On the Evolution of the Heart Sutra

The evolution of the Heart Sutra has been largely obscured by the historically dominant narratives and by the reluctance of Buddhist Studies to go beyond description and seek explanations. Watanabe Shōgo (1990) and Jan Nattier (1992) showed that the historical narratives about the Heart Sutra are pious fictions and pointed to another, rather unexpected history: the Heart Sutra was composed in China in the mid-seventh century. Their insights were subsequently confirmed by Huifeng (2014), and then I started publishing on this topic in 2015, both confirming the existing observations and adding a few of my own. While the field of Buddhist Studies (and the Buddhist world) has yet to catch up, it is now certain that the Chinese origins theory is correct.

Part of my contribution has been to step outside the usual descriptive mode of Buddhist Studies and propose explanations for the origins and evolution of the Heart Sutra. To date, my main focus has been on origins since this seemed to be the most urgent problem. More recently, I have begun to look at how the text evolved once it appeared ca 656 CE. In particular, I published an article on the varieties and relationships between the extended versions (Attwood 2021a).

In this essay, I will present a first attempt at an overview of the origins and the evolution of the Heart Sutra. I will explain why the variant texts on the Heart Sutra were produced and why they took the form that they did. In particular, I will argue that all of the major variants were created to bolster the perceived authenticity of the Heart Sutra. That the Heart Sutra appeared to lack authenticity in some eyes is hardly surprising given what we now know about its origins.

The centre of this argument is a simplified version of the stemma (or genealogy) of the Heart Sutra that I published in 2021. This diagram shows the relationships between the main inputs to the Heart Sutra and the five main versions that subsequently appeared.

Here a solid arrow represents the lines of descent, and the dotted arrow reflects the fact that Chinese extended versions repeat the text of Xīn jīng (T 251) where they overlap. Vertical spacing reflects relative chronology.

There are two processes to consider: an initial convergence in the Xīn jīng and a subsequent divergence into numerous versions of the text.

As much as the Xīn jīng reflects a convergence of texts, it also reflects a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhism. This may not be obvious since writing about Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism tends to happen in different academic contexts that don’t communicate very well. This is sometimes referred to as “the silo mentality”. Even when there is some crossover, such as when scholars of Pāli literature study Chinese translations of Āgama texts, they see the Chinese translations as reflecting Indian culture rather than Chinese culture. Little or no attempt is made to read translated Āgama texts as Chinese texts.

This may be understandable in the case of Āgama texts but it doesn't work in the case of the Heart Sutra. The text was created in a Chinese Buddhist milieu and this is important for understanding it. However, the principal ideas in the text—Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva, Prajñāpāramitā, and dhāraṇī—all come from, and must understood in terms of, Indian Buddhism as well. Understanding the Heart Sutra requires us to have a foot in both camps, which may explain why the text has been so neglected and many of the articles that appear in print are low quality.

Convergence

The late Stefano Zacchetti (2005: 32) says that Kumārajīva's translation of Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Pañc) occurred during the period 29 May 403–13 Jan 404 CE. The Móhē bānrě bōluómì jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223; Móhē) was completed with the help of several expert assistants and was a significant improvement on previous translations. In parallel Kumārajīva and his team translated the *Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa an extensive commentary attributed to Nāgārjuna. The Dàzhìdù lùn «大智度論» was completed on 1 Feb 406 CE.

During the process of translating the commentary, it became clear that Móhē required some revisions. Zacchetti says that these were complete by 18 May 404, but also says in a footnote (128) that one of Kumārajīva's principal assistants, Sengrui (僧睿; 371–438 CE), in his preface to the sutra, mentions revisions continuing to be made throughout the process of producing the Dàzhìdù lùn. The commentary and its text have guided the Chinese understanding of Prajñāpāramitā from that time onwards.

While we still don't know for sure who composed the Xīn jīng, it seems increasingly likely to have been Xuanzang. His name is associated with the earliest mention of the text, he is named in the oldest artefacts, and the earliest commentaries were by some of his close associates. My thorough exploration of this evidence has been submitted for peer review and with luck will be published in 2024. In this essay, after long and detailed consideration of the evidence, I assume that Xuanzang was the author. This is a provisional conclusion that may be subject to revision if some plausible refutation appears (implausible refutations already exist, but can be safely ignored).

Sometime between 654 CE and 26 December 656 CE, Xuanzang composed the Bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 251; Xīn). The earlier date reflects when the dhāraṇī was translated in the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901) by Atikūṭa. Since dhāraṇī transcription in China was never standardised, where we see an identical transcription in two different texts it is highly likely that one copied from the other. Given the nature of Xīn, which is mainly copied passages, I provisionally assume that Xuanzang copied the dhāraṇī from the Tuóluóní jí jīng. This means that Xīn could not have existed before this date. Note that Watanabe Shōgo (1990) definitively refuted the idea of Heart Sutra texts existing prior to the composition of the Xīn.

The later date is when the text is first mentioned in Buddhist literature, i.e. in the Biography of Xuanzang, Dà Táng dà Cí’ēnsì sānzàng fǎshī chuán xù «大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳序» (T 2053), composed by Yàncóng 彥悰 in 688 CE. The best translation of the Biography is Li (1995), but see also remarks on its historicity in Kotyk (2019).

There is no evidence of the Heart Sutra, of any kind, from any place, before 654 CE. From that date onwards, evidence in the form of inscriptions, manuscripts, catalogue entries, and commentaries proliferated and began to spread to neighbouring polities in Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. There is no evidence of any kind from India and it now seems extremely unlikely the Heart Sutra was ever known there. The so-called Indo-Tibetan commentaries are better thought of as Tibetan commentaries attributed to Indian authors (a legitimising strategy).

Xin consists of some copied passages from Móhē, to which Xuanzang added some touches of his own (notably some novel "spellings" and the figure of Guanyin) and the dhāraṇī. Xīn became the standard Heart Sutra from that time onwards in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It is Xīn that people refer to when they say "The Heart Sutra is the most popular Mahāyāna text".

This part of the stemma also emphasises that passages from Pañc found in Hṛd did not arrive there directly. Contra the historically dominant narrative, the copied passages arrived via a Chinese intermediary, i.e. Móhē. That is, the passages copied from Pañc were not copied directly in Sanskrit from a Sanskrit source. Rather they were selected from Móhē, and only later were they (inexpertly) translated back into Sanskrit.

As Jan Nattier (1992: 170) pointed out, Hṛd bears all the hallmarks of a "back-translation". These include “unmatched but synonymous equivalents” for some Sanskrit terms and “incorrect word order, grammatical errors that can be traced to the structure of the intermediary language, and incorrect readings (due to visual confusion of certain letters or characters in the intermediary language)”.

