Chinese Heart Sutra: Dates and Attributions

Xīnjīng

One of the important conclusions of Jan Nattier's 1992 article on the Heart Sutra was that the traditional dates ascribed to its composition could not be correct and that it is more likely that it was composed in the 7th century, a time period which coincides with the life of Xuánzàng (602 – 664 CE) and his activity as pilgrim and translator. This coincidence allows Nattier to speculate that it might even have been Xuánzàng who translated the text from Chinese into Sanskrit. The speculation is bolstered by the fact that Xuánzàng has form in this area. He is known to have translated the Chinese authored 《大乘起信論》 (Dàshéng qǐxìn lùn) or Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna into Sanskrit.

In this essay I will rehearse Nattier's arguments about chronology and attribution of the Chinese translations as a prelude to discussing the challenge to them published by Dan Lusthaus. Lusthaus (2003) draws attention to two Chinese commentaries on the Heart Sutra, one of which appears to refer to alternate versions of the Heart Sutra in a way that Lusthaus claims poses "serious problems" for Nattiers conclusions about the chronology of the Heart Sutra. As one of the few scholars to engage critically with Nattier's thesis in print, Lusthaus's article is interesting both for the new information it presents and for the test it provides for the Chinese Origin thesis.

Another reason to rehearse this aspect of Nattier's thesis, is that that the popular Zen inspired commentaries seem to struggle with it. Red Pine, Mu Seong, and Kazuaki Tanahashi all seem to be in denial about the evidence. As such, most modern readers are given the impression that Nattier's argument is weak or improbable. But this is not the case.

In this essay I favour the Pinyin Romanisation of Chinese characters. Lusthaus and Nattier both use the Wade-Giles system. Additionally, Lusthaus uses McCune–Reischauer for the name of the Korean monk 원측, and the Revised Romanisation of Korean proposed by the South Korean government is now standard. I silently emend their Romanisation to fit my own preference (and recent scholarly convention). In particular I change the names:

• 玄奘: Hsüan-tsang > Xuánzàng
• 원측: Wŏnch’ŭk > Woncheuk
• 窺基: K'uei-chi > Kuījī

Nattier's Comments on the Authorship and Dates of The Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra exists in three short versions in the Chinese Tripiṭaka. This essays focusses on T250 and T251 attributed to Kumārajīva (334–413 CE) and Xuánzàng respectively. T256 is now thought to be attributable to Amoghavajra (705–774) and directly influenced by the Sanskrit text. The main argument for this is in Japanese, but a summary can be found in Tanahashi (2014: 68).

As Nattier points out, the attributions of T250 and Y251 first appear in an 8th century catalogue of Buddhist texts called 《開元釋教錄》Kāiyuán shìjiào lù (T2154) long after both men were dead (1992:174). This raises the question of why this very popular text failed to be associated with either in their lifetime, especially when we consider the explicit links between Xuánzàng and the Heart Sutra in his biographies. The simplest answer is that neither was involved in the creation of these versions. As we will see this is also the most plausible answer.

The catalogue of Buddhist texts in China 《綜理衆經目錄》 Zōnglǐ zhòngjīng mùlù (compiled in 374), itself now lost but reproduced in 《出三藏集記》 Chū sānzàng jíjì, compiled around 515 by Seng-yu (僧祐; 445-518), records two texts considered to represent lost versions of the Hṛdaya in Chinese. The two titles mentioned are:

《摩訶般若波羅蜜神咒一巻》
Móhēbōrěbōluómì shénzhòu yī juàn
Great Perfection of Wisdom Vidyā in one scroll

《般若波羅蜜神咒一巻》
bōrěbōluómì shénzhòu yī juàn
Perfection of Wisdom Vidyā in one scroll

These titles are certainly similar to the Chinese sutra titles:

T250 《摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經》
Móhēbōrěbōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng
Mahāprajñāpārami[tā]-mahāvidyā-sūtra.

T251 《般若波羅蜜多心經》
Bōrěbōluómìduō xīn jīng
Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra.

T256 《唐梵翻對字音般若波羅蜜多心經》
Táng fàn fān duì zì yīn bōrěbōluómìduō xīn jīng
Tang [i.e. Chinese] Transcription of the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra.

However the similarity itself is suspicious, because it was Kumārajīva who introduced the transcription 般若波羅蜜 bōrěbōluómì for prajñāpāramitā. Nattier points out that earlier translations of the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra do not use this terminology. For example:

T221 《放光般若經》Fàngguāng-bōrě-jīng, by Mokṣala (291 CE)

T222 《光讚經》 Guāng zàn jīng, by Dharmarakṣa in 286 CE

However early translations of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra use 般若bōrě for Sanskrit prajñā, and one uses 摩訶 Móhē for Sanskrit mahā. Eg.

T224 《道行般若經》Dàohéng-bōrě-jīng, by Lokakṣema (179 CE).

T226 《摩訶般若鈔經》Móhēbōrěchāo-jīng, by 竺佛念 Zhúfóniàn (382 CE).

I think this undermines the argument that the title is anachronistic. Nattier's dismissal on the grounds that the two supposed early texts containing the term 神咒 shénzhòu because "both are clearly intended to be construed as mantras based on - or at least associated with - the Prajñāpāramitā corpus." (1992: 183) is less convincing because mantras did not come into Chinese Buddhism for some centuries after the supposedly early period of the texts. On the other hand the use of the phrase 神咒 may itself be anachronistic. Mantras were non-Buddhist until after this period, but dhāraṇī and vidyā (along with Pāḷi parittas) were not. The idea that the Heart Sūtra is itself intended as a dhāraṇī is one that Nattier herself discusses (1992: 175-6). On the other hand, another early translation of Aṣṭa, 《大明度經》Dàmíngdù-jīng (T225) by 支謙 Zhīqiān (225 CE), uses the character combination 神呪 (or possibly 神祝, the editions disagree) to represent Sanskrit vidyā, and Xuánzàng apparently employs 神咒 for the same word. So the titles of the two "lost translations" are not so unusual after all. But it is possible that the catalogue was edited at a later date to include texts that could not have existed at the time, and it's also plausible that a no-longer extant text predates both T250 and T251 because of their variations (and differences between them and the Sanskrit mss.). I do not think that T250 or T251 are a plausible ur-text.

If they did exist, the two texts are now lost and we cannot draw any hard and fast conclusions about them, however ambiguous the evidence. We certainly ought not to join Red Pine in taking their existence on face value.


Kumārajīva & T250

Having decided that we must set aside non-existent texts, Nattier then turns to the ascription of T250 to Kumārajīva. This was already in doubt as Conze attributed it to Kumārajīva’s pupils (1978: 20). Nattier summarises the consensus view:

"...it seems clear that the students of Kumārajīva (in particular, Sēngzhào) read and commented on the core passage of the Heart Sūtra found in Kumārajīva's version of the Large Sūtra [ie. T223]. There is no evidence, however, that they were aware of the existence of the Heart Sūtra as a separate text, nor is there any evidence that Kumārajīva himself had any role in the production of the 'translation' associated with his name." (1992: 184)

It is precisely this consensus of informed opinion that Tanahashi (2014) rejects when he refers to T250 as the "α-version", doing his readers a disservice. There is simply no way that T250 is the ur-text for the Heart Sutra. It clearly dates from after Kumārajīva's death and has been edited by third parties unknown. It's interesting to note also that Sēngzhào (ca. 378—413 CE) is associated with the establishment of Madhyamaka, whereas Xuánzàng and his students were instrumental in establishing Yogācāra thought in China.

That the Heart Sūtra is based on Kumārajīva's translation T223, or perhaps on the version found embedded in 《大智度論》Dà zhì dù lùn (= *Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa; T1509), is not in doubt. The similarity between the two is too great to be a coincidence. That the Heart Sutra is based on the large Perfection of Wisdom text is also evident in some of the Nepalese Manuscript titles. For example the new Hṛdaya manuscript (EAP676/2/5) I described in 2014: is titled Ārya-pañcaviṁśatikā-pajñāpāramitā-mantra-nāma-dhāraṇī which translates as The Dhāraṇī named The Mantra of the Noble 25,000 Perfection of Wisdom.

The argument against attributing T250 to Kumārajīva is complex (Nattier 1992: 184-189). Where T250 has two passages of extra characters, these can be traced to T223. Nattier asserts, not entirely convincingly I think, that it is unlikely that the parallels would have been translated identically by Kumārajīva and that the exact correspondence argues for a plagiarism. The argument would be stronger if we had some concrete examples of this actually happening. I can supply an example of Kumārajīva's inconsistency from his translation of the Aṣṭasahāsrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, i.e. 《小品般若經》 T227. At 8.542.b5-6 Kumārajīva translates vidyā as 呪術 zhòu shù, while a little later at 8.543b25-29 he translates first as 明呪 míng zhòu, and then simply as 呪 zhòu. More examples would be needed to establish a pattern, but it lends plausibility to Nattier's assertion.

Nattier further points out that the initial equation of form and emptiness conforms not to T223, but to T1509 《大智度論》. The combination of observations leads Nattier to propose that T250 is based on, or has been made to conform to, T1509, rather than T223. Thus, the earliest possible date (terminus post quem) for T250 is the date of the translation of T1509, ca. 406 CE (1992:188).

Nattier's next step is to point out that, unlike Kumārajīva's other translations, which eclipse Xuánzàng's in popularity even to this day, T250 was never popular in China. Unlike T251, T250 is not craved into stone, copied, or printed. Not only are all the Chinese commentaries on the Heart Sutra on Xuánzàng's version, T251, but they do not date from earlier than Xuánzàng's lifetime, whereas Kumārajīva was active 250 years earlier. Thus the attribution of authorship of the Heart Sutra to Kumārajīva rings hollow. And in fact Kumārajīva is frequently apocryphally given as author or translator when it is clear that he is not.


