3.3: The Heart Sutra

Reading Three: The Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra is a short passage that, though quite complicated in its philosophy, has become one of the most beloved and often chanted passages in the Buddhist world, especially Mahayana Buddhism.

The main theme of the passage is “anatta,” which translates to emptiness. Buddhists believe in a doctrine sometimes called “interdependent origination,” which teaches that nothing in this world has an independent, stable essence. Everything that exists in this world – us, the natural world, all living beings, all thoughts, ideas, feelings, events, etc. – exist in a web of cause and effect. Everything, including ourselves, is interdependent, not independent. This is a complex doctrine and Buddhists spend their entire lives trying to better understand it.

So Buddhists claim that because everything exists only in connection to everything else, that means that everything is “empty”, meaning that is has no independent, stable essence to it. There is nothing that exists independently in and of itself.

We can see this teaching in the first section of The Heart Sutra. Avalokiteshvara is a bodhisattva, or an enlightened being, and in the beginning of this passage we can see him becoming enlightened when he “suddenly discovered” this truth and then tries to teach it to “Sariputra,” another Buddhist monk.

So Avalokiteshvara is encouraging Sariputra to reject “dualism,” which is the belief that there are two essential natures that exist in the world. In other words, that world is a place of opposites – some might say a place of good and evil. But Buddhism rejects all that and says that what we think of as opposites are not really opposite. If everything is interdependent, then even opposites depend upon each other.

The passage uses the examples of our bodies and what are called the “five skandhas” in Buddhism, which are our “feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness”. These five, along with the body, are what constitutes a human being in Buddhism. The passages discusses the “emptiness” of all of these, as well as the emptiness of “all phenomena”, which also means that they are not “separate self entities”, meaning that they are interdependent, and not separate.

The Sutra also contains a list off pairs of opposites and say that they don’t exist – there is ‘no birth no death, no being no non-being” etc. This is the rejection of dualism and opposites – Buddhists encourage meditation on phrases such as this to better understand the reality of the world. There is “no birth” and “no death” because in Buddhism we have always existed in some form in the world and probably will for a very long time before we reach Nirvana. We come back and exist in this world in a variety of forms; therefore our “birth” is not really our birth, it was just our re-entering into this world in our current form, and our “death” is not really our death, just a transition to another form in this world.

There may still be some confusing parts of this passage, and that is okay! As I said before, this passage is one that Buddhists meditate on and try to come to a better understanding of because it presents, in a very condensed format, an extremely complicated Buddhist doctrine.

The Heart Sutra

Avalokiteshvara, while practicing deeply with the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore, suddenly discovered that all of the five Skandhas are equally empty, and with this realization he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self-entities…

Ill-being, the causes of ill-being, the end of ill-being, the Path, insight and attainment, are also not separate self-entities.

Whoever can see this no longer needs anything to attain.

Bodhisattvas who practice the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore see no more obstacles in their mind, they can overcome all fear, destroy all wrong perceptions and realize Perfect Nirvana.

All Buddhas in the past, present and future by practicing the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore are all capable of attaining Authentic and Perfect Enlightenment.

Access the original reading here:

https://1gkys61108am2vvslv1ayriu-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2014-Thich-Nhat-Hanh-New-Heart-Sutra-letter-cc.pdf