Thus the Heart Sutra can be explained as the the result of a series of convergent processes and reflects also a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhist cultures. However, the text soon began to diverge into numerous versions and it is to these that that we now turn.

Divergence

From the Xīn we see three main lines of development that, as yet, cannot be precisely dated.

1. The creation of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng (T 250) and its attribution to Kumārajīva
2. The creation of the Sanskrit text titled Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.
3. The creation of two extended texts.

Note that the dotted line from Xīn to the Chinese extended sutras (T 253, 254, 257) reflects the retention of the Chinese text of Xīn where they overlap. The phrase "two extended texts" refers to (1) the Chinese text of T 252, and (2) the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatikā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya nāma dhāraṇī “Dhāraṇī named The Heart of the Perfection of Insight in Twenty-five [Lines]”. The Pañcaviṃśatikā was subsequently translated into Chinese (T 253, 254, 257).

I will take each of these versions in turn and try to show that each adds something that was perceived to be missing from the Heart Sutra. I don’t argue that there was any coordination between the three processes and, indeed, they seem to have occurred independently and over quite a long timeframe. However, together with the hagiographic stories about Xuanzang, they were embraced into the established myth of the Heart Sutra as an Indian Buddhist text.

1. Dàmíngzhòu jīng

The Heart Sutra was associated with Xuanzang from the outset and this might have been enough to ensure its place as an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra. The four early Chinese commentaries, however, still exhibit some anxiety on this score. The commentaries are:

• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng yōuzàn «般若波羅蜜多心經幽贊» “Profound Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā”, by Kuījī 窺基 (T 1710)
• Fú shuō bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng zàn «佛說般若波羅蜜多心經贊» “Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Woncheuk 圓測 (T 1711)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng shū «般若波羅蜜多心經疏» “Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Jìngmài 靖邁 (X 522)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng lüèshū «般若波羅蜜多心經略疏» “Brief Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Fǎzàng 法藏 (T 1712).

Fǎzàng's commentary is traditionally dated to ca. 702 CE and he died in 712 CE. The other four are not dated, but Kuījī and Woncheuk died in 682 and 696 CE respectively. Jìngmài’s precise dates are unknown but he was roughly contemporary with Xuanzang. Thus they all date from the late seventh or early eighth centuries, and span perhaps twenty years (682–702).

Each commentator notes that the Heart Sutra lacks the expected introduction and conclusion of an authentic sutra. They also note that it consists of extractions from Prajñāpāramitā, which at that point in history seems to have been a reference to Móhē. All four men went ahead and composed their commentaries, but they left some ambiguity. Each of the subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra seems to address this ambiguity.

One approach to securing the authenticity of the text was to create the impression that previous translations existed, notably a translation attributed to the greatest of all the Chinese translators, Kumārajīva, i.e. Móhē bānrě bōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經» (T 250; hereafter Dàmíngzhòu jīng). Note the title does not include the word xīn 心 "heart". Many of Kumārajiva's translations from the early fifth century are still in use today.

The idea of a Kumārajīva translation and the title it was given (Dàmíngzhòu jīng) were used to make links to another story about an even earlier translation, titled Móhē bānrě bōluómì shénzhòu 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪. This created the myth of the "lost translation" by Zhī Qiān 支謙 (fl. 3rd century).

Watanabe (1990) thoroughly debunked this story, pointing out that it relies on a two-step process: (1) the false attribution of the shénzhòu text to Zhi Qian—in the catalogue Lìdài sānbǎo jì «歷代三寶紀» (T 2034), compiled by Fèi Chángfáng 費長房 in 598 CE—and (2) the conflation of this shénzhòu text with Dàmíngzhòu jīng. The debunking of this story (some 34 years ago) has not stopped commentators from continuing to use the idea of the "lost translations" to push back the date of translation and assert the validity of the claim that the text is Indian in origin. To be clear, neither Kumārajīva nor Zhi Qian translated the Heart Sutra. This is a false trail, deliberately laid.

In fact, the first evidence of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng, of any kind, is a mention in the Dàtáng nèidiǎn lù «大唐內典錄» "Catalogue of the Inner Canon of the Great Tang" (T 2149), published in 730 CE. As far as I can tell there are no physical texts of Dàmíngzhòu jīng before the eleventh century. The idea that a translation by Kumārajīva could be lost and then rediscovered some three hundred years after his death is extremely far-fetched and scholars have long doubted this attribution, starting with Matsumoto (1932).

That a text produced after Xīn might be retrospectively attributed to Kumārajīva to bolster its perceived authenticity is entirely plausible. It is not merely theoretical to say that Dàmíngzhòu jīng might have been used this way since this is exactly the use that has been made of it in practice. Indeed, we may say that legitimising Xīn is more or less the only use that has been made of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng. In stark contrast to Xīn, there are no commentaries on Dàmíngzhòu jīng, for example, and no prominent inscriptions or famous manuscripts. To my knowledge, Dàmíngzhòu jīng was never transmitted outside of China or translated into another language.

Dàmíngzhòu jīng, then, seems to have been created with the intention of making Xīn appear to be more authentic by pushing back the date of its composition.

2. Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.

In the historically dominant view, Xīn, the main text used in China, is a translation of this authentic Sanskrit version of the text. What some scholars still call "the Sanskrit original" proves that the Heart Sutra is an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra.

This view is spoiled by a detailed analysis of the text which shows that Hṛd definitely could not have borrowed its copied passages directly from Pañc. Rather the passages were clearly copied into Xīn from Móhē and then translated back into Sanskrit, leaving numerous telltales of the "back-translation" process. This was the gist of Nattier (1992) but has been confirmed numerous times by Huifeng (2014) and yours truly (see especially Attwood 2021b). The Sanskrit text is a translation of the Chinese. As such, it is not a stretch to refer to it as a "Chinese forgery".

It seems that the Sanskrit text was produced at around the same time as Dàmíngzhòu jīng was being created, i.e. in the late seventh or early eighth century. To date, we have no information on who did the translation or when. There is an ambiguous reference to "a Sanskrit text" (fàn běn 梵本) in Woncheuk's commentary (T 1711), though he does not name Hṛd and might have been referring to Pañc, since he says:

The reason there is no introduction or conclusion is that [this text] selects the essential outlines from all the Prajñā texts. It has only the main chapter, without an introduction and conclusion, just as the Guānyīn jīng is not composed of three sections (Adapted from Hyun Choo 2006: 138: emphasis added).

