Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra 9781400884513

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ELABORATIONS ON EMPTINESS

ELABORATIONS ON EMPTINESS

USES OF THE HEART SOTRA

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1996 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Paperback ISBN 0-691-00188-X

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Lopez, Donald S., 1952Elaborations on emptiness : uses of the Heart Siitra I Donald S. Lopez p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-02732-3 1. Tripitaka. Siitrapitaka. Prajiiaparamita. Hrdaya-

Commentaries. I. Tripi~aka. Siitrapitaka. Prajiiaparamita. Hrdaya. English. 11. Title. BQ1967.L66 1996 294.3'85-dclO 95-44449 This book has been composed in Sabon The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper) www. pup. princeton.edu

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For Laura

The Heart Siitra - - - - - - - - - - - - The Bhagavati Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Siitra

Bhagavatiprajfzaparamitahrdayasutra

Thus did I hear. At one time the Bhagavan was abiding at Vulture Peak in Rajagrha with a great assembly of monks and a great assembly of bodhisattvas. At that time, the Bhagavan entered into a samadhi on the categories of phenomena called "perception of the profound." Also at that time, the bodhisattva, the mahiisattva, the noble Avalokitesvara beheld the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and saw that those five aggregates also are empty of intrinsic existence. Then, by the power of the Buddha, the venerable Sariputra said this to the bodhisattva, the mahiisattva, the noble Avalokitesvara, "How should a son of good lineage who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom train?" He said that and the bodhisattva, the mahiisattva, the noble Avalokitesvara said this to the venerable Sariputra, "Sariputra, 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: form is empty; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, conditioning factors, and consciousnesses are empty. Therefore, Sariputra, all phenomena are empty, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not stainless, undiminished, unfilled. Therefore, Sariputra, 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, no form, no sound, no odor, no taste, no object of touch, no phenomenon, no eye constituent up to and including no mental consciousness constituent, no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, no aging and death up to and including no extinction of aging and death. In the same way, no suffering, origin, cessation, path, no wisdom, no attainment, no nonattainment. Therefore, Sariputra, because bodhisattvas have no attainment, they rely on and abide in the perfection of wisdom; because their minds are without obstruction, they have no fear. They pass completely beyond error and go to the fulfillment of nirvaQ.a. All the buddhas who abide in the three times have fully awakened into unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment in dependence on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom

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THE HEART SOTRA

is the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that completely pacifies all suffering. Because it is not false, it should be known to be true. The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is stated thus: [o1!1} gate gate paragate parasa7!1gate bodhi svaha. Sariputra, a bodhisattva mahasattva should train in the profound perfection of wisdom in that way." Then the Bhagavan rose from samadhi and said, "Well done" to the bodhisattva, the mahasattva, the noble Avalokitesvara. "Well done, well done, child of good lineage, it is like that. It is like that; the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom is just as you have taught it. Even the tathagatas admire it." The Bhagavan having so spoken, the venerable Sariputra, the bodhisattva, the mahasattva, the noble Avalokitesvara, and all those surrounding, and the entire world, the gods, humans, demigods, and gandharvas, admired and praised the speech of the Bhagavan.l 1 The edition of the surra translated here is the one that appears in the Peking edition (P 160, vol. 6, 166.1.7-166.4-5). The siitra is translated from the Tibetan rather than the Sanskrit because one of the translators of the siitra from Sanskrit to Tibetan was Vimalamitra. The best study of the Heart Siitra in Tibetan is the superb monograph by Jonathan Silk, The Heart Siitra in Tibetan: A Critical Edition of Recension A and Recension B of the Kanjur Text (Wien: Arbeitskreis fiir Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universitiit Wien, 1994 ). The fullest study of the Sanskrit text of the siitra in English remains Edward Conze, "The Prajfiaparamita-hrdaya Siitra," in his Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 148-67. See also Jan Nattier, "The Heart Siitra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15, no. 2 (1992): 153-223. A Sanskrit edition of the siitra is also available in P. L. Vaidya, ed., Mahayanasiitrasa~?tgraha (Darbhanga, India: The Mithila Institute, 1961), pt. 1, pp. 98-99. For a brief survey of Japanese scholarship on the text of the siitra, see Hajime Nakamura, Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Bibliographical Notes (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), p. 164, n. 47.

Conten~---------------------------------

Technical Note and Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

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1. Who Heard the Heart Sutra?

