas, because that was an alternative to the fixed identity and separate self. The skandas are a practice of mental and emotional yoga. The Buddha said that instead of having the attitude “this is good for me and I like it, and this is bad for me and I don’t like it,” be more intimate with your experience and look at what is physical, look at the feelings that arise, look at the reactions to your experience, look at your perceptions, and look at the sky-like awareness in which all these things are taking place. Train your mind and your heart to look at your experience in this way, and don’t be so fixated on yourself as a separate, independent self. And if you do that, you will have less suffering.

This is really the truth. I recommend that you consider meditating in this way on your experience in this way. When you find yourself thinking, “This is good for me. This is bad for me,” realize that you do not have to think in this way. Look more intimately at the nature of your experience, and your life will be changed. This is how the early Buddhists were trained to experience what was happening to them on a moment by moment basis. They learned that idea of a fixed self was a cause of suffering, that it was not necessarily real, and that it could be dispensed with.

So the Buddhists pre Heart Sutra thought that the self was not real but that the experiences that arose were real. They defined the tiniest, most conceivable moment of real experience, as a dharma. One could categorize every dharma that arose in one of the five “heaps”. So the self was not real, but the dharmas were real. A dharma had its “own being” and was a fixed, real independent basis for experience.

There were two problems with asserting the own being of dharmas. First, anytime that you assert that something is fundamentally real, then you have to defend it. If it is something that can be attacked and something that you can cling to, you set suffering in motion. Another problem is that the analytical approach to working with mind tends to set up a world in which you become extremely self focused. Your main focus is on your own experiences. Even though the goal is to be liberated from self, the method puts so much emphasis on watching your experience that you might just miss the fact that the world is full of other beings, and that the most important thing is love. To be sure, the early teachings of Buddhism did teach about compassion and love, but if you consider the way in which it was taught, you realize that compassion and love were taught in the service of seeing through the self. Compassion and love were seen as antidotes to self clinging, but they weren’t ends in themselves in the early teachings.

In the Mahayana schools they were inspired by compassion, and they began with compassion as the fundamental principle. You can see that if you begin with compassion and love, you eventually are going to become very disgusted with these dharmas. You see that everyone is so fixated on analyzing their experiences that they don’t really have a warm hearted feeling toward others. Eventually one comes around to the fact that all dharmas are empty of own being, and that the whole world is connected, one thing flowing freely in and out to another. So, if you start from compassion, you are going to find your way to emptiness.

On the surface the Heart Sutra seems to be analytical: no eyes, no ears, etc. It actually goes though the whole map of Buddhist psychology in list form. But in reality the Heart Sutra is enthusiastic, incantatory, and poetic. It is the poetry of sky mind. This is why many commentators have not understood why the Heart Sutra can be so analytic and then end with a mantra. If you understand the Heart Sutra in the way I have been speaking, it makes sense that the whole thing is a mantra. The whole Heart Sutra is more mantric than it is philosophic or analytical. What is the point of analyzing things that are not really there in the sense in which you are analyzing them? So the Heart Sutra is really a mantra.

The next line in the Heart Sutra is:

O SHARIPUTRA ALL DHARMAS ARE MARKED WITH EMPTINESS THEY DO NOT APPEAR NOR DISAPPEAR ARE NOT TAINTED NOR PURE DO NOT INCREASE NOR DECREASE

This brings up another important point that we have not discussed. In the system of dharmas that I discussed, there were 75 types of dharmas, but there was one fundamental division between dharmas. On the one side were “conditioned” dharmas – that is, the world, including oneself: feelings, thoughts, and so on. Most of the 75 dharmas were conditioned. On the other side were the dharmas that are “unconditioned” dharmas, called “unworldly dharmas.” These are the dharmas of the liberated and religious life. There are only three unconditioned dharmas: space and two kinds of nirvana. One kind of nirvana is what the Buddha experienced in his lifetime when he completely lets go and enters the unconditioned; except that since he is still walking around and living his life, he has a remainder of dharmas from the past that will be exhausted at the end of his life. When he ends his life he then enters the second kind of nirvana which is called the nirvana of no remainder. This is the final and complete nirvana when his entire life force enters unconditioned peace and union.