The Guānyīn jīng «觀音經» being originally the twenty-fifth chapter of the Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng «妙法蓮華經» (T 262; Skt. Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra), where it is titled Guānshìyīn púsà pǔmén pǐn 觀世音菩薩普門品 “Chapter of the Universal Gate of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva”.

I assume that a manuscript of Hṛd was forged for this purpose, and passed off as an Indian “original” since later copies of a Sanskrit text do exist (such as the famous Hōryūji manuscript). A Sanskrit manuscript is the sine qua non of authenticity for a Buddhist text in China.

Now that it has been revealed to be a back-translation, Hṛd has little philological value. Those existing studies that treat this text as "the Sanskrit original" have to be deprecated. In a forthcoming article in Asian Literature and Translation, I revise Conze's unparsable Sanskrit edition of Hṛd to make it parsable. But even this was perceived as a dead end by one of the reviewers. Study of the Sanskrit text is now quite pointless except as a unique historical artefact from early Tang China.

It is not that rare for a Chinese Buddhist text to turn out to have been composed in Chinese. Examples of this have been well documented, even in antiquity. It is exceedingly rare for a Chinese text to be translated into Sanskrit. A few examples of this have been noted. To my knowledge, the Hṛd is unique for having been successfully passed off as an authentic Indian text.

The single most important sign of the authenticity of a Buddhist text in Tang China was precisely the existence of a Sanskrit manuscript. Once again, Hṛd appears to have been created to fill a perceived gap in the authentication of Xīn.

3. Extended Texts

All of the early commentators on Xīn comment on—and attempt to explain—the absence of the usual introduction and conclusion that we expect in Buddhist sutra (I cited Woncheuk on this above; the others make similar comments). The extended text is an attempt to supply exactly these missing sections and this appears to have happened at least twice.

The first extended text appears to be Pǔbiàn zhì cáng bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «普遍智藏般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 252). This text has an introduction and conclusion that are substantially different from all other extended Heart Sutra texts. The introduction is much longer and has specific details —like the presence of 100,000 bhikṣus and 70,000 bodhisatvas—that are absent in all the other texts. At the same time, the conclusion of Pǔbiàn is much shorter and more perfunctory. It is quite striking that the significant differences here have been almost entirely overlooked by other scholars. For more, though still incomplete, detail see Attwood (2021a).

All the other extended texts are clearly from one source, probably in Sanskrit, though with Tibetan and Chinese translations. The Chinese versions of the extended text (i.e. T 253, 254, 257) appear to be genuine translations from Sanskrit. That said, all the Chinese versions, including Pǔbiàn, retain the text of Xīn and only retranslate the extensions.

Ben Nourse (2010) has noted several variant extended texts in the Dunhuang cache. He suggests that these may be hybrids of standard and extended texts, but an alternative explanation might be that they are additional attempts at creating an extended text. More work needs to be done on the Dunhuang texts.

So for a third time, we see the Heart Sutra being modified to better fit a Chinese preconception about authenticity, in this case, that a real sutra has an introduction and conclusion. Only here, however, do we see two (or possibly more) attempts at the same modification.

Conclusion

I have been engaged in explaining the origins of the Heart Sutra for around twelve years. It already seems like old news to me and I find it frustrating that no one in Buddhist Studies seems willing or able to keep up with my oeuvre. At some point, the textbooks will have to change and I only hope I live long enough to see this. How this affects Buddhists is anyone's guess, but I suspect that they will continue to resist all attempts at a deflationary explanation.

The evolution of the Heart Sutra beyond its origins has been of even less interest to the field (and of no interest to Buddhists). The existence of multiple versions is, of course, well known. However, the dates of these versions have been obscured by presuppositions and this has hampered any attempts to understand how the text evolved. Watanabe (1990) debunked the attributions to Kumārajīva and Zhi Qian, making it clear that Xīn is the earliest version of the text. But his work has largely been ignored (including by me until 2023). The dhāraṇī tells us that Xīn cannot have existed before 654 CE, when Atikūṭa transcribed it in Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901). This is our starting point.

As we have seen, Xīn diverged into four other versions—ie. Dàmíngzhòu jīng, Hṛd, Pǔbiàn, and Pañcaviṃśatikā. I have argued that we can see these versions as the result of three processes:

1. One attempt to push back the date of composition
2. One attempt to create a "Sanskrit original"
3. Two attempts to provide the missing introduction and conclusion.

In other words, the evolution of the Heart Sutra was driven by conscious attempts to make the origins of the Heart Sutra fit preconceived notions of authenticity in China. These attempts largely succeeded and the associated ideas were incorporated into the historically dominant narratives of the Heart Sutra as an ancient Indian sutra text.

What my work shows is that the Heart Sutra was never ancient, Indian, or a sutra. It was created in the mid-seventh century, in China, and is modelled on a chāo jīng 抄經 "digest text" (a Chinese genre of Buddhist text). And this created anxieties related to authenticity that were addressed in a variety of ways.

I hope that it is becoming clear to my readers that the historically dominant narrative, the myth of the Heart Sutra, is largely a fiction, created quite consciously (thought without much coordination) by Chinese Buddhists. If the Heart Sutra had been merely another ancient Indian sutra, it would have been quite prosaic, notable only for its popularity in East Asia. The idea that it was composed in China and deliberately (and successfully) passed off as an ancient Indian sutra is far more interesting (even a little exciting for a textual scholar).

While I am still not an expert in Chinese Buddhist texts, if I am right about this, it makes the Heart Sutra unique amongst Buddhist texts. Moreover, I think I am right because my approach has a great deal more explanatory power than the historically dominant narratives: expanding on existing work, I have explained the origins of the text in detail. I hope this essay shows that my approach can also explain subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra as well.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2021a). "Preliminary Notes on the Extended Heart Sutra in Chinese." Asian Literature and Translation 8(1): 63–85. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18573/alt.53

——. (2021b). “The Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of the Chinese and Sanskrit Texts.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 44: 13–52.

Huifeng. (2014). "Apocryphal Treatment for Conze’s Heart Problems: Non-attainment, Apprehension, and Mental Hanging in the Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 6: 72-105.

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 6: 121-205.

Kotyk, Jeffrey. (2019). ‘Chinese State and Buddhist Historical Sources on Xuanzang: Historicity and the Daci’en si sanzang fashi zhuan 大慈恩寺三藏法師傳’. T’oung Pao 105(5-6): 513–544. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685322-10556P01

Li, Rongxi (1995). A Biography of the Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty. Berkeley, CA.: Numata Centre of Buddhist Translation and Research.

Matsumoto, Tokumyo. (1932). Die Prajñāpāramitā Literatur. Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat zu Bonn.

Nattier, Jan (1992). "The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?" Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15 (2): 153-223.