Xuánzàng & T251

However the attribution of T251 to Xuánzàng is also problematic. Xuánzàng was a prolific translator. His compendium of Prajñāpāramitā texts (T220) takes up vols. 5-7 of the Taishō edition of the canon, each of which is thicker than Vol. 8 containing all the other Prajñāpāramitā texts translated by all the other translators. If Xuánzàng translated the Heart Sutra why was it not attributed to him in his lifetime, and why was his translation not included in T220? Why does the legend of his association with the text speak of him receiving the text from a sick man if he composed it or translated it from Sanskrit?

Curiously T251 largely sticks to the terminology found in T250 (and thus in T223/1509). But three key terms: the names Avalokiteśvara and Śāriputra, and the Sanskrit word skandha, are written in a way that is distinctive to Xuánzàng. A text containing 觀自在, 舍利子, and 蘊 can only have been completed during or after the work of Xuánzàng. Nattier concludes that Xuánzàng did indeed receive a text and made minor amendments. T250 seems also to be an amended text, which suggests to me an ur-text of which both T250 and T251 are revisions. This is supported by the Sanskrit text which is significantly different in places from either of the two Chinese versions, in particular it has no equivalent of 度一切苦厄 in the first sentence. That the Sanskrit translator would drop this phrase is less plausible than that at some later date it was added to the Chinese text. This is because everywhere we look, Buddhists add words, phrases, and chapters to their texts, but we very seldom see them subtracting. Indeed in light of recent scholarship, Conze's view that the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya and Vajracchedikāprajñāpāramitā represent 3rd or 4th Century condensations of the Prajñāpāramitā texts seems unlikely. Vaj is now thought to be contemporary with Aṣṭa and the character of Hṛdaya is not a condensation, but simply a quote or two.

Either way the Heart Sutra as we know it can be no older than the early 5th century, i.e. after Kumārajiva's translations of the Pañcaviṃśatisahāsrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and/or Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa because it is an extract of one or both of them. Another part of the text that is cited word for word from the same source is the passage with epithets of prajñāpāramitā, found at T223, 8.286b28-c7 and many other locations: see Nattier (1992 footnote 54a) and my forthcoming article for JOCBS.

So the catalogues which list earlier texts are most likely forgeries. And on this basis Nattier proposes that the Heart Sutra was composed in or near the 7th Century in China. The close association with Xuánzàng suggests that he may have been involved in the translation of it into Sanskrit, though given how botched the translation is, it was presumably well before his work on 《大般若波羅蜜多經》(T220). My view is that the translator from Chinese to Sanskrit was more at home in Chinese than in Sanskrit, and not very familiar with the Prajñāpāramitā literature in Sanskrit.

Woncheuk's Commentary.

Xuánzàng’s students 窺基 Kuījī (632–682) and 圓測 Woncheuk (613-696) produced commentaries on the Heart Sutra in the late 7th century (Nattier 1992: 173). These have both been translated into English: see Shih & Lusthaus (2006) and Hyun Choo (2006) respectively.

Lusthaus (2003) cites four passages from Woncheuk's commentary 《般若波羅蜜多心經贊》 (T1711), which he says lead us to two main conclusions: 1. that versions of the text once existed that were different from the extant versions; and 2. that these versions were older than the extant versions. And thus Nattier's preference for a later composition date is seriously challenged.

The first passage comments on Xuánzàng’s use of the form 觀自在 Guānzìzài for the name of Avalokiteśvara Woncheuk comments:

若依舊本名觀世音 (T1711, 33.543b.21)

"This is what the old text(s) named Guānshìyīn" (Lusthaus 2003: 82)

Quite a lot of Lusthaus's argument rests on his conclusion that it is "natural in this context to understand this as a reference to older versions of the Heart Sutra" (82). Hyun Choo (2006) concurs, he translates the passage "According to the old version of the translation [of the Prajñāpāramita-sūtras]" (138). However, as is well known Avaoliketśvara does not appear in any other Prajñāpāramita sūtras, so this is an unlikely interpretation. In fact, Woncheuk's commentary immediately proceeds to a discussion of the deity and the name 觀音in Buddhist literature, a discussion that does not include any Prajñāpāramitā sūtras or mention of the

Heart Sutra, but does include the Avalokiteśvara-sūtra (觀音三昧經), Avalokiteśvara-bodhisattva-mahāsthamaprapta-bodhisattva-sūtra(觀音授記經), and the Larger Sukhāvatīvyuha-sūtra (無量壽經). If we are talking about "natural" conclusions then Woncheuk's reference to 舊本 'old texts' appears to reference these other named texts.

The next passage concerns the first sentence of the Heart Sutra:

或有本曰 「照見五蘊等皆空」 雖有兩本。後本為正。撿勘梵本有等言故後所說等準此應知。(added punctuation for clarity)

There is another version of the text 或有本 which says "illuminatingly, he saw the five skandhas, and so on (等), are all empty." Although there are two versions of the text 有兩本, the latter text is correct. An examination of the Sanskrit text [梵本] shows that is has the word "and so on" (等). Hence the 'and so on' stated by the latter (text) should be understood to be the standard." (Lusthaus 2003:83, emphasis added)

By 'and so on' we can probably interpret Sanskrit ādi. T251 here simply has 照見五蘊皆空 without the extra character 等. Given that the text does list the skandhas and other lists such as the dhātus and āyatanas this interpolation is not wrong. However, as Lusthaus concedes, ādi doesn't appear in any known Sanskrit text. Nor does any extant Chinese text have 等 here. The mention of a Sanskrit text with a different wording here is interesting of course, but the manuscript tradition of the Heart Sutra is widely variable - so much so that editing it proved very difficult for Conze and led him to make several errors (See my forthcoming article in the JOCBS 7). No two manuscripts of the Sanskrit Hṛdaya are identical, even the oldest manuscript (the Hōryūji Manuscript; probably from the 8th century) is obviously corrupt in many places.

Next, Lusthaus cites this passage:

又解此經自有兩本 一本如上。一本經曰受想行識等亦復如是。所言等者準下經文有六善巧。謂蘊處界緣生四諦菩提涅槃。(T1711, 33.546.13-15)

"Further, for interpreting this sutra we have two texts (自有兩本). One text is as above 如上 (i.e. Xuánzàng's version, which says 'vedanā, saṃjñā, saṃskāras, and vijñāna are also like this'). The other text of the sutra says: 'vedanā, saṃjñā, saṃskāras, vijñāna, and so on 等, also like this.' The word 'and so on' [deng] indicates what is [discussed] below in the text of the sutra, i.e. the six skill in means, the aggregates, āyatanas, dhātus, pratītysamutpāda, the four truths, Bodhi, and Nirvāṇa." (Lusthaus 2003: 84).

From this we infer that Woncheuk has at least two texts in front of him. Possibly two Chinese texts and at least one Sanskrit text. And one of the Chinese texts again has 等 (= Sanskrit ādi) at the end of a list of skandhas, seeming to indicate the other lists that follow in the sutra. Again no extant Chinese or Sanskrit text has this additional feature, but it is not inconceivable, in the light of the manuscript tradition, that it could have been added by a scribe or editor.

Woncheuk's contemporary and rival, Kuījī, also wrote a commentary on the Heart Sutra and also seems to have a text with 等, and does not problematise it in the way that Woncheuk does, suggest that he only had the one text and it included 等. And this raises the question of why we do not find it in the text attributed to their teacher Xuánzàng. Lusthaus avoids the conclusion from Nattier's study, that the text of T251 was at best edited by Xuánzàng, or more likely by his later students, rather than being a translation he produced.

Finally in relation to Chinese versions corresponding to the Sanskrit passage "cittāvaraṇanāstitvād atrastro viparyāsātikrānto nirvāṇaparyavasānam", which in Chinese becomes:

心無罣礙；無罣礙故，無有恐怖，遠離顛倒夢想 ，究竟涅槃。(T251)

His mind is not obscured, since it is not obscured he is not afraid, far from upside-down dreamlike thinking, he finally attains nirvāṇa. (My translation).

Lusthaus observes that Woncheuk's two texts differ and that Woncheuk favours the one that says 遠離一切顛倒夢想 "far from all upside-down dreamlike thinking." And in this case the T250 has 離一切顛倒夢想苦惱. Lusthaus says "Unfortunately for Nattier's thesis, the alternate version this time is recognisable. It is Kumārajīva's version". Except that it is not. T250 does not include the character 遠 and adds two characters 苦惱. The difference Lusthaus is highlighting involves the interpolation of just two characters, 一切 (literally 'one cut'; figuratively 'all'), so having three other differences is significant. Certainly the two are similar, but then all of these Chinese texts derive have similarities. In fact we have reference to yet another version of the text here which is not the same as either T250 or T251.

One possible good to come out of this is that in looking for parallels in the wider Canon for the last passage, which to my knowledge has not previously been identified with any existing text, we now know to look for alternate readings, though a preliminary search did not turn up any parallels for any of the variants.

Conclusion

On the point about the dating of versions of the Heart Sutra referred to in Woncheuk's commentary we need first to address the issue of "older texts". Crucially, Lusthaus says earlier in his article,

"We have no dates of other background information on when or where the two commentaries were written... We don't know for certain even if these commentaries were written before or after [Xuanzang's] death, though my sense is that they were written after." (2003: 66: emphasis added)

The conjecture by Lusthaus that the commentaries he is discussing were written (i.e. composed) after the death of Xuánzàng is important in assessing his claim that the alternate readings found in them amount to a text from a much earlier period, particularly contemporary with Kumārajīva in the early fifth century.

We've seen that when Woncheuk mentioned old texts" (舊本) he was in fact directly referring to a number of other sutras in which Avalokiteśvara plays a prominent role. So Lusthaus's conclusion that it would be "natural" in this context to conclude that this referred to the Heart Sutra looks wrong. We've also seen that his attempt to connect Woncheuk's text with Kumārajīva fails. Lusthaus's challenge to Nattier's theory falls well short of its mark.

