The Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra
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The Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra The Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra with Verses Without A Stand and Prose Commentary With the Commentary of Tripitaka Master Hua English translation by the Buddhist Text Translation Society Buddhist Text Translation Society Dharma Realm Buddhist University Dharma Realm Buddhist Association Burlingame, California U.S.A. The Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra with Verses Without a Stand and Prose Commentary Published and translated by: Buddhist Text Translation Society 1777 Murchison Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010-4504 © 2001 Buddhist Text Translation Society Dharma Realm Buddhist University Dharma Realm Buddhist Association First edition (USA) 1974 Second edition (USA) 2002 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-88139-316-9 Printed in Malaysia Addresses of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association branches are listed at the back of this book. Contents Introduction One . ix Introduction Two. xx Introduction Three. xxiv Part I. The Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra . 1 Part II. A General Explanation of the Title . 3 The Five Categories of Recondite Meaning . 6 The Five Periods of the Buddha’s Teaching . 14 The Meaning of “Sutra” . 17 The Translator . 21 Part III. Explanation of the Meaning of the Text . 25 Prajna and Emptiness . 32 The Conditioned Body . 38 The Kinds of Suffering . 44 Shariputra . 51 Form Does Not Differ From Emptiness . 55 Feeling, Cognition, Formation & Consciousness . 66 The Emptiness of the Eighteen Fields. 83 The Twelve Conditioned Causes. 90 Emptying the Four Truths . 97 No Understanding and No Attaining. 127 The Meaning of Bodhisattva. 133 Nirvana . 147 The Mantra . 153 Part IV. Index . 167 The Eight Guidelines of BTTS The Eight Guidelines of The Buddhist Text Translation Society 1. A volunteer must free him/herself from the motives of personal fame and profit. 2. A volunteer must cultivate a respectful and sincere attitude free from arrogance and conceit. 3. A volunteer must refrain from aggrandizing his/her work and denigrating that of others. 4. A volunteer must not establish him/herself as the standard of correctness and suppress the work of others with his or her fault-finding. 5. A volunteer must take the Buddha-mind as his/her own mind. 6. A volunteer must use the wisdom of Dharma-Selecting Vision to determine true principles. 7. A volunteer must request Virtuous Elders in the ten directions to certify his/her translations. 8. A volunteer must endeavour to propagate the teachings by printing Sutras, Shastra texts, and Vinaya texts when the translations are certified as being correct. Introduction One In uncountable ways this is an extraordinary book. It is one of those records of wisdom which can be consulted, just dipped into, or read through diligently many times over with inestimable benefit, because each repetition reveals to the reader a new depth or a new horizon. In a book ten times its length one could not truly praise its value as a key to the understanding of human life. At the core of this book is the Heart of Prajna Paramita Sutra itself. In English a mere sixteen sentences, and a mere 262 characters in Chinese, the Heart Sutra, as it is called in brief, is nothing less than a summation of the wisdom of the Buddha. It distills perfectly the teaching of non-attachment, which is the doctrine of emptiness. As the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua says in his commentary, it is the heart in the heart within the heart. For more than two millennia it has been recited daily in Buddhist monasteries, convents, retreats, and house-holds, in a practice which has continued to this day and now grows again on every continent of the earth. The human beings who have studied, memorized, recited, and treasured the Heart Sutra probably number in the billions. The Heart Sutra is a summation, not an introduction. Yet precisely because it gives only the essentials, it is used in the Buddhist tradition as a text which aptly introduces the teachings to new students. Modern readers who are new to Buddhism can do no better than to begin their study with this volume. It is the presence of ix explanatory commentaries, however, such as the ones by the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua included here, that make the Heart Sutra so accessible to students, practicers of the Way, and to ordinary readers. Only the most advanced of masters can expect to grasp the full import of the sutra by itself without the aid of a teacher. Someone is needed who can explain the meanings that are packed so tightly together in the text. Indeed, not