Nourse, Benjamin. (2010) "The Heart Sutra at Dunhuang." Paper presented at the North American Graduate Students Conference on Buddhist Studies. Toronto, Canada. April 10, 2010.

Watanabe, Shōgo. (1990). “Móhē bānrě bōluómì shénzhòu jīng and Móhē bānrě bōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng, As Seen in the Sutra Catalogues.” Indogaku Bukkyōgaku Kenkyū 39-1: 54–58. [= 渡辺章悟. 1990. 「経録からみた『摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪経』と『摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪経』」印度学仏教学研究 39-1: 54–58.]

Zacchetti, Stefano. (2005) In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1-3 of Dharmarakṣa’s Guang zan jing, Being the Earliest Chinese Translation of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā. (Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, 8). Tokyo: The International Research Institute of Advanced Buddhology, Soka University.

Nattier's Response to Fukui on the Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra

When I first read Nattier's article, "The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?" (1992), ca 2007, I found the case compelling. I could immediately see how the method was applied to the evidence and how this led to certain conclusions, namely that the Heart Sutra could only have been composed in Chinese.

Subsequently Huifeng and I independently published confirmation of Nattier’s research. We both applied the same method to other parts of the text and reached the same conclusion. Nattier’s results from comparing versions of the “core section” apply to the text as a whole. Sixteen years and fourteen published articles later, I'm completely convinced by the evidence we have, that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese, on the model of a chāo jīng 抄經 (digest text). Although I have also stated what kind of evidence would refute my view.

I was, therefore, amazed to learn that the Chinese origins thesis is not only rejected amongst Japanese academics, but that they consider the thesis to have been refuted. The issue is difficult to understand because the principal documents are in Japanese and, as a non-Japanese speaker, I can only get glimpses of the arguments through translations and the occasional article published in English. Still, I have been afforded many such glimpses since 2007 and have begun to see the outlines of their arguments.

A key moment in the modern history of Heart Sutra studies was the 1994 publication of a rebuttal of Nattier (1992) by the theologian Fukui Fumimasa (1934–2017), who was not only a senior academic, but also head priest at a major Buddhist temple. Japanese society being what it is, an older man who has high status as an academic and as a priest enjoys a kind of prestige that we can scarcely imagine in Europe and her colonies. In effect, Fukui cannot be publicly contradicted. In Japanese academia such men are considered untouchable. Contradicting one of the big men would be career suicide for a Japanese academic.

Fukui’s denunciation of Nattier was, therefore, a big deal. And it set the tone for Japanese scholarship that followed. A number of articles by other Japanese theologians began to appear. As I say, non-Japanese speakers only get glimpses into the world of Japanese Heart Sutra studies. I'm piecing this together from fragments and hearsay.

By contrast, Jan Nattier was at the time an early-career academic, a youngish woman, and an American. From what I can tell, this combination of qualities meant that she was not taken very seriously in Japan, which may account for the patronising tone of Fukui's criticism. And yet, Tanahashi (2014: 77) reports Fukui's comment that Nattier (1992) "shook the Japanese academic world". Fukui is reported as saying (in Tanahashi's translation)

"As the Prajñā Heart Sutra is one of the most revered sutras in Japan, it would be a matter of grave concern if this were proved to be an apocryphon produced in China."

One might be forgiven for thinking that Fukui therefore took Nattier's article very seriously indeed. And yet, as we will see, his attempt as a rebuttal cannot be taken seriously. His assertions are full of misunderstood English idioms, trivial arguments that don't address the issues raised by Nattier, and many kinds of logical fallacy.

Note the essentially theological nature of Fukui's remark. That a text is "revered" is at best incidental to philology. Nor would it be "matter of concern" for philologists, let alone a grave concern, if the text was composed in China using extracts of other (genuine) Buddhist texts. The provenance is what it is. The ideal philologist (or historian for that matter) is concerned to establish the facts of the matter, where and to the extent that they can be established, and to present them in some kind of coherent framework that helps to answer questions about the text. Of course, in practice we never attain the ideal, but we do aim to make progress towards it. This is in fact one of the criteria for getting published, i.e. that the article makes progress.

It is the religious who worries about how the facts will look or, more to the point, who worries how they will look, if the provenance pointed to by the facts is not the traditional provenance. Because let's face it, being wrong about the most popular Buddhist text in Japan leaves Fukui et al with some explaining to do. The potential loss of face entailed may be literally unimaginable for a European.

That said, secular academics might also feel some embarrassment if they are forced to admit how very wrong they have been about the Heart Sutra and Prajñāpāramitā generally. They should certainly be embarrassed that none of them noticed mistakes in Conze's Sanskrit text, for example. Or that we still don't reliable editions of our basic texts. In Europe and her colonies, many academics in the field of Buddhist Studies are also religious. Perhaps not to the extent of being abbots or head priests in religious organisations, but they are believers who experience enhanced disappointment when some aspect of their religion is contradicted by facts.

In any case, despite the obvious flaws in the arguments of Fukui, no one stepped up to defend Chinese origins until Huifeng (2014) was published. European academics continue to display an intense reluctance to talk about the issue. Most prefer to support the status quo and continue to refer to the emic view of the Heart Sutra as an Indian text composed in Sanskrit. Jonathan Silk is widely considered a leading Heart Sutra scholar on the basis of his 1994 edition of the Tibet text as it occurs in the Kanjur (ignoring the Tibetan texts found at Dunhuang). And yet Silk is one of those who continue to refer to the "Sanskrit original" despite being shown, step by step, that the Sanskrit is a back-translation from Chinese. Another senior scholar privately told me, he's "not qualified" to assess our work, because he "doesn't know Chinese". Despite exposing T 250 as an apocryphon, Shōgo Watanabe also resists our conclusions about T 251 and promotes the idea that there is insufficient evidence and that we must return to the Sanskrit manuscripts. The mask slipped a little in 2019 when he criticised our conclusions as "unnatural". Not a term I ever expected to see in a scholarly context.

Thus Fukui has become the posthumous poster boy for orthodox Japanese theology which rejects Chinese origins and then scrambles around for reasons to reject it. Those who follow in his footsteps seem to genuinely think that Fukui refuted Nattier. I don't have direct access to Fukui's writing, he only wrote in Japanese, but I do now have access to an unpublished rebuttal of Fukui by Jan Nattier. And today, I'm typing up my notes on this.

