I hope this isn’t too technical, or abstruse, or complex. I'd like to try and explain here why my understanding of the Heart Sutra is somewhat different to the way that you'll find it in most presentations in books or on the internet, and so on. I want to particularly concentrate on a passage in the center of this very short sutra which reads in Japanese:
Ze ko ku chu.
Mu shiki mu ju so gyo shiki.
Mu gen ni bi zets shin ni.
Mu shiki sho ko mi soku ho.
Now mu, which occurs a lot - you just heard me repeat it several times - means “no”, “not”, or “without”. It could be a translation for the suffix, -less. When you say something is shapeless, it means it doesn't have shape.
So mu means not. This passage is generally taken - you’ll find many translations - as a list, a list of negatives: no form, no feeling, no perception, no mental formations, no consciousness, no birth, no disease, no old age, no death, no, no, no, no.
Now in this list are, for instance, the 5 skandhas, which in Sanskrit are rupa, vedana, samjna, sankhara, vijnana, which again, many translators simply take as a list of distinct items often called form, feeling, perception, mental formations consciousness, as the constituents of a person. They take this to be like ingredients that you might put into a cake and you mix them all together and you make a cake. They are presented as a list as discrete objects.
Now I dissent from this. I think that as with many other Buddhist lists they’re not just lists they are a sequence. Rupa is the precondition for vedana, vedana the condition for samjna, samjna the condition for sankhara, sankhara the condition for vijnana and so on. Now let's go back to the Heart Sutra text.
If the Heart Sutra was saying, as is usually translated, no form, no feeling, no perception, then it would read: Mu shiki ju so gyo shiki.
It doesn’t. It reads: Mu shiki mu ju so gyo shiki. There’s an extra mu in there. The extra mu makes all the difference.
If I say to you “no grit no pearl,” you don't take it that I’m saying no grit and no pearl. You take it that I’m saying if there's no grit there won't be a pearl. The same is true with this piece in this passage. When it says mu shiki mu ju so gyo shiki it is saying if there’s no shiki there’s no ju so gyo shiki. If there’s no form, no rupa, then there won't be all the other skandhas. The other skandhas come out of, or are built upon, this skandha. And in fact it goes on to say there won't even be any of the sense experiences that we have, there won't be birth disease, old age and death. There won't be dukkha. There won't be the Eightfold Path. There won't be any attainment, enlightenment and so on. And it is saying that that can't be the case so therefore rupa must be very important in prajna paramita.
When we are in prajna paramita, which is what the Heart Sutra is all about, then rupa figures and it figures strongly. It’s not negated. It isn’t got rid of but it is an essential part of shunyata. When you are in shunyata, in that state in which there is purity, love, compassion, and so on, shiki plays an essential part. This is the essential meaning of the whole Heart Sutra. It is that extra mu that gives the game away.
Thank you very much
Namo Amida Bu
Dharmavidya
David
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