So these are the three unconditioned dharmas: space, nirvana with remainder, and nirvana without remainder. The three unconditioned dharmas are pure by definition. All the conditioned dharmas by definition are impure. The three unconditioned dharmas have the characteristic of absolute peace and are always going on; therefore, do not appear. I am talking here in the context of the Heart Sutra that indicates dharmas that do not appear or disappear, are not tainted or pure, and do not increase or decrease. If they do not increase, they are complete. Nirvana is complete and totally pure and total completion. The conditioned dharmas are impure, incomplete, and need ongoing restless energy. This explains the lines in the Heart Sutra. It says that dharmas do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, and do not increase nor decrease. In other words, conditioned dharmas and unconditioned dharmas are not two different things. There are no conditioned dharmas as we have understood conditioned dharmas, and there are no unconditioned dharmas as we have understood unconditioned dharmas. Neither one of them as previously defined exists at all. It is all just one reality.

Nirvana is no more at rest than we are in our incompleteness and restlessness. There is rest at the heart of our seeming restlessness. Conditioned dharmas are also unconditioned, and unconditioned dharmas are also conditioned. The distinction between the two is spurious altogether. Nirvana and samsara are not two different entities. They are one.

This teaching of the Heart Sutra is the whole basis of the non dual teaching of Zen. That’s why the Heart Sutra is so important to Zen practitioners because it is the basis for the Zen approach to practice and life. There is fundamentally nothing that we can point to as enlightenment and nirvana, and there is nothing fundamentally real that we need to change as samsara. To recognize that this is so, and to live from this perspective, is the only enlightenment. And that enlightenment, of course, is not some fixed, independently existing thing.

This is important for us because we feel caught in the conditioned world, and we are longing spiritually for a respite from that conditioned world. Or maybe we like this conditioned world and wish it were improved. But the Heart Sutra teaches us that even that which is most troublesome to us in the conditioned world is itself already complete, at rest, and peaceful. Many of our Zen teachings hinge precisely on this point. When Zhaozhou says to the monk, “wash your bowls”, he is saying don’t seek some special, unconditioned world, just take care of your bowls. Nirvana is right there. All peace and all completion is right there if only you would see your bowls as they really are. It is the same thing when Nanchuan says that everyday mind is the way. He is saying don’t look for some special spiritual realm apart from the everyday. This is the fundamental basis for all Zen teachings.

Fifth in a series of five talks on this central Mahayana teaching.

(Transcribed and Abridged by Barbara Byrum)

The Heart Sutra
Lecture Number Five

NO SUFFERING NO ORIGINATION NO STOPPING NO PATH NO COGNITION ALSO NO ATTAINMENT WITH NOTHING TO ATTAIN THE BODHISATTVA DEPENDS ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND THE MIND IS NO HINDRANCE WITHOUT ANY HINDRANCE NO FEARS EXIST FAR APART FROM EVERY PERVERTED VIEW ONE DWELLS IN NIRVANA IN THE THREE WORLDS ALL BUDDHAS DEPEND ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND ATTAIN UNSURPASSED COMPLETE PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT THEREFORE KNOW THE PRAJNA PARAMITA IS THE GREAT TRANSCENDENT MANTRA IS THE GREAT BRIGHT MANTRA IS THE UTMOST MANTRA IS THE SUPREME MANTRA WHICH IS ABLE TO RELIEVE ALL SUFFERING AND IS TRUE NOT FALSE SO PROCLAIM THE PRAJNA PARAMITA MANTRA PROCLAIM THE MANTRA THAT SAYS GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE! BODHI! SVAHA!

Last time we mentioned that the Heart Sutra lists the fundamental Buddhist doctrines and then it says that they are not so. It denies the fundamental reality of all these things that were thought to be basic points of Buddhist thought. It says that these doctrines are not so in the way that you thought they were so. We went through the five skandas, which were seen to be empty of own being. We went through the six sense organs, the six sense objects, and the consciousness that arises. And last week we went through the twelve fold chain of causation, a kind of moral physics of the universe, all of which were denied, not only the twelve fold chain of causation, but the possibility of reversing the chain and entering the unconditioned was also denied. All of these things were said to be empty.