only the Heart Sutra, but all the Buddhist scriptures, from this the shortest one to the Avatamsaka Sutra, the most extensive one, are best studied with the aid of explanatory commentaries, which are given, either in spoken lectures or as essays or poems or interlineary glosses, by enlightened masters who have realized the principles of the Sutras in their own lives. Why is spiritual experience, rather than deep learning by itself, the traditional and the true prerequisite for a commentary on the Sutras? Profound as the Buddha’s teachings are, and difficult as their concise formulation in the Heart Sutra may seem at first, the teachings are not abstractions which can only be understood with the specialist’s knowledge. The concern of the Heart Sutra and all the Sutras the Buddha spoke is simply the life and death of living beings. What good is, what evil is, what the world is, why we are born in it and where we will go when we die, what we are to do with ourselves now while we are here, and how we can stop our suffering and find true happiness for ourselves and others: these are the questions that the Buddha answered. He spoke only about what really counts. In his own life, he gave up wealth, power, fame, and the pleasures that do not last, in order to attain what people really need: compassion and wisdom. He then spoke the Sutras to teach others how to do what he had discovered how to do. If the Sutras are books of knowledge, then, it is only in service of their higher purpose of being guides to life and death. And so to speak or write an explanatory commentary on one of the Buddha’s Sutras, one does not need to be a scholar, though scholarship may help—one can even, like the Great Master Hui x Neng, the Sixth Patriarch in China, be unable to read a word. What one must be is a master of life and death, one who has realized, in his or her own heart, what it really means to be a human being. The two commentaries which are interwoven in the following pages, illuminating and making plain the subtle meanings of the Heart Sutra, are the work of the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, Abbot of Gold Mountain Monastery in San Francisco and Tathagata Monastery at Talmage, California, Chairperson of the Sino- American Buddhist Association, and Chancellor of Dharma Realm Buddhist University. The Venerable Master combines in one person a scholar’s mastery of the entire Buddhist Canon and a sage’s mastery of the life-principles that the Sutras contain. It is safe to say that this combination not wholly uncommon during the centuries when Buddhism flourished in Asia, would nowadays be greatly difficult, if not impossible to find elsewhere than in the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua’s teachings. In his two commentaries here—one in written verse, one in spoken prose—the Venerable Master holds up to the light of his knowledge and wisdom the Sutra’s jeweled sentences, so that each brilliant facet of the Sutra shines on many different planes of the Buddha’s teaching. The famous Buddhist lists—the Eight- fold Upright Path, which belongs to the Thirty-Seven Categories of Enlightenment; the Four Truths; the three sufferings and the eight sufferings; the three obstacles, the eight winds, the six basic and twenty subsidiary afflictions—these and others are explained clearly and in detail in this volume. So also are the Sanskrit words which have already been accepted into English as hallmarks of a supreme and ancient tradition—Buddha, Bodhisattva, Dharma, Sangha, Arhat, samadhi—and the doctrines which have already begun to change the mental landscape of the Modern West: karma, precepts, respect for life, leaving home, enlightenment. Throughout all the clear and lively, sometimes humorous, sometimes arresting explana- tions, the Venerable Master never fails to lead the reader back to the xi Sutra’s central teaching of non-attachment, which is the basis of the compassion and wisdom of enlightenment. The Venerable Master Hsuan Hua’s birth itself was an extraordi- nary beginning. In a dream, his mother saw Amita Buddha emitting a brilliant light that pervaded the entire world, and she awoke to give birth to the Master while a rare fragrance lingered in the room. He was only eleven when he resolved to devote his life to cultivating the Buddha’s Way. While out playing with friends, he saw the dead body of a baby girl, and not knowing what it was, he ran home to ask. A friend of the household informed him that death is inevitable for everyone, unless they are able to end the revolving wheel of birth and death by following in the footsteps of the Buddhas. He immediately resolved to leave the home-life to become a bhikshu, a Buddhist monk. But he honored his mother’s request that he stay at home until his parents’ death, to care for them in their old age.