Nattier's Response

In 2019, I was corresponding with Jan Nattier about the Heart Sutra and she shared her unpublished response to Fukui (1994), which I read with interest. I urged Nattier to make this response more widely available and last week (Apr 2023) she kindly uploaded the response to academia.org. Re-reading it after four years I was again struck by how poorly Fukui did in trying to refute Nattier. And by this time I had also seen other articles that were said to be influential in Japan. I have subsequently published two formal critiques of other scholars work on the Heart Sutra (Attwood 2020, 2022), including a number of Japanese scholars. I also composed informal reviews of other works on my blog (cited in the bibliography below).

My method here is to use Nattier's response to take a back-bearing on how Fukui thought about the Heart Sutra with a view to better understanding his objections; and to show that he certainly did not refute our Chinese origins thesis. And with his methods he could never refute it.

Core Section

Nattier first raises what seems to be the central issue for Fukui, the notion of the "core" of the text. Nattier referred to the quoted passage that was the focus of her article as "the core passage". As she says, this term "core" was not intended as a value judgement, nor as a metaphysical statement, it is just that the section falls in the middle of the text, which Nattier divides up for methodological reasons.

In fact, Heart Sutra manuscripts tend not to divide the prose text up into sections at all. I haven't seen all the surviving manuscripts but I have seen a majority of them, and they are all like this. Both in Sanskrit and in Chinese. The famous Hōryūji manuscript has neither word nor sentence breaks, let alone paragraphs or sections. Each akṣara (roughly "a syllable") stands alone on the page. So all divisions of the text, for whatever reason, are entirely arbitrary and imposed on the text by scholars.

For Fukui, however, correctly identifying the "core" of the text requires a radical shift in outlook. For Fukui the core of the text is the "mantra", which strongly implies a Tantric outlook (Fukui was head priest of a Tendai temple, in which tantric Buddhism is practiced). He apparently claims to have shown that a shift in the general title of the text from Duō xīn jīng «多心經» to Xīn jīng «心經» can be interpreted as evidence that the emphasis shifted from the mantra to emptiness only in the fifteenth century.

Nattier notes that Fukui is making a theological argument rather than a scholarly one. For example, Nattier notes that if we are saying that some part of the text represents "the core" (as a value judgement) then it simply begs the question, "represents the core, for whom?" And Fukui has nothing to say about this. That the Heart Sutra means different things to different people, at different times, can be amply demonstrated by glancing at any two commentaries taken at random.

By "theological" here, I mean a religious outlook that aims to legitimise and authenticate some religious doctrine. Theology takes doctrine as a starting point; as a given. Theologians collect and collate evidence in support of that doctrine. As a science undergraduate I called this "cooking" the result, not sure of the origins of that phrase. Cooking a result amounted to making the data fit the expected norm. One did this in school, for example, to hide experimental failures that might adversely affect one's grades. It is of course, fatal to the process of doing science to allow cooking in real world situations. Theology seems to me to be entirely concerned with cooking the results.

Fukui apparently argues, and Nattier apparently agrees that Xīn jīng «心經» would have been interpreted as meaning "mantra text". As Nattier points out, even if Xīn jīng «心經» were perceived as meaning "mantra text" this does not translate into a belief that Buddhists were focused on the mantra. For example, Nattier reminds us, the undated commentaries by Kuījī and Woncheuk do not think in Tantric terms. They encompass Madhyamaka and Yogācāra thought, with a clear preference for the latter. Long before the fifteenth century, these earliest Chinese commentators focused almost all their efforts on explicating the emptiness doctrine (albeit it from a Yogācāra point of view).

We can short circuit this discussion by looking at my 2017 article: "‘Epithets of the Mantra’ in the Heart Sutra." There I showed that word mantra does not occur in the Chinese Heart Sutra.

Credit for this discovery goes to Nobuyoshi Yamabe. Rather than publish, he pointed it out to Jan Nattier in a letter. The observation made its way, at the last minute, into Nattier (1992) as footnote 54a (typesetting was a lot more clunky in the early 90s). Nattier added a few more examples to flesh out Yamabe's, and my contribution was to provide a comprehensive survey of the relevant texts.

I was able to show, per Yamabe, that where the Heart Sutra has zhòu 咒 or zhòu 呪 (same character written two different ways), the source text in Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation (T 223) has míngzhòu 明呪. By referencing the extant Sanskrit manuscripts we showed that Kumārajīva was translating vidyā, not mantra. Hence the epithets sections of the Sanskrit Large Sutra manuscripts refer to Prajñāpāramitā as mahāvidyā, anuttarā vidyā, and asamasamā vidyā. The Sanskrit Heart Sutra by contrast suggests (using very different syntax also) that Prajñāpāramitā is a mahāmantra, mahāvidyāmantra, anuttaramantra, and asamasamamantra. This can be explained as a simple mistranslation from Chinese into Sanskrit, but I don't see how it can be explained if the passage was copied from the Large Sutra in Sanskrit. Copying, in this way, ought to be inherently conservative. Even where scribal errors distort words, the syntax of a sentence should not change to something completely different.

Moreover, where the character zhòu 呪 occurs on its own in the Heart Sutra, where it introduces the incantation, it almost certainly means dhāraṇī. This seems to be the case because the incantation that follows is not a mantra, since it has none of the characteristic features of a mantra. Rather, it has all the characteristic features of a dhāraṇī. Samuel Beal (1865) translated the word zhòu 呪 as dhāraṇī, based on a Tang Dynasty commentary, long before the Sanskrit text was known in Europe.

We can be quite confident that the Heart Sutra was not a "mantra text" and does not contain a mantra. The answer to what kind of text the Heart Sutra is can also be found in Nattier's footnotes (48). Robert Buswell, also wrote to Nattier, and pointed to the possibility of the Heart Sutra being a chāo jīng 抄經, i.e. a "digest text" or "condensed sutra". A chāo jīng 抄經 consisted of copied passages intended to convey the gist of a larger text. Many hundreds of these texts were produced in China, in one early medieval catalogue, chāo jīng 抄經 make up around one in five Buddhist "translations" in circulation. European scholars have long overlooked this genre and the catalogues of Buddhist translations which are our main source of evidence about them when writing about the Heart Sutra.

Thus Fukui's first complaint is shown to be invalid. He not only mistakes the wording of the text, he also mistakes the meaning of the words. In responding to this, Nattier was far more accommodating than she needed to be and had the tools at hand to solidly refute Fukui. But perhaps the ideas in her footnotes still appeared to be unclear at that time.

Nattier then shifts to consider twelve more specific criticisms.

Minutiae

The reader may have to bear with me to some extent, because, a) I have nowhere near as much patience as Nattier displays; and b) I've written about some of the issues raised by Fukui and resolved them in ways that refute his conclusions (before I knew what his conclusions are).