19

2. The Commentaries of Vimalamitra and Atisa

47

3. The Heart Sutra as Tantra

78

4. The Commentaries of Kamalasila and Srisirpha

105

5. The Heart Sutra as Sadhana

116

6. The Commentaries of Jiianamitra and Prasastrasena

141

7. The Heart Sutra's Mantra

165

8. The Commentaries of Mahajana and VajrapaQ.i

187

9. The Heart Sutra as Exorcism

216

10. Commentators Ancient and Postmodern

239

Index

261

Technical Note and Acknowledgments _ _ __

IN TRANSLATING the eight commentaries, I made use of two editions: the reprint edition of the Peking (Peking Tibetan Tripifika [Tokyo and Kyoto: Tibetan Tripifaka Research Foundation, 1957]) and the Derge (sDe dge) edition published by the Sixteenth Karma pa (Delhi: Delhi Karmapae Choedhey, Gyalwae Sungrab Partun Khang, 1985). The Peking (also known as Otani, indicated here by P) and Tohoku (for the Derge edition, rendered here as Toh.) catalogue numbers of the eight commentaries (by author) are as follows: Vimalamitra (P 5217, Toh. 3818), Jiianamitra (P 5218, Toh. 3819), VajrapaQi (P 5219, Toh. 3820), Prasastrasena (P 5220, Toh. 3821), Kamalasila (P 5221, not in Derge), Atisa (P 5222, Toh. 3823), Srimahajana (P 5223, Toh. 3822), and Srisiqtha (or Vairocana) (P 5840, Toh. 4353). Because the Derge has become the more widely available edition, I have provided the Derge page numbers in the body of the translation (with the exception of Kamalasila, which does not appear in Derge; I provide the Peking page numbers instead). In the Derge, the commentaries of Vimalamitra, Jiianamitra, VajrapaQi, Prasastrasena, Atisa, and Srimahajana are all in the Shes phyin section, volume ma, 267b1-317a7 (Kamalasila is found only in Peking). The commeJ'It-ary of Srisiqtha is found in the sNa tshogs section, volume eo, 205b7-209b7. In the notes to the translation, I have noted those variants that seem most significant to the translation of the text, following what I judge to be the best reading. Unfortunately, it was not possible to include all variants in spelling and punctuation. A critical edition of the Indian commentaries remains a desideratum for a number of reasons, including the fact that variants in the editions of the Heart Sutra used by the commentators (even if known from memory) may shed light on the vexed question of the date of the Heart Sutra. Nakamura Hajime, in his Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Bibliographical Notes (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987, p. 160) dates it from the second century of the Common Era. Conze, in his The Prajiiaparamita Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1960, p. 9) dates it around C.E.350. More recently, Jan Nattier has suggested the possibility that it is a Chinese apocryphon translated into Sanskrit in the seventh century ("The Heart Sutra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15, no. 2 [1992]: 153-223). In reading some of the more difficult passages of the commentaries,

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TECHNICAL NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I received great assistance from Geshe Yeshe Thapke of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India. I took some small comfort in the fact that the passages that seemed most intractable to me sometimes posed problems for him as well. I also am grateful to Steven Collins for many helpful comments on the essays. Buddhist terminology that appears in Webster's Third New International Dictionary has not been italicized.

ELABORATIONS ON EMPTINESS

Introduction-------------THE JAPANESE STORY "Miminashi Hoichi" tells the tale of Hoichi, a blind boy with the rare ability to recite the epic Tale of Heike in a beautiful voice, accompanying himself on the biwa, a stringed instrument. He lived in the temple of Amidaji near the town of Shimonoseki in southern Honshu, the site of the decisive sea battle in which the Heike clan met its demise. Late one summer night, Hoichi was sitting outside playing the biwa when he heard someone call his name. From the sound of the footsteps, he determined that the visitor was a samurai in full armor, who told Hoichi that his lord was passing through the area and wished to have performed for him the portion of the epic which tells of that final battle. He was led to what seemed an opulent villa where the women spoke in the language of the court. He was given a kneeling cushion and began to sing the mournful song of the battle. His performance was so poignant that the whispered praise he overheard soon changed to sobs and wails from what must have been a large audience. The lord was so moved that he invited Hoichi to return for the next six nights. The soldier then led him back to the temple before dawn. The next night, the soldier came once again at the appointed hour and led him away. This time, however, some servants of the monastery followed. They lost Hoichi in the evening fog but eventually heard his song, which led them to the cemetery of Amidaji, where Hoichi sat alone. They led him back to the monastery, where one of the monks realized what had happened. Hoichi was in grave danger, for he had not been taken to a villa each night but to a cemetery, where he had performed not for a noble family but for the ghosts of the Heike clan. On the night when he completed the tale, he would be killed. That night, the abbot devised a plan to protect him. The monks took calligraphy brushes and ink and wrote the words of the Heart Sutra over Hoichi's entire body. This would render him invisible. If Hoichi remained silent and did not betray his presence with his voice when the soldier came to fetch him, the ghost would be unable to find him. The next morning the monks discovered Hoichi sitting in the monastery's garden, alive. But blood was flowing from holes on either side of his head, holes where his ears had been. The monks had forgotten to write the siitra on his ears, which alone had remained visible to the ghost, who tore them off to present to his lord. From then on, the famous singer of

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INTRODUCTION

the Heike Monogatari was known as Miminashi Hoichi, "Hoichi the Earless." 1 This is perhaps the most graphic of the many uses to which the Heart Sutra has been put throughout the many centuries of its history across Asia. Here, Hoichi's salvation (rather than his crime, as in Kafka's penal colony) is inscribed on his blind body, rendering it invisible to the dead. But this salvation comes with a cost, because the monks failed to write the words of the siitra that begins, "Thus did I hear," on his ears. As a result, the outer organs of hearing, all that remains visible of the blind boy, are left unwritten and are therefore lost. Although the uses of the Heart Sutra studied in this volume are less immediately visceral, one finds here nonetheless related themes of speech and writing, of performance and protection. The Indian commentators whose works are considered here found in the Heart Sutra something that elicited exegesis, an exegesis that attempted to find in this most terse of siitras vast elaborations of Indian Buddhist thought and practice. They took it as their task, in a sense, to write the Heart Sutra over this great corpus of doctrine. In 1988 I published a book entitled The Heart Sutra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. This book was an extended multilevel explanation of the siitra that proceeded through the text word by word, quoting at length from the seven extant Indian commentaries, those quotations in turn explained by me. At times I simply defined technical terms, identified allusions, and provided lists; at other times I reported explanations from the dGe lugs pa tradition ofTibetan exegesis. In the years since the publicatior• of the book, I have had occasion to regretthe choice ofthe title, The Heart '.iUra Explained, often atthe time of a public lecture, because the person !n