Crossing Nebraska

The Buddhist concept of shunyata , or emptiness, is perhaps one of the most difficult to grasp of all. One reason for this difficulty, of course, relates to the fact that there is simply no really good English equivalent for it. The Western mind is too used to thinking of the world in dualistic terms to have invented vocabulary suitable to the discussion of such a foreign concept. And so we scratch our heads and pick a word that comes close, and then we spend a little time (or a lot of time) expounding upon what we really mean. The problem with a concept like shunyata is that it is so far removed from how we normally think about the world that we have no ready frame of reference for it. It’s a little like trying to imagine a five-dimensional universe when all we’ve ever known are the four dimensions of space and time. How do we even begin to comprehend five dimensions when the very blood and bone and nerves and tissue of our body/mind have evolved over billions of years tightly enmes...

I'll dive right into this second installment on the Heart Sutra by quoting once again from the invocation and prologue of the three selected translations: Rosan Yoshida’s translation : Invocation:       The Sutra of the Heart of Great Perfection of Insight Prologue:         The Venerable Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when carry’ng out the profound Prajnaparamita career, penetrated through the five aggregates and saw that they are Shunya in their nature.                                                    Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation : Invocation:       The Heart of the Prajnaparamita Prologue:       ...

Some combination of brevity, succinctness, depth of meaning, and poeticism has made the Heart Sutra one of the most widely known of all sutras – revered by practitioners of nearly all the various schools of Mahayana Buddhism. Formally known as the Mahaprajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra, the Heart Sutra is the shortest of the forty or so sutras that comprise the entire Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra (Schuhmacher & Woerner, 1994, p. 128 – hereafter referred to as S&W ). Perhaps we should, ahem, “brush up” on our Sanskrit! Prajna is usually translated as wisdom , but not without some reservation. Rosan Yoshida prefers the word prognosis over wisdom due to the far reaching nature of the wisdom conveyed by the word prajna . Thich Nhat Hanh (1988) also has some misgivings about the use of the word wisdom in this context, saying: “Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and knowledge are solid and can block our understanding” (p. 8). Paramita literally means “that which ...