Having dealt with the issue of the "core", Nattier then moves onto considering several points made by Fukui with only her summaries of his complaints to guide us (given in Arial font). In reproducing what follows, Chinese transcriptions are converted to Pinyin and characters supplied.

A. There are no sources that state that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal scripture (Jap. gikyō 偽経), while sources accepting it as a translation by Xuanzang are voluminous. For example, an inscription dating from 672 credits Xuanzang with the translation of the sūtra. Nattier must show that this inscription is a forgery. If she cannot do so, her entire argument becomes unreasonable.

It is entirely true that none of the traditional commentaries on the Heart Sutra refer to it as "an apocryphon", but so what? This is a plain old fallacy that logicians call an "argument from popularity" (argumentum ad populum). It doesn't matter how many people believe something, popularity does not make a proposition correct or meaningful.

It is surely a fact that, by the time the earliest artefacts appeared, it was widely believed in China that the Heart Sutra was a translation from Sanskrit by Xuanzang. A belief is not a fact, even if everyone we know believes it. A belief is an emotion about an idea. Note that we actually have an earlier inscription, the Fangshan Stele (13 March 661), that also credits Xuanzang as the translator. But, again, so what? This attribution has no bearing on Nattier's methods or conclusions. And we know that Chinese attributions cannot always be trusted.

Here Nattier (1992: 206, n.33) raises an issue that I also explored in Attwood ("The History of the Heart Sutra as a Palimpsest." 2020). Both Kuījī and Woncheuk did not see the text as a sūtra preached by the Buddha. Rather they refer to it as bié shēng 別生 "separately produced", which means they didn't think of the text as a sutra preached by Śakyamuni. So not only is Fukui's argument inherently fallacious, it's simply wrong to say that no one ever questioned the authenticity of the text.

Nattier also points out that the Biography of Xuanzang (T 2053) composed by Yàncóng 彥悰; 688 CE), still naively used as a source historical evidence throughout the Buddhist world (see Kotyk 2019), doesn't mention Xuanzang translating the text. The general reader may not appreciate the impact of this absence. The Biography makes a point of describing all of Xuanzang's translations and the circumstances in which they occured. And that list coincides with other evidence of Xuanzang's translations. None of these mention Xuanzang translating the Heart Sutra.

The first literary mention of Xuanzang as translator, apart form attributions on inscriptions (which date from Xuanzang's lifetime), occurs in the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù «開元釋教錄» (Record of Śākyamuniʼs Teachings Compiled During the Kaiyuan period. T 2154); compiled in 730 CE by Zhìshēng 智昇. Earlier catalogues don't mention this.

The inscription Fukui refers to is better known in English as the Beilin stele, and his thinking on this appears to be reproduced in Tanahashi (2014). Fukui and Tanahashi seem to be unaware of the Fangshan Stele which is somewhat older (661 CE) and attributes the Heart Sutra as a translation by Xuanzang during his lifetime. But so what? We have shown that the Chinese text is definitely not "a translation" and that the Sanskrit text definitely is a back-translation from Chinese. Ergo, the text was not "translated by Xuanzang" and we must seek an alternative explanation for the attribution.

In a telling note Nattier (6, n.11) points out that the phrase attributing the text to Xuanzang is ambiguous because "a substantial number of the canonical sutras that a labelled 'imperially commissioned translations' [zhào yì 詔譯] ... are not new translations at all, but only slightly touched-up renditions of versions that already existed in Chinese". Thus the tag yì 譯 might not necessary indicate "translator/translation" in the strict sense, but might stretch to the collator of a chāo jīng 抄經 (this is something a Sinologist needs to investigate by looking at attributions on other chāo jīng 抄經).

In light of this comment, I went and looked at the attributions of some of Xuanzang's translations. The attribution of T 220 (Xuanzang's Prajñāpāramitā translations), for example, takes the standard form:

Sānzàng fǎshī Xuánzàng fèng zhào yì 三藏法師玄奘奉　詔譯
“Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang translated with imperial authorisation.”

The phrase 奉□詔譯 might also be read, "translated with the blessing of the Emperor" or "... by order of the Emperor". The space before the character zhào 詔 "edict" is there as a sign of respect for the Emperor, although there was also a taboo against writing the name of the reigning emperor. Note that the Emperor paid for the translations, he paid for the upkeep of the monks involved, and he paid for the monasteries the monks lived in. Getting his approval was necessary because it came with the financial backing of the Chinese Imperium. The formal role of the state in supporting Buddhism meant that even emperors hostile to Buddhism, such as Tàizōng 太宗 (r. 626–649 CE) and Gāozōng 高宗 (r. 649–683 CE) were constrained to continue state support for the religion.

The attribution on the Fangshan Stele (661 CE), which predates the completion of T 220 by a few years, follows the same pattern. The attribution of the canonical Xīn jīng is different in the Taishō based. The main text says:

Táng sānzàng fǎshī xuán zàng yì 唐三藏法師玄奘譯
Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang translated

And a variant reads:

Táng sānzàng fǎshī Xuánzàng fèng zhào 唐三藏法師玄奘奉詔
“Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang, imperial authorisation.”

The variant is obviously a simply scribal error where a copyist has omitted the expected character 詔. The main text is more interesting because yì 譯 on it's own does mean "translation" (as well as translator, and "to translate" in all conjugations), but as Nattier says, it was also used for redactions of existing translations. And mention of imperial sponsorship is missing here. I don't know why.

In any case, the attribution has to be taken with a grain of salt, because we have shown that the Chinese Heart Sutra is not a translation from Sanskrit, it was composed in Chinese, using passages from T 223 and T 901.

Fukui's comment that "Nattier must show that this inscription is a forgery. If she cannot do so, her entire argument becomes unreasonable" is incoherent. Between us, Kotyk and I have shown that the Heart Sutra was composed ca 654-656 CE. To see an inscription of it in 672 is not some big reveal. The existence of the Beilin stele and the even older Fangshan stele simply tell us that the text must have existed by then and be attributed to Xuanzang by Chinese Buddhists. The attributions of Chinese Buddhist texts are still being checked and are often disproved, even now.

B. Nattier's division of the Heart Sūtra differs from that of traditional Buddhist scholarship. There is no authority for her division, and it cannot be accepted.

Again my response is, so what? As Nattier says, she divides the text this way for methodological reasons. Nattier acknowledges that she uses the term "core" before defining it, but the definition is there for anyone who kept reading. Moreover, her choice of "core" to label the core passage doesn't have the value laden interpretation in Nattier's mind that it appears to have in Fukui's. It's just in the middle.

Points B, C, D & E are variations on the theme "Nattier can't divide the text up that way because it is not traditional" and "Fukui valorises the mantra over the body of the text so Nattier is wrong about everything." In my view, Nattier is too generous in her discussion of these trivial complaints. I will skip over them.