What we're left with is evidence of multiple versions of the Heart Sutra, probably around the time of, or not long after, the death of Xuánzàng. No texts with the readings evinced by Woncheuk, in either Chinese or Sanskrit are extant. Thus there is no good case for pushing back the date of composition of the Heart Sutra before Xuánzàng. On the other hand, the evidence for multiple versions at this time is intrinsically interesting in terms of the history of the text. And in drawing attention to these early commentaries. Lusthaus has made an valuable contribution.

Nattier's thesis on the origins of the Heart Sutra certainly has stronger and weaker points. However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the Heart Sutra per se began life in China as a compilation of extracts from Kumārajīva's《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》(T233) or possible the commentary on it 《大智度論》and probably other texts including the Mahāmegha Sūtra (possible source of the dhāraṇī). And her arguments about the attribution and dates of T250 and T251 largely stand. Neither seem to be the product of authors to which they were attributed in the 8th Century.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward. (1978). The Prajñāpāramitā Literature. Tokyo, The Reiyukai.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006) 'An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch'uk's Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)' International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. February 2006, Vol.6, pp.121-205.

Lusthaus, Dan. (2003) 'The Heart Sūtra in Chinese Yogācāra: Some Comparative Comments on the Heart Sūtra Commentaries of Wŏnch’ŭk and K’uei-chi.' International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. September, Vol. 3: 59-103.

Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

Shih, Heng-Ching & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006) A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Tanahashi, Kazuaki. (2014) The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambhala.

Variations in the Heart Sutra in Chinese

Huifeng (慧峰)

It's well known that seven versions of the Heart Sutra are preserved in the Chinese Canon. Of these, two are versions of the short text:

• T 8.250  摩訶般若波羅蜜大明咒經
  Móhēbōrěbōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng
  (= Mahāprajñāpāramitā-mahāvidyā-sūtra).
• T 8.251 般若波羅蜜多心經
  Bōrěbōluómìduō xīn jīng
  (= Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra).

T 250 is attributed to the Kuchan bhikṣu Kumārajīva, though only by later catalogues, for the first time in 730 CE, which is four centuries after he died (Nattier 214, fn 71); and T 251 is attributed to Xuánzàng,  again only by later catalogues.

There is a third version of the short text, which is a complete transliteration of the Sanskrit using Chinese characters (T 8.256). It has traditionally been attributed to Xuánzàng,  though more recently it has been attributed to Amoghavajra. The remaining versions are all later translations of the long text of the Heart Sutra and don't concern us here.

Both of the two Chinese short Heart Sutra texts are almost identical to sections of Kumārajīva's translation of T 8.223 摩訶般若經 Móhēbōrě jīng (= Mahāprajñāsūtra; Large Wisdom Sutra - a translation of the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrika-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra or 25,000 Line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra). It is this identity in Chinese, combined with the differences in idiom and sentence structure in Sanskrit versions of these two texts, that lead to the conclusion that the Heart Sutra was assembled in China, albeit from parts of the Large Wisdom Sutra.

Shi Huifeng (Orsborn 2008) has raised a question about part of Jan Nattier's (1992) argument that the Heart Sutra was assembled in China. Although I think the weight of evidence is against his objection, it will be instructive to work through it and think about the implications.

One of the besetting problems of the religious and academic study of Buddhism is the tendency to see texts as monolithic and fixed. We will write about 'The Heart Sutra' for example, as though it was clear what this meant. If my recent work has showed anything it is that the Heart Sutra is far from a unitary phenomenon. It exists in multiple, often competing, recensions: Tibetan Buddhists almost exclusively use  one of two long texts found in their Canon, whereas in Japan and China the short text is most important. In China the version by Xuánzàng is more or less the only text is use. In Japan they have an old (though not as old as claimed and somewhat corrupt) manuscript in Sanskrit that is influential alongside the Chinese. In the West we tend to prioritise the Sanskrit editions by Conze, though I hope to change this by publicising the errors in his edition. And we have very many English translations each of which takes a slightly different approach.

It is very difficult to know which reading of any particular passage is the correct reading. It was only in 1992 that this most popular text in all of Mahāyāna Buddhism, a text which has received intense scrutiny over centuries, was discovered to have been assembled in China. But even the two Chinese short texts are not original: T 8.251 appears to have been edited to conform to some of Xuánzàng's word coinages, but largely follows Kumārajīva's translation (something which Xuánzàng does not do in other cases) and T 8.250 has additions which are drawn from Kumārajīva's Mahāprajñāpāramitāśastra translation (see below). Both contain a phrase that is not found in any Sanskrit manuscript and which must therefore have been added after the creation of the Sanskrit archetype or been deliberately left out of the Sanskrit (viz 度一切苦厄 "overcame all states of suffering"). The former being the more likely of the two explanations because while Buddhists frequently add to their texts they seldom if ever deliberately leave lines out.

Each manuscript is different and not just because scribes made mistakes. Each manuscript has been subtly altered by an anonymous editor who presumably thought to "improve" the text. Yes, we can find and undo these additions where appropriate, but this assumes that we know better than them! Our main advantage being that we have access to more versions than most historical Buddhists would have had. All these versions were presumably in use by Buddhists at some point and were deemed to be authoritative. Of the two versions of the text that were preserved in the Tibetan Canon, both have obvious errors. But they are the canonical versions in Tibet so in practice pointing out the mistakes makes little difference. Tibetan exegetes deftly work around the  textual difficulties. I looked in more detail at some of these points in my article on the Vajrasattva Mantra (which is mostly transmitted in a corrupt version even where canonical versions are less corrupt). Thus in practice it would make more sense to speak of a Heart Sutra tradition or even a number of traditions, including the traditions of exegesis, rather than a single Heart Sutra text. The text that any group had access to at any given time was the Heart Sutra for that group at that time - and this is true even now. 

In the study of Pāli texts we seldom see discussions of variant readings, and the study of the manuscript tradition is neglected compared to Sanskrit studies. Westerners are only beginning to unlock the riches of the Chinese canonical works, and there are still no English translations of the bulk of the Chinese Tripiṭaka, though the first generation of translations are now being expanded in the BDK Tripitaka Translation Series, under the auspices of the Numata Foundation. Some scholars are starting to make use of Chinese texts and it is becoming more common to see comparisons particularly of Pāli and Chinese translations. But we usually see one Pāli and one Chinese translation compared. We see the critical editions being compared without any attention given to alternate readings. The Pali Text Society critical editions and the Vipassana Research Institute Pāli editions, as well as the CBETA/Taishō Chinese edition, all include footnotes about variant readings in other editions or manuscripts. Also note that Silk found considerable variation in the Tibetan Canonical versions of the Heart Sutra based on comparing fourteen exemplars of the various editions of the Tibetan Kanjur.

It may well be that these are of no consequence in the majority of cases, but the lack of any discussion of variants is suspicious. My experience of finding multiple errors in Conze's 60 year old, well scrutinised version of the Heart Sutra has put me on guard. Thus it was of considerable interest to see Huifeng making an argument precisely on the basis of variant readings recorded in the Taishō Tripiṭaka. We first need to set the background for the point Huifeng makes.

The argument about the attribution of T 250 begins at Nattier p.184 (Huifeng places the argument at p.164, which may be a typo). The importance of the argument is that it eliminates Kumārajīva as a potential translator of the Heart Sutra and thus makes an important chronological point. Had Kumārajīva been a plausible translator we would have to push back the creation of the Heart Sutra to the early 5th century. We've already pointed out that the attribution to Kumārajīva is not made until 730 CE - this makes the attribution "highly suspect" (184). Nattier makes four numbered points and adds a fifth as after thought (though it is not inconsequential).

1. Near the beginning T 250 contains an extra passage:
   舍利弗！色空故無惱壞相，受空故無受相，想空故無知相，行空故無作相，識空故無覺相。何以故？
2. In the middle T 250 adds: 是空法，非過去、非未來、非現在。which has no counterpart in T 251.
3. The wording of the phrase 'form is not different from emptiness' is worded differently.
4. T 250 and 251 vary in their rendering of certain key terms: prajñāpāramitā, skandha, bodhisattva, and the names Avalokiteśvara and Śārputra.

The fifth point is that no translation by Xuánzàng ever eclipsed a translation by Kumārajīva in Chinese Buddhism. In other words where Kumārajīva has translated a text, it becomes the standard, right down to the present, despite the existence of an (arguably) better translation by Xuánzàng. And yet the most popular version of the Heart Sutra the one attributed to Xuánzàng and all of the Chinese commentaries, which begin to be produced only in the latter half of the 7th century, are on that single version (188).

Fukui Fumimasa, cited by Nattier, has used the similarity between extra parts of T 250 (points 1 and 2 in Nattier's discussion) and Kumārajīva's Large Wisdom Text (T 233) to argue that Kumārajīva must have translated the text, but Nattier counters that "a nearly verbatim agreement between two Chinese texts should instead arouse our suspicions" (196). The odds of choosing the exact same translation in two different texts (and recall that the wording of the Sanskrit texts is different) are "enormous". (186). The obvious conclusion is not that T 250 is a translation by Kumārajīva, but a portion copied from his T 233 translation. "And this is especially true of a translator like Kumārajīva, who is renowned not for wooden faithfulness to the Sanskrit original but for his fluid and context sensitive renditions." (186).

The different wording at point 3 Nattier attributes to the text being taken not directly from T 233 the Large Wisdom Text, but from his translation of the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśastra: T 25.1509 大智度論 Dàzhìdù lùn (Attributed to Nāgārjuna).

T 251

色不異空，空不異色
sè bù yì kōng, kōng bù yì sè 
For is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form

T 250

非色異空，非空異色
fēi sè yì kōng, fēi kōng yì sè
It is not that form is different from emptiness, it is not the emptiness is different from form.

