Jayarava Attwood

A comprehensive comparison of the Chinese and Sanskrit texts of the Heart Sutra shows that, even after correcting transmission errors, there are substantial differences between them. Most of the differences appear to arise from the process of translating the text from Chinese to Sanskrit in isolation from Sanskrit Prajñaparamita literary traditions. Some differences appear to reflect the differing doctrinal commitments of those involved in creating/transmitting the texts. Following a suggestion by Huifeng (2014), I take a phenomenological approach when reading the Heart Sutra, effectively creating a new kind of commentary that eschews the usual references to metaphysics, mysticism, and magic. The focus here is on the phenomenology of sensory experience and especially the cessation of sensory experience in meditation.

A critical review of five articles that appeared in the special issue of Acta Asiatica, i.e. • Saitō, Akira. “Avalokiteśvara in the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.” • Watanabe, Shōgo. “The Lineage of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: With a Focus on Its Introduction and Expressions of Emptiness.” • Horiuchi, Toshio. “Revisiting the ‘Indian’ Commentaries on the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: Vimalamitra’s Interpretation of the Eight Aspects.” • Ishii, Kōsei. “The Chinese Texts and Sanskrit Text of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Seen by Wŏnch’ŭk 円測.” • Silk, Jonathan A. “The Heart Sūtra as Dhāraṇī.” My overall impression of Frontier is that the authors are committed to a hermeneutic dictated by the Buddhist religion itself, that the Heart Sutra is an Indian text, composed in Sanskrit. The articles in Frontier seem to suggest that no counterfactual evidence exists, or could exist, that would change this conclusion.

This article offers an introductory overview of the attribution and dating of the versions of the extended Heart Sutra preserved in the Chinese Tripiṭaka and some preliminary assessments of the reliability of these sources. It includes some observations about the interesting features of each version and a stemma showing how they relate to the wider world of Heart Sutra versions. Finally, a conjecture is made about the language in which the extension was made. The Heart Sutra appears to have been extended twice in the early eighth century, leaving us with two different versions of the extended text. It appears that the first extended text, like the standard Heart Sutra, may have been composed in Chinese, while the second extended text appears to have been composed in Sanskrit.

Edward Conze still dominates the field of Prajñāpāramitā Studies, such as it is, forty years after his death in 1979. He continues to draw the highest praise from some quarters for his “meticulous” scholarship and his “pioneering” work on Prajñāpāramitā. Does he deserve this praise? As a person, he could be extremely unpleasant shading into something more like malevolence. He was a self-confessed elitist, who hated “blacks” and thought of women as “servants”. As a scholar, Conze was erratic, eccentric, and obscurantist with a conscious commitment to magical thinking. His editions, translations, and exegesis of Prajñāpāramitā are all unreliable. The argument here, however, is not for summary judgement; rather, I present evidence to establish the case for a thorough reassessment of Conze’ s oeuvre.

Connections between Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra and Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra suggest a new interpretation of an important passage in the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya or Heart Sutra. I am able to show that the four phrases exemplified by “form is emptiness” were once a reference to the well-known simile, “Form is like an illusion” (rūpam māyopamam). As the Prajñāpāramitā corpus expanded, the simile became a metaphor, “form is illusion”. It was then deliberately altered by exchanging “illusion” for “emptiness”, leading to the familiar phrases. This connection opens the door to reading the Heart Sutra, and the early Prajñāpāramitā sutras more generally, along the lines of Sue Hamilton’s (2000) epistemological approach to the Pāḷi suttas; i.e. as focussed on experience and particularly the meditative experience known in the Pāḷi suttas as dwelling in emptiness (suññatā-vihāra). In this view, the Heart Sutra makes sense on its own terms without having to invoke paradox or mysticism.

The Chinese Heart Sutra was traditionally considered a translation of an Indian Sanskrit text. In the late 20th century scholars began to question this tradition. The Heart Sutra reuses passages from other texts, principally the Large Prajñāpāramitā Sutra. The reused passages are extant in Sanskrit and Chinese source texts and this enables us to perform a unique form of comparative analysis to confirm what language the Heart Sutra was composed in. Jan Nattier examined about half of the text – the 'core section' – and concluded it was composed in Chinese and 'back-translated' into Sanskrit. Nattier’s method has been extended to other parts of the text with the same result. This article details an exhaustive application of Nattier’s method to the Heart Sutra. Considering 22 points of comparison, many of them new, we find a pervasive pattern of features and bugs that definitively point to Chinese origins.

Received traditions of Prajñāpāramitā interpretation embrace a hermeneutic in which truth and falsehood are one and the same. This philosophy has deep roots in Indian Buddhism, and it gained prominence in Europe and her colonies through the writings of D. T. Suzuki and his devotee, Edward Conze. It is relatively easy to show that the “contradictions” that form the main axiom of their reading are the result of misunderstanding the texts they relied on. Having done this I discuss a new way of understanding Prajñāpāramitā which shifts the emphasis towards an epistemological reading along the lines of Sue Hamilton’s epistemic approach to Pāli texts. I show how Prajñāpāramitā makes sense in relation to a particular type of meditation practice that aimed to bring about the cessation of sensory experience leaving the meditator in a state of contentless awareness which early Buddhists called suññatāvihāra, “dwelling in [the] absence [of sensory experience].”

This article illustrates the importance of research methods in Buddhist Studies using the recent article on the Heart Sutra by Ng and Ānando (2019) as a case study. The authors make a novel conjecture about the Heart Sutra to explain a difference between the Xīnjīng (T 251) and the Dàmíngzhòujīng (T 250) but in doing so they neglect the relevant research methods and critical thinking. Their selection of literary resources is somewhat erratic and their evaluation of them appears to contain bias. The authors did not consult relevant Sanskrit texts (including the Sanskrit Heart Sutra). The logic applied to their source materials appears to be faulty at times and this causes them to arrive at an unconvincing conclusion. By going over the same ground, using more appropriate methods and materials, a far better explanation of the problem emerges.