Again, as I have said many times, empty does not mean nothing. Things do exist but in a mode that is fundamentally and radically different from the way that we think that they exist. How do we think they exist? We are convinced in our gut that things are separate, fixed, independent, solid, weighty, and “out there”. The Heart Sutra says that things are not like that. They are all a fluid, connected, flowing reality. So, in this sense, we could say that nothing – no thing – exists. A thing is something ripped out of the fabric of the world, like me, or like you. But that thing does not exist. We are each a bright space on which everything in the world converges.

Now, in the passage that I just quoted, we have another item of Buddhist philosophy that is enumerated so that it can be denied. This item includes the Four Noble Truths, the cornerstone of Buddhist thought. The first is the truth of suffering. Suffering does not mean that everything is depressing and negative, and if we don’t think so, we are kidding ourselves. We all know through our personal experience that although we may experience a certain amount of depressing and difficult things, we also experience a certain amount of joy and delight. So the truth of suffering is not denying that we feel that joy, it is saying that because of the nature of human consciousness, we experience an underlying sense of anxiety or restlessness, even in moments of happiness, if we look closely enough, because we sense the ungraspable and temporary nature of our experience. We know that this moment of happiness, no matter how beautiful it may be, is fleeting. This bothers us existentially. This is not to mention all the unhappiness that can pile up – the loss, the death –you can make your own list. So all conditioned reality, whether it is joyful or depressing, is all called duhka, or suffering.

The second Truth is the origination or cause of suffering. In the earliest layers of the Buddhist teaching, it was said that desire is the cause of suffering, but as the discussion went on through the generations, it became more subtle, and instead of being sensual desire, it was more a question of a deeper, unconscious desire that things would be graspable and that they would last. The need for things to be other than they are is the cause of suffering. The desire is constant, and so the suffering is constant.

The third of the Nobel Truths is the stopping of suffering. That is to say, if we can discover the cause of suffering, we can suppress the suffering. So in the Heart Sutra, seeing the empty nature of phenomena, seeing the true aspect of things as they are, is to see that our desire to grasp something is ridiculous, because there is nothing to be grasped. If we see this fact completely and experientially, there is the stopping of suffering.

The fourth Truth is the truth of the path, the way of stopping the cause of suffering and finding peace. There are many ways to describe the path; one is the Threefold Path of ethical conduct, morality, meditation or insight. The earliest one was the eightfold path that we would have an understanding perfectly according to reality: viewpoint, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. The last three have specifically to do with meditation practice. And when these last three were developed properly, they would lead to right understanding, which is the first of the eightfold path. So you are going over and over again: deeper understanding leads to deeper intention, which leads to deeper effort, and so on. There is an endless refinement until we get past the havoc of suffering.

So these Four Truths are the cornerstones of the edifice of Buddhist teaching, but the Heart Sutra says, “No suffering. No origination. No stopping. No path”, which is to say they are empty of any fixed and fundamental reality. They are simply concepts that are no different from any other concepts floating around in our minds, and they are not different from anything that we would see or hear or touch or taste, because everything flows together. There is no separate thing called the Four Noble Truths.

Since there are no Four Noble Truths, it stands to reason that there is no cognition of the Four Truths, no cognition of fixed, separate, distinguishable truths. Also there is no attainment of wisdom, as had been promised earlier: if only you penetrate these truths, then you will attain a cognition and wisdom of them, and you will achieve nirvana. But there is no attainment of these truths in the way that we thought. There is no cognition and there is no attainment of wisdom. To say that there is cognition or attainment is to say that there is a fixed, separate object to be cognized and a fixed, separate state called nirvana to be attained. But there is no separate fixed object or state to be cognized, because in emptiness all such distinctions are mere designations, provisional concepts. So we could say there is an attainment, as long as we recognize that it is a provisional designation, a conceptual statement that had no fundamental reality.

So the Boddhisattva harmonizes with things as they are: free, connected, endless, without a single obstruction anywhere. So, as the sutra says, how could there be any hindrance? Acts of perception and thought, all volition, thought and experience, whether positive, negative, or neutral are without any hindrance. Everything is unfolding in this vast framework of emptiness. So, this being the case, the sutra says, what could we ever have to fear? I find it astonishing that the Heart Sutra mentions fear. There is a long list of technical propositions and Buddhist philosophy, and then there is the line about no fears. The Heart Sutra becomes human and emotional, and says that there is nothing to fear. Reflecting on this fact over the years, I have come to appreciate the strong and necessary association of fear with the first noble truth of suffering. We live with a strong, pervasive sense of fear; it is really common. Fear seems to be endemic to human experience. We start as children with the fear that there is a vast world standing over against us. We feel that we are in a state of constant threat. There are threatening, fearful forces, but where do they come from? These forces themselves are motivated by fear. Fear produces violence and confusion. Due to our universal existential fear, there is outer danger in the world as well.