With respect to the passage under discussion here T 1509 reads:

非色異空，非空異色

Nattier concludes: "In other words, the Heart Sutra may be viewed as the creation of a Chinese author who was more familiar with the Large Sutra as presented in this widely popular commentary than with the text of the sutra itself" (187). In my view is true of T 250, but I don't think it can apply to T 251 which is entirely consistent with the sutra (i.e. with T 233) except where a few of Xuánzàng's translations of individual words have been used (i.e. those mentioned in point 4), which suggests that it was altered post-composition.

However Nattier also sees this scenario as consistent with point 4. Where the terms mentioned above are used, T 251 has the characters typical of a translation by Xuánzàng, while T 250 uses characters typical of Kumārajīva. Of course if the Heart Sutra is drawn from another text translated by Kumārajīva then we are not surprised to find his terminology in use. T 251 can then be explained as having been edited by someone familiar with Xuánzàng's vocabulary. 

The section of the text that Huifeng draws attention to, dealt with by Nattier point 3, is the part that translates as "form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form" (Huifeng 10-11, n.34). As above this is different in the two Heart Sutra texts.

T 251 色不異空，空不異色
T 250 非色異空，非空異色 

Kumārajīva's Large Wisdom Text (T 233) here is different to T 250 :

T 223 色不異空空不異

Punctuation aside, and all Chinese punctuation comes from modern editors, the characters in T 251 and T 223 are identical. While those in T 250 are different. On this basis Nattier argues that T 250 is drawn from T 1509 and probably not the work of Kumārajīva.

However, Huifeng points out that the Taishō edition footnotes record that in the earlier Sòng, Yuán, Míng and Gōng editions of the Tripiṭaka T 223 reads 非色異空，非空異色. This is exactly the same as T 250. Thus the third point regarding the attribution of T 250 to Kumārajīva is not valid and the Heart Sutra found in T 250 precisely matches the earlier editions of the Large Wisdom Sutra (T 223) which is known with certainty to be the work of Kumārajīva. This invalidates Nattier's comments regarding point 3, which is an important part of her argument about the authorship of T 250. There is now an imperative to examine other such arguments in more detail.

Problematically Huifeng infers from this what he considers to be a reasonable doubt about the entire Chinese Origin hypothesis.

"Detailed analysis would be needed to determine whether or not the rest of her argument and conclusions, and thus [the] conclusion that the Heart Sūtra is a Chinese apocryphal work, are still valid" (11, n.34)

I think Huifeng is overstating the doubts that emerge from his valid point. If he had provided evidence that definitely linked T 250 with Kumārajīva then that would be a game changer. But there is a weight of other evidence provided in Nattier's article that undermines the attribution. Particularly the lateness of the first attribution, which is in fact some 300 years late. Kumārajīva is not an obscure translator whose work went unnoticed. Where he translated a text it is usually still the standard version even in the present day (this is true of the Lotus Sutra for example). If he translated the Heart Sutra the lack of any mention of this before 730 CE requires an explanation. Also there are the extra passages. It is axiomatic that texts are frequently added to, but seldom reduced in scope. This is plainly evident in the extant Sanskrit manuscripts that I have examined for example. One passage of 37 characters and another of 12—which incidentally appear in no Sanskrit source either—do not just disappear from a Buddhist sutra.

Nattier goes further, saying "nor is there any evidence that Kumārajīva himself had any role in the production of the 'translation' associated with his name" (184). And this is the considered opinion of previous scholars working in the field where "significant progress [in understanding the origins of T 250] has recently been made by Japanese and Western scholars" (184).

There is no doubt whatever that the Heart Sutra is largely based on the Pañcaviṃśati. This fact is already acknowledged in some of the Nepalese mss., which title the text: ārya-pañcaviṃśatikā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya nāma dhāraṇī (The Dhāraṇī entitled the Heart of the 25,000 Line Perfection of Wisdom).

If the creator of the Heart Sutra took their extracts from a Sanskrit text then they either a) had a previously unknown version of the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati with an entirely different wording, though largely the same meaning; or b) the composer deliberately changed the wording of the Pañcaviṃśati to create a paraphrase without substantially changing the meaning, a procedure unknown in any other case. In either a) or b) the result was a Sanskrit Heart Sutra in which the wording, but not the meaning, was different from the extant versions of Sanskrit text it was extracted from (i.e. Pañcaviṃśati) and also contained one or two phrases that make better sense in Chinese than in Sanskrit. Neither of these two options are very likely. By contrast the differences between the Large Wisdom Text and the Heart Sutra in Chinese are minimal. For the most part the wording (including choice of characters) is identical. The obvious conclusion, the conclusion demanded by Occam's Razor, is that the extraction happened in Chinese and in China; and that the Sanskrit translation of the short text Heart Sutra was done by a Chinese speaker. Unlike the short-text, the extra passages found in the long text Heart Sutra seem to have been composed by someone well versed in Sanskrit and the conventions of Sanskrit Buddhist literature.

To Nattier's extensive evidence I have added the example of the word vidyā in Pañcavimśati becoming the word mantra in the Heart Sutra, which is difficult to explain in purely Sanskrit terms, but makes sense given a Chinese intermediary and the Chinese practice of abbreviating technical terms. I've tried to show how the Heart Sutra might look had it been extracted from a Sanskrit Pañcavimśati from that time period rather than from the Chinese (An Alternate Sanskrit Heart Sutra). I also showed that Nattier's arguments about satyam amithyatvād in relation to the Chinese text are better explained by Conze's mistaken choice for his critical edition: the text should have read samyaktva-amithyātvāt.

Thus I think we can say that, though Nattier's argument is incorrect in one or two small details, the case for the Heart Sutra being assembled in China is very strong and that extraordinary evidence would be required to refute this theory. Huifeng's main point about versions is certainly true, and it does change the picture, but only a little. That said a still more nuanced story might still emerge from paying attention to the footnotes and variant readings. Huifeng is correct to wonder what other variations might reveal if studied. And variations are the norm rather than the exception when dealing with Buddhist texts.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography 

• Nattier, Jan. (1992) 'The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. Vol. 15 (2): 153-223. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

• Orsborn, M. B.  [aka 釋慧峰 Shi Huifeng] (2008) A Survey Of Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra Translations In Chinese. Online: http://prajnacara.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/survey-of-prajnaparamita-sutra.html.

Who Translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit?

Xuánzàng 

This is the third in a series of essays exploring Jan Nattier's thesis that the Heart Sutra was composed in China in about the 7th century. The last two essays have looked at some of the sources for what ended up in the text. The other main issue addressed by Nattier is the question of who translated the text into Sanskrit. I think it's fair to say that this is still a mystery, but the text itself has some clues. 

Let's begin by looking more closely at some of the Sanskrit phrases. Many scholars by now have noted that the Sanskrit used in the Heart Sutra is rather unidiomatic at times. I can assure you that translating the Sanskrit text as it stands is not always easy! It was perhaps this awkwardness that hid a basic grammatical error in the first paragraph which I discovered at the end of last year. In this essay I outline some Chinese idioms identified by Nattier in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, and show how this supports her Chinese origins thesis and puts some limits on who could have translated it into Sanskrit. Coming out of this examination are concomitant proposals to improve the Sanskrit text, which will be in next week's essay. 

In making the case that the Heart Sutra was composed in China, Nattier points to a number of idioms that seem more at home in China than India. For example the phrase niṣṭhā-nirvaṇa is rather awkward in Sanskrit. The Chinese 究竟涅槃 jiùjìng-nièpán is more natural. The last two characters render nirvāṇa while the first two mean 'finally attain' (Nattier has "literally 'ulimate[ly] nirvāṇa"). Nattier comments "[this phrase] is attested in a number of other Buddhist texts, and might well be described as standard (even idiomatic) Buddhist Chinese." (178).

The difficulty of this term can perhaps be exemplified by Edward Conze's equivocation with respect to it. The first two versions of his critical edition (1948) and (1967) have niṣṭhā-nirvāṇa, but (1975) has niṣṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. Conze has added the past participle prāptaḥ 'attained' (from pra√āp 'attains') to nirvāṇa extending the compound. This choice is ironic because the text earlier says na prāptiḥ 'no attaining' (this is a verbal noun from the same root). So why choose prāpta? The obvious answer is that it appears in some of the mss. Looking at the footnotes of Conze's 1967 critical edition (confirmed from my own observations in most cases) we find these variant readings:

N^abcdikm: nistanirvāṇaprāptaḥ
N^e: nirvvaṇaprāptās
J^ab, C^cg: niṣṭhanirvaṇaḥ
C^ae: tani nirvāṇam prāpnoti
C^g: niṣṭhanirvāṇā

Thus those mss. which supplement niṣṭhanirvāṇa, supplement it with a verbal form from pra√āp. But prāptaḥ doesn't make sense because the text itself rules it out. This, plus the fact that many mss. leave it out and Conze himself left it out in his first two versions of the critical edition, suggest that it was inserted later to help make sense of the text precisely because niṣṭhanirvāṇa alone is so awkward. It's extremely unlikely that the text was composed with the phrase niṣṭhanirvāṇa in Sanskrit.

In Pāli we find a strikingly similar idiom, though only in a single text, Gaṇakamoggallāna Sutta (MN 107):

Appekacce kho, brāhmaṇa, mama sāvakā mayā evaṃ ovadīyamānā evaṃ anusāsīyamānā accantaṃ niṭṭhaṃ nibbānaṃ ārādhenti, ekacce nārādhentī’’ti. (M iii.4)
When, O Brahmin, my disciples are advised and instructed by me, some do indeed succeed to the ultimate goal nibbāna, and some do not succeed. 

Note that the verb here is a causative from ā√rādh 'to suceed, attain, accomplish' rather than pra√āp. The Chinese counterpart, Madhyāgama 144, was translated ca. 397 or 398 CE probably from Gāndhārī. In Chinese the verb is 得 de 'get, obtain, etc'. Thus where there is a verb in a similar Indic phrase it was supplied by some Chinese translators. 

