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Previously on Open Pages
Chögyam Trungpa,
Disappearances,
and Rainbow Bodies.
Please send comments to:
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Dear Chronicles,
I became a student of the Vidyadhara back in '81 (Paris, France). For the first time in my life, something in this ur-weird world was not weird, but good, and made sense. '85 seminary, nyondro (the old version, rising in the cold dark while the child was still sleeping at four in the morning to practice, month after month, mala clicking...)
And then Vajradhatu seemed to recede like an endlessly outgoing tide, replaced by unfamiliarity such that connections with sangha loosened and disappeared--Nothing to counter the call of parenting and training + earning a living... Only discreet photographs of the Vidyadhara glowing in the corners of my consulting room.
This is a wordy (I'm sorry) introduction to saying what inspired me to write to you.
Which is Newcomb Greenleaf's essay on the Heart Sutra. It zoomed right into me. I could feel the breath of the Vidyadhara. Timeless stillness. So taut and completely open.
This is sangha that I recognise, that resonates, that ignites my curiosity all over again.
And I don't want to be unfair---there have been many wonderful things on the Chronicles which reminded me of the Vidyadhara. However this has a quality of aliveness which makes my hair feel like it could be on fire all over again.
Thank you.
Jane Lindsay
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Open pages
by Newcomb Greenleaf
Red Pine's
Heart Sutra
 The best known of the Buddha's teachings on this subject [shunyata] are presented in the Prajnaparamita-hridaya, also called the Heart Sutra; but interestingly in this sutra the Buddha hardly speaks a word at all. -Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through (p. 187)
In fact, the Heart Sutra is surely the best known of all the Buddha's teachings on any subject, and also the best loved. And it is loved in part for the dramatic scene on Vulture Peak Mountain to which the Vidyadhara alludes, where the Buddha enters a samadhi that inspires Shariputra to question and Avalokiteshvara to teach, with the Buddha speaking only at the end to praise the teaching. Scholars often refer to the Heart Sutra as "the Hridaya," where hridaya is a Sanskrit word that means "heart" or "essence."
Since going on a 2002 pilgrimage with Tsoknyi Rinpoche which took us to Rajagriha and up a dusty footpath to Vulture Peak itself, I see the whole scene vividly when I recite the sutra: Buddha sitting here, twinkling; Shariputra over there, earnestly inquiring; between them Avalokiteshvara, usually a figure of compassionate silence, now inspired to sublime clarity and eloquence; and all about a host of monks and a pride of bodhisattva-mahasattvas. (I use the term "pride" here having learned from Red Pine that the Sanskrit mahasattva, literally "great being" or "great hero," originally referred not to humans but to lions, and only later was applied to those who shared the courage of the king of beasts.)
Recently, while preparing to teach a weekend on the Heart Sutra, I consulted a number of commentaries. The one that really spoke directly to me, which nourished both my love and my understanding, was Red Pine's The Heart Sutra: the Womb of Buddhas. For some time I had had the misapprehension from his name that Red Pine must be a Native American. Then, a year ago, he gave two lectures at a local college and I got to spend some time with him, well actually with Bill Porter, for "Red Pine" is the name that Bill uses for his translations, recognizing that, when translating, a different voice flows through him. As Red Pine he is perhaps best known for his translations of Chinese poetry. As Bill Porter he wrote the engaging Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. But here I want to describe how Red Pine's commentary on the Hridaya expanded my vision, giving me complementary understandings of the text as both polemic and incantation, as both myth and history. The Heart Sutra: the Womb of Buddhas is in a sense a collaboration, with Bill Porter supplying his own commentary and Red Pine translating both the very short text and extensive excerpts from a dozen or so Chinese commentaries from the 7th to the 20th century.
Vulture Peak Mountain
When I recite the Heart Sutra these days, my mind still goes to that dramatic scene amid the striking rock shapes of Vulture Peak Mountain, but after studying Red Pine's commentary I also sense a parallel history, a strange wandering in which the work changes name and shape, yet somehow survives to lodge itself deeply and securely in my mind and heart. Perhaps it is fitting that a work on emptiness, a work that deconstructs the Abhidharma, should have such an irregular pedigree as to give its devotees precious little terra firma on which to plant themselves.
Where, when and by whom was the Heart Sutra composed? We can only guess, as its early history is shrouded in obscurity. The first recorded appearance was in China around 200 A.D., but we will see that there are strong reasons to believe that it was written in India, perhaps 200 years before. Early versions bore the name Prajnaparamita-dharani, where the Sanskrit word dharani is similar in meaning to "mantra," but a dharani is often longer with more literal content. The term identifies the Heart Sutra as something that can be powerful when recited, regardless of intellectual understanding. Thus many Zen groups in the West continue to chant it rhythmically in Japanese. Mingyur Rinpoche suggests we open to "the potency of syllables that have been recited by enlightened masters for thousands of years," or to "think of mantric syllables as sound waves that perpetuate through space for thousands, perhaps millions, of years." But this sheds no light on how a tradition of chanting a mantra begins and takes root.
