Our sangha is in the midst of a series of explorations of Emptiness, which Sam began last Sunday. This week, Michael guided an unpacking of the famous Heart Sutra, which brings a Mahayana perspective: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.
Payton and visiting Dharma Teacher Cara Lai will round out the series in the subsequent weeks.
Join us as we go further into this rich and various territory of understanding and practice.
There are many translations, but here is one: https://thebuddhistcentre.com/system/files/groups/files/heart_sutra.pdf
And here is another by Thich Nhat Hanh offered by a member of our Sangha this week: https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation
Michael’s notes follow:
The Heart Sutra is framed with symbolic/literal geography and personality. Vulture Peak offers a high unimpeded view of mountaintops of Bihar (Vihara) and the cast of characters is anchored by the mostly silent Buddha, who approves what he hears, plus Shariputra the analytical whiz of Early Buddhism, to whom speaks Avalokitesvara /Kwan Yin, embodying the mahayana.
What seems like a litany of denial of all the original teaching’s analytic categories is actually a claim for the porosity of everything included in the sutra—the inclusion of emptiness not as an ultimate, but within the very texture of all being(s).
Emptiness is like Zero, in ancient Indian mathematics, neither nothing nor something: mathematically defined as 1-1=0. now you see it, now you don’t, in a world of traces without essences. Traces appear and disappear, while change itself is the underlying reality (contrasted to the notion of a world comprised of things which change).
Thich Nhat Hanh’s famous sheet of paper demonstrates the whole world’s Interbeing, present in that sheet: rain, cloud, the soil, logger, etc. Paper is made of non-paper elements. . . .
. . . which is more engaging when we leave sheets of paper behind, and turn to lived experience:
Love is made of non-love elements; grief of non-grief elements, etc .
Thich Nhat Han’s homesickness for his mother, and then finding her fully present in the very meat of his own hand further complicates and enriches Indra’s net.
The Sutra’s “no fears exist” goes beyond classical fears of “flood, fire, snakes and elephants” and includes modern self-doubt, “preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet,” as TS Eliot put it. Our hesitation betrays our fear. And, as Trungpa suggested, Awakening can be understood as transcending hesitation.
The concluding mantra not only points to going beyond, but also goes beyond itself and enters the immediacy of direct experience.
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate
— Bodhi Svaha
Gone Gone Gone beyond Gone beyond even going beyond
—Awakened state, Right on!