Nattier argues that no one would use niṣṭhānirvāṇa (with no verb) when composing a text in Sanskrit, but that the same idiom is right at home in Chinese, thus the Sanskrit reflects a Chinese original. Recall that, in the case of those sections known to be from the Pañcaviṃśati, the Sanskrit wording has almost invariably changed after going through Chinese. In the next essay we will see that Kumārajīva used the phrase 究竟涅槃 to translate several different Sanskrit phrases, and show that there are several that are better candidates than niṣṭhānirvāṇa. This in turn provides us with possible improvements to the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. 

Another phrase that stands out is satyam-amithyatvāt. Conze (1975) takes poetic flight in translating this phrase: "...in truth, for what could go wrong", but this is not grounded in the text. Satyam is easy enough, it means 'truth' and being a neuter word is in either the nominative or accusative singular. The preceding phrases are the epithets of prajñāpāramitā, discussed last week, and we might therefore suppose that here satyam is predicated of prajñāpāramitā. That is to say that we would naturally read this as saying that prajñāpāramitā is true. The fact of being true is of considerable importance to Buddhists. 

The other word amithyatvāt is much more troublesome however. The word mithyā is a contracted form of mithūyā and means 'inverted', or 'contrary' and thus 'false'. The root is √mith which Whitney's Roots glosses as 'alternate and altercate'. The term is often paired with samyañc (from saṃ + √añc 'to bend') which becomes samyak or samyag in actual use. Samyañc roughly means 'to go with' and mithyā 'to go against'. The form amithyatvāt has a prefix and a suffix, and a case ending. We add -tva to create an abstract noun, mithyatva meaning 'a state of being false' or 'falseness'. This is negated by the prefix a- so that amithyatva means 'a state of being true, truthful', however it's typical to retain the Sanskrit morphology and render a word like this as 'non-falseness' or 'a state of not being false'. Finally the whole word is in the ablative case, indicated by the ending -āt, which tells us the reason for the action of a verb (the verb here being a tacit 'to be').

Putting it all together we may say that satyam amithyatvāt literally means 'it is true because of non-falseness' or even 'it is true because of [its] truth'. This is as awkward in Sanskrit as it sounds in English. Nattier assures us that the Chinese version 真實不虛 zhēn shí bù xū is "entirely natural in Chinese" (177). Nattier suggests it means "genuine, not vain". 虛 xū can mean 'false, worthless; empty, hollow, vain'.

The suggestion is that satyam amithyatvāt is like the common idiom "long time no see". This phrase is thought to have derived from a Chinese greeting and to retain the Chinese grammar. It may be compared to Mandarin phrase 好久不見 (hǎojiǔ bù jiàn), which can be translated literally as "long-time, no see". 

However, as I will show next week, this is not in fact an artefact of back translation from Chinese, but the result of a poor decision by Conze in creating his critical edition. There were other options available to Conze from his manuscripts that would have made more sense, despite being minority readings.

Finally compare this line:

na rūpaṃ na vedanā na saṃjñā na saṃskārāḥ na vijñānaṃ

With these:

na cakṣuḥśrotraghrānajihvākāyamanāṃsi.
na rūpaśabdagandharasaspraṣṭavayadharmāh.

The former is just what we would expect from a Buddhist text. Buddhists are not afraid of repetition, especially not where the longer Perfection of Wisdom texts were concerned, and so use na in each case. The latter two lines look unusual (and the 'infelicity' was spotted for Nattier by highly experienced Sanskritist Richard Salomon. See 214: note 57). Nattier quotes from the Gilgit ms. of the Pañcaviṃśati: "na cakṣur na śrotram na ghrāṇam na jihvā na kāye na manaḥ". Compare the Pañcaviṃśati version from Kimura's edition (2007):

na cakṣurāyatanaṃ na rūpāyatanaṃ (no eye base, no form base).
na śrotrāyatanaṃna [na] śabdāyatanaṃ
na ghrāṇāyatanaṃ na gandhāyatanaṃ
na jihvāyatanaṃ [na] rasāyatanaṃ
na kāyāyatanaṃ [na] spraṣṭavyāyatanaṃ
na manaāyatanaṃ [na] dharmāyatanam,

The Chinese Heart Sutra has:

無眼、耳、鼻、舌、身、意；
Wú yǎn, ěr, bí, shé, shēn, yì;
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind;

And this in turn precisely follows the Large Perfection of Wisdom Text of Kumārajīva except in the matter of punctuation, all of which was added by later editors: 

無眼耳鼻舌身意 (T 8. 223 p.0223a18.6). 

It seems reasonably clear that na cakṣuḥśrotraghrānajihvākāyamanāṃsi reflects Chinese syntax with a single negating particle for all of the items being negated. Sanskrit syntax would give each item it's own negative particle as we see from the Sanskrit Pañcavīṃśati.

For Nattier the weight of evidence suggests that the Heart Sutra is a back translation from Chinese to Sanskrit. However this is only the most obvious conclusion of her investigation. There is a further conclusion from these facts that Nattier does not explicitly draw, but which is implicit given the facts.

The composer of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra was probably a Chinese speaker. 

For Nattier the main suspect in the mystery of who composed the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is Xuánzàng. He lived at about the right time, travelled to India and learned Sanskrit at about the right time. Thus he had the opportunity and the means. He was also known from his memoir of travelling to India to have been a devotee of the text. 

Nattier invites us to imagine that Xuánzàng had arrived in India only to find that the Indian monks had not heard of this text. Upon learning the language would he not be tempted to compose a version in Sanskrit? Early in my own attempts to learn Sanskrit, the Heart Sutra was one of the first texts I looked at precisely because it is familiar and concise. As I mentioned in my last essay, an Indian provenance was crucial to the authenticity of a Buddhist text in China. The whole point of Xuánzàng's journey to India was to return with authentic Indian texts. To discover that one's favourite text was not extant in Sanskrit might tempt the most scrupulous monk to compose a new Sanskrit "original".

Xuánzàng was unlikely to have composed the Chinese Heart Sutra however. It is recorded that he was given the text. A man who he had cared for during an illness taught him the Heart Sutra out of gratitude (179). It subsequently became a favourite to chant in troubled times, such as crossing the Gobi desert.

Xuánzàng included all his translations of the Prajñāpāramitā texts into one huge volume, treating the various texts as chapters. The only translation of his not included is the Heart Sutra. Also the vocabulary of the Heart Sutra (T 8.251) closely matches Kumārajīva's translation of the Large Perfection of Wisdom text in most cases. Given that Xuánzàng led the effort to translate all of the extant Prajñāpāramitā texts, and developed a whole new approach to translating Sanskrit, why would he not use his own terminology?

A couple of terms used in the Heart Sutra are distinctive to Xuánzàng. Kumārajīva transliterates the name Śāriputra as 舍利弗 Shèlìfú. Here 弗 fú transliterates the first syllable of putra. Chinese transliterations frequently leave off the final syllable. Xuánzàng, on the other hand prefers 舍利子Shèlìzi, replacing 弗 with the Chinese word for 'son' 子. 

Kumārajīva translates Avalokiteśvara as 觀世音 Guānshìyīn (whence Guānyīn also spelt Kwan yin), whereas Xuánzàng prefers 觀自在 Guānzìzài. As I have noted before, this change in transliteration reflects a change in the Sanskrit name from Avalokita-svara to Avalokita-īśvara (with sandhi resolving a-ī to e and giving Avalokiteśvara). This change is discussed by Alexander Studholme and involves Avalokitasvara absorbing some of the characteristics of Śiva who is converted to Buddhism in the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra and in the process absorbing the epithet īśvara 'lord', which replaces svara 'sound'. Nattier notes that Xuánzàng's own students tended to retain the more popular form of the name, Guānshìyīn, even when they adopted his new readings of other terms including the name Shèlìzi (216, n.84).

These usages are innovations introduced into Chinese Buddhist texts by Xuánzàng. And thus we know that at the very least Xuánzàng, or someone familiar with this work, must have edited T 8.251, and have done so after Xuánzàng learned Sanskrit in India and devised these new transliterations of Indic names and terms. 

Whoever did translate the text into Sanskrit, they were soon vindicated by the adoption of the Heart Sutra into the pantheon of Prajñāpāramitā texts.  In China commentaries were produced from the 7th century onwards. In India a number of commentaries (now only preserved in Tibetan) were written from the 8th to the 11th centuries (see Donald Lopez 1988, 1996). All of the Chinese commentaries are based on the Chinese version attributed to Xuánzàng (i.e. T 8.251), and all the Indian commentaries are of the long text. The split in the dates of the commentaries of East and South Asia, as well as the text they chose to comment on are supporting evidence for Nattier's Chinese Origins thesis.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward (1948) ‘Text, Sources, and Bibliography of the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya.’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 80(1-2): 33-51.

Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167.

Conze, Edward. (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. George Allen & Unwin.

Kimura Takayasu (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. Online: http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010].

Lopez, Donald S. (1988) The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1996) Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University press.

Nattier, Jan. (1992) The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text? Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. Vol. 15 (2), p.153-223. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

Studholme, Alexander. (2002) The origins of oṃ manipadme hūṃ : a study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Albany: State university of New York Press.

Heart Sutra Mantra Epithets

Karaṇḍamudrā dhāraṇī

My last essay mined the footnotes of Jan Nattier's excellent article 1992 on the provenance of the Heart Sutra. Her article is a remarkable piece of scholarship and repays close study. The footnotes are no less interesting and in this essay I want to expand on a single long footnote: 54a (211-213). The 'a' is added because this information was included just as the article was going to press and the note, amounting to two full pages, had to be squeezed in, sans any Chinese characters (which in any case were hand written on a separate page at the end of the article).

