The Heart Sūtra

The Heart Sūtra (Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, “The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom”) is the best-known scripture of Mahāyāna Buddhism and one of the shortest — about 260 Chinese characters in its standard version, a single page in Sanskrit. It distils the vast Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) literature into a few lines. In it, the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara, practising the deep perfection of wisdom, sees that the five aggregates are empty, and explains to the Buddha’s disciple Śāriputra that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. The sūtra goes on to negate, one after another, the basic categories of Buddhist doctrine — the senses, the elements, the twelve links of dependent origination, even the Four Noble Truths — and ends with a mantra. It is chanted daily across East Asia and Tibet and has been called the most important single text in Buddhism after the Dhammapada.

The text

The sūtra opens: “The noble Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva, practising the deep course of the perfection of wisdom, looked down and saw the five aggregates, and saw that they were empty of own-being.” Then the famous lines to Śāriputra:

Here, Śāriputra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form; emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness; whatever is emptiness, that is form. So too are feeling, perception, formations and consciousness.

All dharmas are “marked by emptiness: not produced, not destroyed, not defiled, not pure, not deficient, not complete”. Therefore:

In emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formations, no consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch or mental object… no ignorance and no ending of ignorance… no old age and death and no ending of old age and death; no suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment, and no non-attainment.

The bodhisattva, relying on the perfection of wisdom, “dwells without thought-coverings; without thought-coverings, he has no fear, and, passing beyond delusion, attains final nirvāṇa”. The Buddhas of past, present and future awaken by it. Therefore one should know the perfection of wisdom as “the great mantra”, which removes all suffering:

gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond — awakening, hail!

Meaning

The sūtra’s negations do not deny that the Buddhist categories are useful; they deny that any of them has intrinsic existence (see Śūnyatā (Emptiness)). Even the Four Noble Truths and the path are empty — not things to grasp, but means to be let go when the other shore is reached, like a raft. And emptiness itself is not something apart from form: the ordinary world, seen rightly, is emptiness. This identity of the ordinary and the ultimate became a central theme of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen.

In conversation

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” — the whole of Mahāyāna in six words. And the mantra, gate gate pāragate, is the Buddhist image of crossing over: gone, gone beyond, altogether beyond.