The Prajnaparamita-dharani remained a fairly obscure text in China until the monk Hsuan-tsang—who had made a celebrated pilgrimage to India from 629 to 645—prepared a new translation in 649, giving it a name which in Sanskrit is Prajnaparamita-hridaya. The term hridaya—which we have seen means "heart" or "essence"—in a title usually means that the work is a summary. But it still was not called a sutra, nor did it have the form of a sutra, for the text still consisted wholly of a discourse of Avalokiteshvara addressed to Shariputra. There is no mention of the Buddha, no setting on Vulture Peak, no gallery of monks and bodhisattvas. Just Avalokiteshvara practicing the profound Prajnaparamita and telling Shariputra how it is, ending with the Prajnaparamita mantra:
OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
(Here I want to mention that this mantra was very prominently displayed in the old Karma Dzong shrine room at 1111 Pearl Street in Boulder. All the way around the room it was repeated, elegantly printed in gold letters perhaps six inches high on a black background between two moldings. You could not practice there without having the mantra imprinted in your mind.)
In the centuries after Hsuan-tsang's translation the text gained enormous popularity, many commentaries were written, and it began to be referred to as a "sutra." Perhaps to justify this title, new stanzas were added at the beginning and end, a "Prologue" to set the scene on Vulture Peak Mountain, include the Buddha and give him the crucial role of inspiring Avalokiteshvara's discourse, and an "Epilogue" in which the Buddha gives that discourse his seal of approval. And so it has come down to us, almost always referred to as a "sutra" and most often including the Prologue and Epilogue.
I feel the need to insert here a reminder that while we often see the phrase "historical fact," in fact history is not fact, but is a web of inferences drawn from the surviving evidence. Here we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that the full Heart Sutra with Prologue and Epilogue were there all along, but that no surviving traces have been found. The Prologue and Epilogue tell one story, history tells another story. They only conflict if we try to make one of them the real story. Now let's look at the earlier history.
The Heart Sutra lists the categories of the Abhidharma in a specific order:
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the Five Skandhas |
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the Twelve Ayatanas |
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the Eighteen Dhatus |
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the Twelve Nidanas |
followed by the Four Noble Truths, an order that scholars seem to agree was unique to the Sarvastivadins—the dominant Buddhist sect in north India and central Asia around the time of Christ. They were "atomists" who had a strong belief in the reality of dharmas, the supposedly "atomic" bits into which their meditative abilities allowed them to dissect experience. This suggests that the original Prajnaparamita-dharani may have been written by a Mahayanist as a polemic against the Sarvastivadins. Since we are beyond all evidence, I feel free to imagine a debate between a Mahayanist and a Sarvastivadin before an audience in which the Mahayanists are in the minority. Someone in the Mahayanist camp has written a chant. It is copied and passed through the crowd waiting for the debate to start and the rhythmic chant begins, repeating and repeating, ending each time with
OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
In my fantasy the chanting leads to the spontaneous awakening of many Sarvastivadins, who join in chanting with the Mahayanists.
It is often noticed that Avalokiteshvara, a bodhisattva of compassion, is not a natural choice as spokesperson for wisdom and emptiness, and further that she/he plays a very minor role in the other Prajnaparamita sutras. In an attempt to answer the question—Why Avalokiteshvara?—Red Pine tells the Mahayana story of Santushita and how the Buddha taught the Abhidharma. It seems that Maya, the mother of the Buddha, who died shortly after his birth, was reborn as the goddess Santushita in a heaven on top of Mount Sumeru. Seven years after the Buddha's awakening, he went to that heaven every day throughout the rainy season and taught Santushita the full Abhidharma, including the role of emptiness. Each evening he would return to earth and give a summary of the teaching to Shariputra, foremost among his students. The Sarvastivadins traced their lineage back through Shariputra to the Buddha. Who could be more qualified to examine Shariputra's teachings "in emptiness" than the reincarnation of Santushita, who got the full teachings, while Shariputra only got the Cliff Notes? So Red Pine suggests that Avalokiteshvara was probably seen as the reincarnation of Santushita. The evidence for this is scant at best, since the origins of Avalokiteshvara are as obscure as those of the Heart Sutra. But it makes sense, and makes a whale of a good story. To wit: "After reading this essay a friend remarked, 'Ava is Buddha's mom. Cool!'"
For me the power of the Heart Sutra as dharani and polemic is enhanced by knowing both stories, the account of the Prologue and Epilogue which many teachers pass on without question, and the account of modern scholarship given by Red Pine. The latter is a dramatic tale in its own right, which, remembering a favorite book of my childhood, I like to think of as the story of "The Little Dharani that Could." The Heart Sutra has long been recognized as a dharani with protective and spiritual potency, as for millennia those who chant it have been transformed by doing so. And that potency has not been lost in translation from Sanskrit to languages as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan and English. (And even into Dutch, where the word for "no" is geen, which is pronounced with a clearing of the throat which has no counterpart in English speech. It's worth a trip to the Amsterdam Shambhala Center just to hear a crowd recite "no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind" in Dutch.)
But why should a polemic aimed at the Sarvastivadins remain of such interest 2000 years later? Perhaps because we all have a bit of the Sarvastivadin in us, we all have some craving for a foundation, for something solid and real. We live in a world of multiple fundamentalisms: some turn to the Bible, the Koran or other text of ultimate authority; others to money and the free market; others turn to science. While quantum mechanics has deconstructed the world of late 19th century science, in which atoms were—like the dharmas of the Sarvastivadins—the ultimate building blocks of reality, few of us really get quantum mechanics, so our understanding is likely to remain rooted in the 19th century. The Heart Sutra, unlike quantum mechanics, speaks to our hearts as well as to our minds. By ending with the Prajnaparamita mantra, Avalokiteshvara takes us, takes us away, takes us beyond belief, takes us even beyond belief in emptiness. So be it.
© 2008 Newcomb Greenleaf
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