The subject of this note is the epithets of the mantra. The section we're interested in reads:

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāmantro mahāvidyāmantro ‘nuttaramantro ‘samasama-mantraḥ

Therefore, it should be known that the perfection of wisdom is a great mantra, a mantra of great insight, an unexcelled mantra, an unequalled mantra

For Conze these are epithets of the Buddha applied to a mantra as a way of conveying the magical power of the mantra: "The prañāpāramitā... is here envisaged as a spell" (1973: 101-104). The epithets in question are those from the familiar itipi so gathā that Triratna Buddhist Community members will know as the Buddha Vandana. In Pāli:

iti pi so bhagavā arahaṃ sammāsambuddho vijjācarana sampanno sugato lokavidū anuttaro purisadammasārathi satthā devamanussānaṃ buddho bhagavā ti

As we can see by simple comparison Conze is stretching things somewhat with this comparison. Of the Heart Sutra terms only anuttara 'unexcelled' has an actual parallel and it is a rather common superlative applied to any and all Buddhist ideals.

Nattier cites two letters sent to her by Nobuyoshi Yamabe. Yamabe San completed a PhD at Yale in 1999 and is the author of several books on Buddhism. Yamabe identified a number passages in Chinese which closely parallel the Heart Sutra epithets. Nattier adds two extra passages to those identified by Yamabe. We'll begin with the passage found in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Aṣṭa). This text is the basis for the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrika Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Pañcaviṃśati) and is therefore of some interest. Also the existence of a clear Sanskrit text allows us some insight into another matter.

The Chinese Heart Sutra (T 8.251) reads:

故知般若波羅蜜多，是大神咒 ，是大明咒，是無上咒，是無等等咒， 

Gùzhī bōrěbōluómìduō, shì dàshén zhòu, shì dàmíng zhòu, shì wúshàng zhòu, shì wúděngděng zhòu, 

Therefore know the perfection of wisdom, the great magical mantra, it is the great knowledge mantra, unsurpassed mantra, an unequalled mantra,

般若波羅蜜多 bōrěbōluómìduō is a transliteration of prajñāpāramitā. A short digression here. The Middle Chinese pronunciation of 般若波羅蜜多, reconstructed from rhymes, but lacking information on tones, would have been ban ya ba ra mil da. As we will see shortly the Aṣṭa is written in Classical Sanskrit. However the transliteration banya suggests a spelling more like Pāli paññā than Sanskrit prajñā. Baum and Glass's interim Gāndhārī Dictionary record several spellings of prajñā from the Gāndhārī Dhammapada: praña, prañaï, prañaya. The transliteration of prajñā is quite standard across genres. I can find only one variant: 鉢若 bōruò, Middle Chinese balya. It seems the initial syllable was not heard or seen as a conjunct /pra/ by early Chinese translators even when we can be reasonably sure the text used it.

神 shén is a term from Daoism that is sometimes used to translate Sanskrit ṛddhi 'supernatural power' or even deva. Generally is means 'supernatural, divine' or 'magical'. It's missing from all of the Sanskrit versions of the text, which opens the possibility that it was added to the Chinese after the Sanskrit text was created.

Yamabe identified a counterpart from the Chinese Aṣṭa, early 5th century CE, translation by Kumārajīva (T 8.227 843b25-27) reads:

般若波羅蜜是大明呪，
般若波羅蜜是無上呪，
般若波羅蜜是無等等呪

Bōrěbōluómì shì dà míngzhòu,
bōrěbōluómì shì wúshàng zhòu,
bōrěbōluómì shì wúděngděng zhòu.

Prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā (明呪),
Prajñāpāramitā is an unsurpassed vidyā (呪),
Prajñāpāramitā is an unequalled vidyā (呪).

As in the last essay, one doesn't need to know Chinese to see that these are the identical characters, except that the anomalous 是大神咒 shì dà shén zhòu is absent. If one knows that Chinese languages, like English, are subject-verb-object languages, one can even guess that 是 means 'is'. Also note that in the Aṣṭa the last syllable of prajñāpāramitā is left off, which is typical. The reason for translating 明呪 míngzhòu and 呪 zhòu as vidyā becomes apparent when we look at the Sanskrit text below. Note also the substitution of 呪 zhòu for 咒 zhòu, on which I will say more below.

The Sanskrit version of this text has been edited by Vaidya (p.36, line 30-p.37 line 7 = Conze 's translation p.108-109). This is one of the best attested texts of Buddhist Sanskrit literature. I have seen and handled the beautiful Cambridge manuscript (Add 1643) dated to 1015 CE, which forms the basis of the critical edition. It's written in Classical Sanskrit with just a few Prakritisms. The edition by Vaidya has been digitised, from which I take the following (placing each sentence on a new line to facilitate reading):

mahāvidyeyaṁ kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
apramāṇeyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
aparimāṇeyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
anuttareyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
asameyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
asamasameyaṁ kauśika [vidyā] yad uta prajñāpāramitā|

O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a great spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an immeasurable spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a measureless spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an unsurpassed spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an unequalled spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a peerless spell.

Kauśika is one of the epithets of the Vedic God Indra, usually called Śakra (Pāli Sakka) in Buddhist texts, who plays an important role in early Buddhism and is one of the main interlocutors of the Aṣṭa. The context here is the Perfection of Wisdom per se. Both apramāṇa and aparimāṇa mean 'not-measured or measureless'. Similarly both asama and asamasama mean 'without equal'. I translate vidyā here as 'spell', as the context shows that the idea is something to be spoken or chanted that has magical powers. There is an irreducible element of magical thinking in these texts that is inherent in their pre-scientific world view. It's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Note that the word in Sanskrit is vidyā throughout, and not mantra or dhāraṇī. Here we see 明呪 míngzhòu translating vidyā. Note that in the Heart Sutra epithets we get the sequence 大明咒，無上咒，無等等咒. In the context of the Heart Sutra the tendency is to see 明 as an extra character: the great 大 knowledge 明 mantra 咒. We know from the Aṣṭa passages that 明呪 means vidyā, so we ought to read 大明咒 as 'great vidyā'. And this means that 咒 is a shorthand reference to vidyā. The character 明 is being dropped from the other epithets, not added to only one of them. 

This passage from the Aṣṭa is a slightly more elaborate version of what we find in the Heart Sutra. Now compare the parallel passage in Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T 8.223).

是般若波羅蜜是大明呪，是無上明呪。
Shì bōrěbōluómì shì dàmíngzhòu, shì wúshàng míngzhòu.
The prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā, an unsurpassed vidyā.

Though Nattier notes that the relevant chapter is missing from earlier editions of the Sanskrit, it is found twice in the more recent Sanskrit edition produced by Takayasu Kimura (vols 2&3). Kimura has edited the earlier Sanskrit text of Dutt and referenced both the Chinese and Tibetan translations to produce a new Sanskrit edition based on the same late Sanskrit manuscripts used by Dutt. So we cannot be entirely sure that Kimura has not, once again, back translated an existing Chinese passage into Sanskrit to fill a perceived void. In any case the two passages are:

mahāvidyaiṣā kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā, anuttaraiṣā kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā. (Vol. 2-3:55)

evam ukte bhagavān śakraṃ devānām indram etad avocat: evam etat kauśikaivam etat, mahāvidyeyaṃ kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā, anuttareyaṃ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā, asamasameyaṃ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā.
(Vol. 2-3:70)

The second of these more closely matches what we find in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra with three epithets: mahāvidyā, anuttara vidyā, and asamasama vidyā. It also alerts us to a further occurrence in Kumārajīva's Pañcaviṃśati (T. 223) at p. 286b28 (unnoticed by Yamabe or Nattier)

般若波羅蜜是大明呪、無上明呪、無等等明呪。
Bōrěbōluómì shì dàmíngzhòu, wúshàng míngzhòu, wúděngděng míngzhòu.
The prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā, an unsurpassed vidyā, an unequalled vidyā.

Again we see from comparing Chinese with Sanskrit, that 明呪 translates vidyā and here it is not abbreviated to 呪 but spelt out each time. If the core part of the Heart Sutra comes from the earlier passage of the Pañcaviṃśati then this passage suggests that the epithets were also borrowed, probably from this passage. Except that it is clear from the context that these epithets are not describing the mantra, but the perfection of wisdom itself. We associate the epithets with the mantra because the word mantra appears in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. The word is used just twice in the Aṣṭa and not at all in the Pañcaviṃśati (suggesting perhaps that the Aṣṭa occurrences are interpolations).

Vidyā has a number of connotations. Clearly both Aṣṭa and Pañcaviṃśati are applying the word to the prajñāpāramitā per se, not to the mantra (as we typically read the Heart Sutra). Vidyā derives from the verbal root √vid 'to know, to discover' (cognate with 'wise, wisdom' etc). Sometimes you'll see vidyā translated as 'science' but the whole context is pre-scientific so this is anachronistic. No body of knowledge before ca. 1700 fits today's definition of science, which is not to say that there was no valid knowledge, only that it could not be considered scientific until the scientific method ha been invented during the European Enlightenment. Vidyā means knowledge in a particular field: knowledge of the Vedas, knowledge of political governance etc. Knowledge cultivated through learning and experience, rather than divinely inspired knowledge or insight. It also have a magical connotation. Knowledge in the sense of vidyā bestows control over the subject studied, when one thoroughly knows a subject one is said to have "mastered" it. Ironically we are stuck using 'wisdom' for prajñā, which means (and is cognate with) knowledge; and 'knowledge' for vidyā, which is cognate with wisdom.

Although vidyā later becomes, at times, almost synonymous with mantra, at the time the Aṣṭa was composed, and probably even the Pañcaviṃśati, Indian Buddhists still probably thought of mantras as the spells mumbled by Brahmins (for money) at ceremonies. The Pāli texts contain a few passages making it clear that the chanting of mantras is un-Buddhist (DN 1 [i.9]; SN 7.8, SN 28.10, Sn 480). By contrast the chanting of parittās, or protective texts, was already established as a popular Buddhist practice in the Milindapañha, which predates the Aṣṭa.