F. The interpretation that "the mantra was added later to the core passage" is an error of the same kind. This kind of thinking is probably due to the interpretation that the core (kakushin) or essence (honshitu) of the sūtra is in the idea of emptiness. But this is an interpretation that was established only during the Ming dynasty, around the fifteenth century. Before that, the essence of the Heart Sūtra was correctly (tadashiku) [sic!] seen as ni the mantra at the end.

Fukui seeks to understand the text primarily as a mantra, as befits his role as a senior cleric in a Tendai temple. As we have seen however, Fukui was comprehensively wrong about this: there is no mantra, Prajñāpāramitā is superlative vidyā, and the incantation in the text is a dhāraṇī.

Moreover, we can say with some confidence that the dhāraṇī was copied from Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901), translated by Atikūṭa ca. 654 CE.

The transliteration of dhāraṇī using Chinese characters was a very hit and miss affair. There was some crossover where a dhāraṇī used Buddhist technical terms, however, no standards were ever adopted and each translator adopted a different, not always consistent, approach. As such the source text is often obscured and cannot be reconstructed with any confidence, even using Middle Chinese phonology.

Thus we can say that if a dhāraṇī in a Chinese source is identical to another source then they are likely the same dhāraṇī transcribed by the same translator. Either one copied the other, or both copied a third source. In the case of the Heart Sutra dhāraṇī, we find exactly the same dhāraṇī in the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經». Similar dhāraṇī have been noted, but the dhāraṇī in the Heart Sutra is identical to the one in Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經». If we stipulate that the Heart Sutra is a text largely composed of copied passages, then it makes sense to think that the dhāraṇī was copied as well. And given that the dhāraṇī in the Tuóluóní jí jīng is identical to the one in the Heart Sutra, we can infer than the Heart Sutra author copied it from there.

Note that inference also gives us a fixed date, 654 CE, before which the Heart Sutra cannot have existed because the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» was first translated into Chinese in that year, by Atikūṭa.

G. Taking as her basis the fact that sources documenting the existence of the Sanskrit Heart Sūtra in India prior to the eighth century are lacking, while there are many references to the Chinese Heart Sūtra prior to the eighth century, Nattier makes this a major reason for the argument that the Sanskrit text is a back-translation (han'yaku) from the Chinese. But how many sūtras are there for which we have evidence of their existence in India propor to the eighth century?

Nattier is quite polite here, given that this assertion is an outrageous falsehood. This is a classical example of the straw man fallacy. As she patiently explains, Nattier (1992) does not make this argument from absence. The lack of evidence from India is circumstantial, not probative. Nattier knows, full well, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The argument that the Heart Sutra is a back-translation is, in contrast to Fukui's blatantly false assertion, supported by numerous examples of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra paraphrasing the text of the Large Sutra and several of these paraphrases being blatantly non-idiomatic. I now often cite the occurrence of avidyākṣaya in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra as an illustrative example. Every other known Buddhist text refers to "cessation of ignorance" in the nidānas as avidyānirodha (nirodha is also the word used in Pāḷi and Gāndhārī texts). Avidyākṣaya can be explained as a plausible, but non-idiomatic, translation of wúmíng jǐn 無明盡. If it occured on its own, we might simply scratch our heads at this oddity (not that academics ever have). However, there is a pattern of this type of unexpected deviation from Buddhist norms across the whole of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. I think Nattier (1992) establishes this beyond a reasonable doubt, but Huifeng (2014) and I have made this as certain as anything ever is in our field.

Fukui's last comment is another example of the argument from popularity fallacy.

H. Isn't it a contradiction to argue that the mantra is "a perfectly good Sanskrit mantra... a genuine Sanskrit mantra" while at the same time saying the grammar of the passage concerning the six senses is not right, thus having both good and bad grammar in one and the same text? Moreover, the conclusion of studies up to now is not that the mantra is "a flawless (kanpeki) Sanskrit mantra" as she says. And the fact that it is not her "own ear" to which the grammar of the passage on the six senses sounds wrong makes it lose its persuasiveness.

Let me state right away, that there is no grammar in the "mantra" [not a mantra], it's just a list of words in the nominative singular case (of a Prakrit language). Of course, there is no mantra either, which does not help Fukui's case.

Nattier notes that this is an odd criticism. Fukui has once again misunderstood Nattier's idiom (which is ironic). The phrase "perfectly good" in idiomatic English means "adequate" rather than "flawless" as Fukui seems to think. When Nattier says that the mantra is "perfectly good Sanskrit" she doesn't mean it is flawless, she means it is not gibberish (unlike, say, some of Conze's Sanskrit sentences).

I'm not going to dwell on Nattier's response because I've already shown that Fukui's views on the mantra are wholly mistaken, or at least, the kind of idiosyncratic sectarian reading of the Heart Sutra we would expect from a senior Tendai priest in the last century.

There is no requirement that a Sanskrit text be well formed across the board. Bad grammar occurs in the ancient world too, and it often occurs in patch. On the other hand Sanskrit Heart Sutra is chock full of grammatical mistakes, both ancient and modern. I have published many articles on this topic. If I can see those mistakes, anyone can.

The last comment refers to Nattier again crediting one of her colleagues, Richard Salomon (a widely acknowledged expert in Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions) with providing helpful information (see 1992: 214, n.57). She does this a lot in Nattier (1992).

As it happens another independent like me (I don't know his name) recently wrote to Paul Harrison about a related matter, and he noticed a counter-example to one of our examples (out of 22 examples in Attwood 2022). A compound like na cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāṃsi is rare, but an example of it has been found in the Large Sutra.

The contrast here is interesting. Harrison's interlocutor gives us a model for how one refutes an argument: one gives evidence that contradicts the conclusion. I took up and asserted the idea that compounds like cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāṃsi don't occur in Prajñāpāramitā when they are being negated; the texts prefer to negate each term individually: na cakṣuḥ na śrotra, etc. I had a good pole around the Large Sutra in Sanskrit to see if I could find any counter-examples and could not. A single counter-example weakens our claim. We may still, I think, generalise that this syntax is the most common way of saying it, but we were wrong about this distinction being an absolute. If our argument had been based on this fact alone, we would have been refuted at this point. But this particular argument is incidental and we have published a mountain of much better evidence that Fukui appears to ignore in favour of lesser arguments, which get worse.

I. At first glance Nattier's work abounds in persuasiveness and appears logical. But in fact, in spite of the small quantity of evidence, she presses forth full of self-confidence with decisive-sounding words, thus creating the "optical illusion" of an established theory.

