Crossing Nebraska

Alan Watts , erstwhile Episcopal priest and Buddhist scholar, died at the relatively young age of 58, prior to ever seeing the Buddhist teachings that he helped disseminate in the West reach the level of acceptance and maturity that we know them to have today. I have the sense that people of about my chronological age represent the last generation of spiritual explorers to see his writings on bookstore shelves with any regularity. Regardless of your familiarity with Watts, however, you will almost certainly enjoy a very delightful, and delightfully animated, lecture snippet of his referred to as The Earth is People-ing (animated by Chris Brion and Todd Benson). The Earth is People-ing challenges us to move beyond our usual way of thinking about the arrival of intelligent life here on earth in order to reflect upon the possibility that the intelligence that resides in people is actually a manifestation OF the Earth and not merely a characteristic of the beings that...

Last week’s post left just two questions outstanding: One, what does the realization of emptiness have to do with the cessation of suffering; and, two, how is it that the realization of emptiness gives rise to compassionate action? In order to focus more completely on these questions, I’ll change the format of this final post in the Heart Sutra series just a little bit by concentrating on Rosan Yoshida’s translation at the beginning and then presenting the three translations in full at the close of this post. Recall that we left off last week with the realization that, with respect to ultimate reality, even the Four Noble Truths are empty; and there is nothing, not even knowledge, to be gained. After all, our conception of knowledge presupposes a knower and a known, and our conception of gain requires that something with a determinable identity enjoy some enhancement of some kind. Clearly this is all solidly in the mundane realm where qualitative and quantitative judgments still ...

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 ...