The parittā practice may well be connected to the idea of the saccakiriyā (Skt satyakriyā) or 'truth act'. This practice, attested in for example the Pāli Aṅgulimālā Sutta, insists that plainly and clearly stating a truth can alter reality. Aṅgulimālā, for example, uses a saccakiriya to ease the pain of a women and baby experiencing a difficult childbirth. Many other examples are found in Pāli. Some scholars have attempted to link the practice to similar ideas in Vedic culture. There is even a suggestion that some aspects of the power of truth are Indo-European. Holding a red-hot axe-head is a test of truth in both Vedic and Celtic literature for example. It may be that by chanting a sacred text aloud, sacred texts being true by definition, that one might avoid calamity or avert disaster. As mentioned last week, this was how Xuánzàng used the Heart Sutra.

Nattier cites the example of the word for mantra as an example of a back translation. Her thesis is that the order of textual production was like this:

1. Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati
2. Chinese translation Pañcaviṃśati
3. Chinese Heart Sutra - short text
4. Sanskrit Heart Sutra - short text
5. Sanskrit Heart Sutra - long text
6. Chinese Heart Sutra - long text

We can see that Nattier's theory explains the changes that occur in the word vidyā. In this case the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati (itself based on Aṣṭa) uses the word vidyā. Kumārajīva translated this as 明呪 míngzhòu, the usual translation of vidyā. The Heart Sutra first uses 明咒 míngzhòu then abbreviates to 咒 zhòu; where 咒 zhòu is a homonym for 呪 zhòu meaning dhāraṇī (or mantra). This is then back translated as Sanskrit mantra. The change from 呪 zhòu to 咒 zhòu might have occurred for any number of reasons, not excluding simple error based on similarities of sound and graphic form.

It is interesting to note here that T 250 (attributed to Kumārajīva) has 明呪 míngzhòu in each of the epithets, which conforms to the general pattern of Kumārajīva's translations noted above. Nattier's conclusion regarding T 250 is "[it] was based not directly on his version of the Large Sūtra, but on citations from the sūtra contained in the Ta chih-tu lun*" (187).

* i.e. T 25.1509 大智度論 Dàzhìdù lùn (Mahāprajñāpāramitāśastra) Attributed to Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumārajīva.

Dàzhìdù lùn itself shows signs of partly Chinese authorship: "Some of the most notable evidence provided by Chou is that the Dazhidu lun’s commentary on the Mahaprajñaparamita Sutra follows Chinese word order rather than Indian..." (McBride 332-333)

At the time the Heart was composed in China we might expect the key term to be dhāraṇī, since the mid seventh century date proposed by Nattier slightly predates the arrival of Tantra in China, while dhāraṇī texts, such as the Karaṇḍamudra Dhāraṇī depicted above, were and to some extent still are, a central aspect of Chinese Buddhism. The first Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra was produced in India, probably in the late seventh or early eighth century at a time when Tantra was in full swing. These dates coincide for example with Stephen Hodges' proposed dates for the composition of the Sarvatathagata-tattvasaṃgraha. In such an environment mantra might have be the natural translation of 咒. Hence find a mantra where we expect not to and, according to my own definitions, where we might expect to find a dhāraṇī.

This is further evidence that the Heart Sutra is synthetic, which is to say it was constructed in China from a variety of sources, probably by a devotee of Avalokiteśvara in the 7th century. Now on the basis of a comparison with the Sanskrit sources, there is an argument for revising this portion of the Sanskrit text:

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāmantro mahāvidyāmantro ‘nuttaramantro ‘samasama-mantraḥ,

becomes

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāvidyā anuttaravidyā asamasamavidyā.

It should be understood that the perfection of wisdom is great knowledge, supreme knowledge, peerless knowledge.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

• Conze, Edward (1973). The Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines and its Verse Summary. San Francisco: City Lights.

• Takayasu Kimura (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. Online: http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010]. 

• McBride, Richard D, II. (2004) 'Is there really "Esoteric" Buddhism?'  Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 27(2): 329-356.

• Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra : a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

• Vaidya, P. L. (1960) Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning. Online: http://www.dsbcproject.org/node/8242

Heart Sutra Mantra

My calligraphy of Heart Sutra
Siddhaṃ script

The Heart Sutra is a synthetic text composed in China from three main elements:

1. Extracts from Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T 8.223; ca. 5th century).
2. Elements drawn from the devotional cult of Avalokiteśvara (觀自在 Guānzìzài). 
3. The cult of dhāraṇī chanting, and a mantra probably drawn from existing Chinese texts. 

The first element is quite well covered in the literature, especially as Jan Nattier (1992) focusses on this part of the text in her reconstruction of its provenance. My next essay will address a lesser known aspect of this issue which is buried in Nattier's footnotes. The second element deserves a little more attention, but is covered briefly in Nattier (174-5). This essay will largely focus on the third element. 

In her long essay on the origins of the Heart Sutra, Jan Nattier notes (footnote 52 & 53) that two other scholars have found mantras similar to the Heart Sutra mantra in other places in the Chinese Tripiṭaka. One of these references is particularly significant as it seems to pre-date the composition of the Heart Sutra itself. This essay will present the Chinese source texts for these mantras. Before dealing with these mantras, we need to pay some attention to the dhāraṇī cult itself, and try to establish some terminological boundaries. 

The cult of dhāraṇī chanting is sometimes placed in the context of Tantric Buddhism, but I think this is a mistake. It is true that mantras are a feature of Tantric Buddhism. However, as Ryūichi Abé. has shown, Tantric Buddhism requires certain elements to be present in order to be Tantric. In The Weaving of Mantra he emphasises the abhiṣeka or initiation in particular because the abhiṣeka is the ür-ritual which underpins all of Tantric Buddhist practice. In Japan, prior to the arrival of Kūkai and Saichō with genuine Tantric Buddhism, some Tantric elements were present: images, dhāraṇī and mantra, and even texts such as the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra. However, in the absence of the Tantric paradigm and organising principles, these elements did not add up to Tantric Buddhism.

Abé is trying to revise the history of Japanese Buddhism, but he has enunciated an important hermeneutic for discussing the presence or absence of a mode of Buddhist thought. For example: if a person bows before a Buddha statue, burns incense, and chants oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ, but has no knowledge of why Buddhists do such things, does this make them a Buddhist? These are simply decontextualised actions with no intentional underpinning. They are Buddhist in externals only. A similar argument is simmering away with respect to the Jon Kabat Zinn inspired mindfulness treatments. Does the teaching of mindfulness amount to teaching Buddhism, or does it lack key elements, such as "going for refuge", that render the teaching non-Buddhist? Some Buddhists who teach mindfulness argue that they are teaching Buddhism when they teaching mindfulness. Others argue that the lack of context for the practice, particularly the absence of Buddhist metaphysics, means this is a beneficial secular practice that does not conduce to liberation.

In any case, the point is that although dhāraṇīs were incorporated into Tantric Buddhism, there is nothing in the dhāraṇī sūtras or the chapters inserted into larger texts such as the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka or Survabhāṣotama, to indicate a Tantric context. The first hints of Tantra associated with a mantra seem to be found in the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra according to Alexander Studholm's study of that text, which includes an account of something like an initiation, though it still lacks the central features of the abhiṣeka ritual. The point of chanting dhāraṇīs seems largely to have been protection from malign forces or entities. And thus they have much more in common with the Theravāda practice of parittā chanting than with Tantric practice (at least with respect to the Tantric Buddhism practised by Kūkai). It's not until they are incorporated into rituals centred on the abhiṣeka, that they become Tantric. This criteria is common to other elements that were incorporated, not least the elements from Vedic ritual. No one, to my knowledge, argues that Vedic fire rituals were "proto-Tantric". 

Nattier points to the opinion of Fukui Fumimasa (1981. Source text is in Japanese) that the name of the Heart Sutra in Chinese is 心經 Xīnjīng, literally "heart sūtra", but that 心 xīn (heart) here connotes dhāraṇī rather than 'pith' and that the text might well be a chanting text, i.e. a dhāraṇī text. We know from Xuánzàng's record of his journey to India that he used the text as a protective measure against unseen malevolent spirits. The title of the short text in Sanskrit, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, does not include the word sūtra, and it seems likely that the original, short text was not considered as a sūtra. That transition probably happened in India when the traditional elements of a sūtra, such as the beginning evaṃ maya śrutaṃ... and the appreciation at the end were added. Another reading of 心 is "gist" with the idea that rather than Heart Sutra, the meaning is Gist Text, with the text representing the gist of Prajñāpāramitā.

The dhāraṇīs of the pre-tantric Mahāyāna texts are often radically different in form from the mantras of later Tantric Buddhism. Of course there is a huge amount of variation and cast-iron definitions are difficult to construct.


Defining Mantra and Dhāraṇī

Tantric mantras have a number of structural features in common: a beginning (usually oṃ); a name or function; and a final seed-syllable. 

Typically Tantric mantras begin with oṃ (not auṃ) which served to mark what follows as a mantra. However in the earliest fully-fledged Tantra, the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, the mantras all begin namas samanta-buddhānāṃ or namas samanta-vajrānāṃ. The ending -ānām indicated the genitive plural case (of the Buddhas). However, in Prakrits (including Pāli) the dative case (to or for the Buddhas) endings began to be replaced by the genitive case endings. Here ending is the usual genitive, but the sense is dative and the words mean "homage to all Buddhas/vajras".

What follows oṃ can be the name of a deity (oṃ amideva hrīḥ, oṃ vajrapāṇi hūṃ, oṃ vagiśvara muṃ) or relate to a function in the ritual, especially purification with the śūnyatā mantra or the Vajrasattva mantra. Names of deities are sometimes in the dative case, or in a kind of faux dative created by the addition of -ye to the end of the word: oṃ muni muni mahāmuni śākyamuniye svāhā. The correct dative of śākyamuni is śākyamunaye (final i is replaced by aye)

Tantric mantras typically end with a seed-syllable (bījākṣara) related to the deity or with svāhā. Sometimes the seed-syllable is specific to the deity, or to the "family" they belong to. Mantras of the vajra family typically end in hūṃ, while the padma family often end in hrīḥ. At other times it seems unconnected to other considerations. For example  oṃ maṇīpadme hūṃ is a padma family mantra. Some mantras incorporate dhāraṇī style features into them which would include the Heart Sūtra mantra and the Tārā mantra (oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā). The variety of mantras is partly due to their being a number of systems existing in parallel. 

