“Heart Sutra”, own translation*


After a couple of years of research, I’m finally comfortable enough with this work to feel like it’s finished. It’s been two or three months since I made any edits to it, so I’m calling it done.

The two main commercial translations, from Red Pine and Kazuaki Tanahashi, make the same egregious error in pretending that a back-translation from Chinese into Sanskrit around the time of Xuanzang (who was apparently responsible for the first Chinese version) is somehow the “original work,” despite Jan Nattier clearly demonstrating otherwise in her paper of 1992. That forced me to undertake my own stab at it whether I wanted to or not. I’ve avoided as much as possible any frilly or poetic language, ‘cause the simplest Classical Chinese is the best Classical Chinese.

With much gratitude to Nattier, Jayarava (whose extensive research on this work astonishes me), and Matt Orsborn. In the unlikely event that anyone would find this interesting enough to ask questions about, I’d be delighted, and would welcome any arguments against my approach or result.

*Not really a sutra, but everybody calls it that. It’s more like a Reader’s Digest version of a much longer work in the Prajnaparamita collection.

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Avalokitesvara bodhisattva, when practicing deep perfection of wisdom, saw that the five aggregates are completely empty of self-existence and was released from all forms of suffering.

Sariputra, form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form. The same is true for sensation, perception, volition, and consciousness.

Sariputra, all experience is defined by emptiness; not life, not death, not defilement, not purity, not increase, not decrease. Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no volition, and no consciousness. No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind; no shape, sound, smell, taste, or thought. No element of vision leading to conceptual consciousness, no ignorance and no ending of ignorance, and even no ageing and death and no exhausting of ageing and death. No suffering, source, relief, or path. No wisdom and no attainment: because of non-apprehension.

The minds of bodhisattvas reliant on perfection of wisdom are without hindrance. Being without hindrance, they are free from fear and dread. They abandon upside-down, dreamlike thinking and finally awaken. All Buddhas, past, present, and future, depend on the perfection of wisdom and attain perfect enlightenment.

You should therefore know the great dharani of perfection of wisdom; the unexcelled dharani, the dharani equal to the unequalled which heals all suffering and is real, not imaginary— the dharani of perfection of wisdom spoken thus:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!