But when we depend on prajna paramita and see the true shape of things as empty, then there is nothing to fear. What is the worst thing that could happen? The world could disappear, we could feel pain, we could die, but death is only connection, so what are we afraid of? The sutra says that it does not matter what is going on; there is nothing to fear. You may ask if this is really possible, to live in the world in this way? Well, since you asked, I would say “yes and no”. Yes, because I really believe the Heart Sutra. With a full integration into our daily living, with effort over time, we could live without fear. And no, at the same time we remain conditioned people. It is natural that we do not want to feel pain; it is natural that we do not want to die or to have those whom we love die. Still, with establishment in the practice of prajna paramita we can not want to feel pain, but still not be afraid of the pain. We can not want to die, but still not be afraid to die. But even if we have the fear of pain or death, that fear would not shake us to the core of our being. We can feel fear at the surface of our mind, a true, human feeling of fear at the surface of our mind, but feel a deep calm and fearlessness underneath. I think that is possible. The Heart Sutra is not just some idealistic religious text, but I think it is a possibility for an ordinary person.

Then the sutra says,

FAR APART FROM EVERY PERVERTED VIEW ONE DWELLS IN NIRVANA

It is called a perverted view when one sees things as having a separate existence. Maybe a better translation is “inverted view.” We see the world in the mirror opposite of what it is; it is an inverted view. When we see the empty nature of the world, we turn the world right side up, and instead of restlessness and anxiety, we have peace. That is nirvana: the flame of our restless passion is burned out. We are living in the conditioned realm but with an unconditioned feeling.

It then says,

IN THE THREE WORLDS ALL BUDDHAS DEPEND ON PRAJNA PARAMITA AND ATTAIN UNSURPASSED COMPLETE PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

Everywhere in time and space, all the Buddhas depend on prajna paramita and attain unsurpassed, complete enlightenment, with nothing beyond this enlightenment.

Then the sutra ends with a burst of enthusiasm. I have thought that the entire Heart Sutra was not meant to be a meaningful text, but was intended to be an incantation. Many people have told me that chanting the Heart Sutra would calm them down. It can be a meaningful and powerful experience just to chant it. I recommend committing it to memory and chanting it to yourself. Let it work from the inside and not from the mind, where we are usually working things out. Minds are important, but we don’t always have to use them. We can use the heart and the voice and the emotions to practice the Heart Sutra.

Fundamentally I think the whole Heart Sutra is a magical incantation, and at the end it becomes clear. The author of the sutra gets very enthusiastic at the end and says that this is all you have to do, this is a magic thing, just chant this and all these truths will become evident to you through the chanting of this mantra. The understanding of the world propounded by the Heart Sutra is more miraculous and magical by far than it is conceptual or even a meditative experience. I think it is beyond that. We might have a flash of insight into the empty nature of phenomena in meditation practice, but that is not what the Heart Sutra is pointing toward. It is pointing toward something more wonderful and magical than that, because these enchanting and wonderful things are not just happening now and then during meditation, they are happening all the time.

My favorite saying of Suzuki Roshi is, “The world is its own magic.” The world being empty of any separate thingness is at any moment completely marvelous. The healing that you need is right there in any state of mind.

By the way, as a footnote, if you will be sitting with the dying, if your parents are headed in that direction, it is very profound to chant the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra. I often do this with my rosary beads 108 times.

GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE! BODHI! SVAHA

Gone, gone, utterly gone, awakening…wow! Basically, that is what “svaha” means…wow!

I would like to end with my poem on emptiness:

What a Wonderful World

What seems separate, weighty, out there is actually already dissolved because the moving into it is a giving up of everything that has already been lost anyway.
So it is easy to do.
Everything works together, even griefs.
Nothing more clever than the mind to tangle things up in without which we couldn’t ever do or even ever appear.