Dhāraṇī by contrast seldom begin with oṃ and almost never end in a seed-syllable. They almost always end with svāhā. The word svāhā is the Vedic equivalent to the Hebrew amen. It is used in the Yajurveda to solemnise offerings: one makes an offering of rice mixed with ghee to the fire while chanting, for example "agnaye svāhā" or 'For Agni, amen' (Taittirīra Saṃhitā 7.1.14.1). The content of the dhāraṇī is a string of words or sounds which seldom reference names of deities, and frequently include nonsense words such as hilli, huru often with repetition and ringing the changes of the first syllable: hilli hilli milli milli. There is a tendency to use words ending in -e. Various theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, but my opinion is that the -e ending is a Prakrit masculine nominative singular. This probably also applies to the well known oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ mantra. A feature of dhāraṇī, then, is the use of Prakrit or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. 

Typical dhāraṇīs from the Saddharmapuṇḍarikā Sūtra:

anye manye mane mamane citte carite same samitā viśānte mukte muktatame same aviṣame samasame jaye kṣaye akṣaye akṣiṇe śānte samite dhāraṇi ālokabhāṣe pratyavekṣaṇi nidhiru abhyantaraniviṣṭe abhyantarapāriśuddhimutkule araḍe paraḍe sukāṅkṣi asamasame buddhavilokite dharmaparīkṣite saṁghanirghoṣaṇi nirghoṇi bhayābhayaviśodhani mantre mantrākṣayate rute rutakauśalye akṣaye akṣayavanatāye vakkule valoḍra amanyanatāye svāhā.

iti me iti me iti me iti me iti me; nime nime nime nime nime; ruhe ruhe ruhe ruhe ruhe| stuhe stuhe stuhe stuhe stuhe svāhā.

There is a world of difference between these two dhāraṇī and most Tantric mantras.


The Heart Sutra Mantra

The Heart Sutra mantra is clearly referred to as a mantra by the text. But it has more features in common with dhāraṇī in form and content. It's lacks the opening oṃ for example, though some traditions have simply added one. The repetition and play of sounds in gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate is typical of dhāraṇī. Why then does the text refer to this as a mantra? I will look more closely at this issue in the next essay.

Meanwhile let us compare the Heart Sutra mantra with the three mantra/dhāraṇī listed in Nattier's footnotes as being similar. Of these T 12.387  大方等無想經  Dàfāngděng wúxiǎng jīng (Mahāmegha Sūtra), identified by Fukui (1981), is important because it was translated in the early fifth century, two centuries before the proposed date for the composition of the Heart Sutra.

Mantras and dhāraṇīs are typically not translated by the Chinese, but the sounds are represented using characters for their pronunciation.  Unfortunately it can be very difficult to reconstruct the Sanskrit from a Chinese transliteration. For example the character 卑 bēi has been used to transliterate the Sanskrit syllables pra, pre, pe, pi, vi, and vai. Note that I'm using Pinyin Romanisation in these posts, which often does not reflect pronunciation at the time the texts were composed. The language of the day is referred to as Middle-Chinese (MC). Where relevant and possible I will indicate the MC pronunciation 

The dhāraṇī in question is:

竭帝　波利竭帝　僧竭帝　波羅僧竭帝波羅卑羅延坻　
三波羅卑羅延坻　婆羅 婆羅　波沙羅　波娑羅　摩文闍　摩文闍　
遮羅帝　遮羅坻 波遮羅坻 波遮羅坻　三波羅遮羅坻
比提 嘻利 嘻梨　薩隷醯　薩隷醯　富嚧 富嚧 莎呵

jiédì bōlìjiédì sēngjiédì bōluósēngjiédì bōluóbēiluóyánchí
sānbōluóbēiluóyánchí póluó póluó bōshāluó bōsuōluó mówéndū mówéndū
zhēluódì zhēluóchí bōzhēluóchí bōzhēluóchí sānbōluózhēluóchí
bǐtí xīlì xīlí sàlìxī sàlìxī fùlú fùlú shā hē

Fortunately for us some markers are clear at the beginning.  The Mantra in the Heart Sutra in Chinese is:

揭帝　揭帝　般羅揭帝　般羅僧揭帝　菩提 僧 莎訶
jiēdì jiēdì bānluójiēdì bānluósēngjiēdì pútí sēng shāhē

One does not need to understand the characters to see that many of them graphically match up between the two mantras above, especially at the beginning. The opening characters of both are very similar. Both 竭帝 jiédì and  揭帝  jiēdì are transliterations of Sanskrit gate (the difference in pronunciation is a matter of tone). MC pronunciation in both cases was gal (with a hard g sound).

The first words in the Mahāmegha Sutra mantra are: jiédì bōlìjiédì sēngjiédì bōluósēngjiédì which most likely represent Sanskrit: gate parigate saṃgate paragate. The Mahāmegha mantra ends 莎呵 shāhē; the Heart Sutra has 莎訶 shāhē; both represent svāhā. Note the graphic similarity of 呵 and 訶 which have the same pronunciation, he, in MC.

A little note here that the mantra in Xuánzàng's version of the Heart Sutra (T 8.251) has an extra out-of-place character, 僧 sēng, between bodhi (菩提 pútí) and svāhā (莎訶 shāhē). Even though this is probably the oldest version of the text, it is not without problems! 

A similar dhāraṇi is also found in T. 21.1353 東方最勝燈王陀羅尼經 Dōngfāng zuìshèng dēngwáng tuóluóní jīng (First-radiance Knowledge King Sūtra = Sanskrit Agrapradīpadhārāṇīvidyarāja-sūtra). As in T 12.387 the dhāraṇī shares opening elements with the Heart Sutra mantra using the same transliterating characters.

阿  竭帝　波羅竭帝 波羅僧竭帝　    
a    jiédì    bōluójiédì  bōluósēngjiédì   

a gate paragate parasaṃgate

Here the character 阿 is often used for the Sanskrit short 'a' vowel and thus may reference the idea of the perfection of wisdom  in one letter, or more precisely the fact that all dharmas are empty of self existence (sarvadharmāḥ svabhāvaśūnyatāḥ) because they are unarisen (anutpanna). See also The Essence of All Mantras; and Sound, Word, Reality.

The gate gate mantra itself, with the same transliteration, is found in T 18.901 陀羅尼集經 Tuóluóní jí jīng (Dhāraṇī Collection Sūtra). This was translated ca. 653 CE which is around the same time that Nattier proposes for the composition of the Heart Sutra. Note also that it is a collection of dhāraṇī (陀羅尼 Tuóluóní) rather than mantra. The presence of a dhāraṇī in a collection is not conclusive evidence that it existed detached from the Heart Sutra before its composition, but it at least shows that dhāraṇīs can be detachable. It's quite possible that similar examples may turn up with further examination. 

It seems that, not only is the core of the Heart Sutra an extract, but the "mantra" might also be an extract from a dhāraṇī. It might be thought that the fact that the Heart Sutra is a mash-up of bits from other texts invalidates the text. However the composition method closely resembles many Pāli texts which are clearly constructed from pre-existing elements that can be found scattered around the Canon. Far from being unusual, the Heart Sutra is following standard Buddhist procedure. Even the subsequent addition of a proper sūtra introduction is in keeping with general Buddhist practice. 

In my discussion of cladistic methods applied to studying manuscripts, I argued that it would help to iron out biases. Another bias that Buddhist Studies faces is the prejudice in favour of texts with Indian "originals". In my essay Which Mahāyāna Texts? I outlined an observation made in another publication by Jan Nattier about which Mahāyāna texts are prominent in the West. The existence of a Sanskrit manuscript is one of the influential factors likely to bring a Mahāyāna text to prominence. The fact is that the Heart Sutra is broadly accepted as a genuine masterpiece of Buddhist thought. Commentaries from across the spectrum of Buddhist schools adopt the Heart Sutra as an epitome of their thought. Is a text any less authentic because it was not composed in India? It is true that Buddhists believed that the text was of Indian origin and that was an element in popularising it. Now that we know differently will Buddhists have to abandon this text? I think there is no question of abandoning the text, but the necessary adjustments might be quite difficult. One sign of this is the rejection of the Chinese origin thesis by Red Pine in the introduction to his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra. Though his reasoning is spurious, it is none-the-less interesting to see how difficult Buddhists find it to absorb information like this.

One of the reasons for writing about Nattier's work is that it has yet to penetrate to the heart of popular imagination and the discussion about textual origins is in its infancy. Such writing raises questions for Buddhists. If we take scholarship seriously, then we are forced to examine our own beliefs and sometimes to admit that our beliefs are based on false assumptions such as authenticity being related to India. 

~~oOo~~

A further note 26 sept 2013.

The Tibetan canonical versions of the Heart Sutra both include tadyathā in the mantra itself. I've looked at this generally in Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra - the inclusion of tadyathā 'like this' in the mantra is like actors speaking stage directions out loud. One of the versions also interpolates oṃ into the mantra as do some of the Nepalese manuscripts. 

 

Bibliography

I've already written about the mantra of this text a couple of times:

• Words in Mantras that end in -e (see also Some Additional Notes).

• Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra. 

• Heart Sūtra Mantra. (on my mantra website). 

All Chinese texts from CBETA.

• Abé, Ryūichi (1999). The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Fukui Fumimasa (1981) Hannya shingyô no rekishiteki kenkyû. [= Historical studies of the Buddhist scripture Prajñaparamita-hrdaya or Heart Sutra.] Tōkyō: Shunjūsha. 

• Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

• Studholme, Alexander (2002). The origins of oṃ manipadme hūṃ : a study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Albany: State university of New York Press.