Again, Nattier is very patient here given the outrageous nature of this ad hominem fallacy.

As she explains, Fukui has ignored the strongest evidence and his objections to the weaker evidence only make sense if he is not even thinking about the facts that he has ignored. The evidence has to be taken as a whole. Nattier notes that Fukui doesn't even acknowledge the oddities in the Sanskrit text let alone provide an alternative explanation.

J. Insisting that the Sanskrit Heart Sūtra is a back-translation from the Chinese, her argument gradually becomes more and more unreasonable. For example, she argues that there is no Sanskrit word in the Heart Sūtra corresponding to the Chinese shén 神 of shén zhòu 神咒; but there are many examples of "mantra" being translated into Chinese as shén zhòu 神咒. It is far from unreasonable to simply see shén zhòu 神咒 as a translation from Sanskrit into Chinese. What has she done is to put the argument first and the evidence second.

Note that the argument in I and J is about how reasonable the Chinese origins thesis is, not how accurate or true it is; nor about the explanatory power of the thesis. The truth can sometimes seem unreasonable to religieux because their religious beliefs don't conform to the truth, they conform to the religious orthodoxy.

Nattier again demurs: she acknowledges that that her choice of this example is one of the weakest and she might leave it out if writing the article in 1995. But the method of cherry picking a weak example and saying on the basis of any ambiguity that it destroys the whole argument is example of the nut picking fallacy. As Nattier says, "If Fukui wishes to argue against the back-translation hypothesis, he must confront the evidence as a whole, not simply suggest that a particular word can be viewed better the other way around" (10. Emphasis added).

However, here Fukui is still fixated on the mantra as the most important part of the text (to him at least). And we know that he is simply wrong about this because the incantation at the end of the Heart Sutra is not a mantra.

It is true, however, that some scholars do read zhòu 呪 as mantra. A good example of this can be found in Heng-ching and Lusthaus's (2006) translation of Kuījī's Heart Sutra commentary (T 1710). They routinely translate zhòu 呪 as mantra even though it must be considered anachronistic for the Yogācāra scholar. I can substitute dhāraṇī in their translation in every case with no loss of sense. Even if I had not shown that the gate gate incantation is a dhāraṇī, there is no principial reason to translate zhòu 呪 as meaning "mantra" in a non-tantric context, such as the Heart Sutra.

K. In order to make her argument complete, there are additional issues that she would have to discuss. For example:

(a) a comparison of the differences between old-translation (kyūyaku) and new-translations (shin'yaku) terminology, e.g. vs Guānzìzài 觀自在 [two different Chinese translations of the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara].
(b) the fact that there is no evidence or argument in the Chinese historical materials (e.g. scripture catalogues) that would support the idea that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal text (gikyō 偽経). If she wants to claim that is it apocryphal, she must explain where there is no proof of this in the text evidence.

In short, hers is an inferential argument based on logic, and as such it lacks persuasiveness.

As Nattier notes, she does in fact discuss this issue raised in (a) citing pages 187, 190, and notes 82 and 84. And the second point is just a reiteration of complaint A, already dealt with in detail above. As Nattier (p. 11) says, "... the last point is genuinely worrisome: would Fukui prefer an illogical analysis?" As a religious, sure, he probably would as long as it left his worldview and his ecclesiastical status intact.

L. Can reasoning based on such an extremely small body of evidence—that is, only on a comparison of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, the Sanskrit Large Sutra, and the Chinese Large Sutra—really allow one to establish the theory that the Chinese Heart Sūtra is an apocryphon?

Nattier answers, "of course not". But here, I think she means to allow for the uncertainty that never goes away in dealing with ancient history. And for the Popperian doctrine that no theory can be proven, because of the black swan effect; theories can only be refuted. At any time, some evidence may crop up that refutes our arguments: I've even spelled out what kind of evidence would be required to refute our arguments. But Fukui does not have any such evidence. What he has is a series of trivial arguments that make no impact at all on Nattier's conclusion that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese.

In fact, our thesis does rest almost entirely on this body of literature. To call it "extremely small", however, when it takes up several volumes of the Taishō Tripiṭaka, is a bit rich.

The situation is a little more clear, some thirty years after Nattier first made her observations, now that we have a decent facsimile edition of the Gilgit manuscript and Kimura's edition of the Nepalese Large Sutra, both of which greatly improve on sources available to Nattier and Fukui in the 1990s. Huifeng and I have also made use of the Sanskrit Aṣṭasāhasrikā, and the Chinese Large Sutra translations by Dharmarakṣa, Mokṣa, and Xuanzang. Some of my articles also look at phrases in the broader Prajñāpāramitā literature as well. And having extended the work, Huifeng and I came to same conclusion as Nattier: the Heart Sutra could only have been composed in Chinese.

Right at the end, Nattier sets out the challenge to her detractors (which is very similar to my own challenge):

In the meantime, though, the data I have collected in my article—whether or not the reader wishes to accept the back-translation theory—must now be confronted in toto by those who wish to affirm or deny the sutras Indian origins. I have suggested one flowchart to diagram the relationship between the Heart Sūtra and the Large Sūtra in their Chinese and Indian versions; those who are not happy with the results are welcome to try their hand at coming up with another.

The textual evidence—especially the virtually word-for-word identity between the core passage of the Chinese Heart Sūtra and its parallel in the Large Sūtra of Kumārajīva, in contrast to the divergence between their Indian counterparts—is anomalous as it stands, and requires that we attempt an explanation. If another scholar finds a better way to account for the totality of this evidence, I will be the first to applaud her success

I agree with every word of this.

Heart Sutra Politics?

Nattier (1992) was published in the leading English language journal for Buddhist Studies: The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (JIABS) and as such it was scrutinised by the editorial board and by at least two anonymous reviewers from the field. Contra Fukui and his trivial objections, the article is well argued, provides ample evidence, follows a clear and simple method (that anyone can understand), and does arrive at conclusions logically. If Fukui were the voice of reason, he'd acknowledge this.

Fukui is not a voice of reason, he appears to be playing his ecclesiastical role as spokesman for his Tendai sect. Instead of reasoned argumentation, he argues from the popularity fallacy, from the nut picking fallacy, from the straw man fallacy, from the ad hominem fallacy, and from general confirmation bias. His thesis about the emphasis shifting from "mantra" [not a mantra] to emptiness only in the 15th century is contradicted by numerous facts, not least of which are the late-seventh century commentaries by Kuījī and Woncheuk, which don't treat the incantation as a mantra, and which don't treat the text as being about mantra.

Fukui's arguments, though wholly fallacious, found fertile ground amongst his peers who sought to extend the argument against Nattier in similarly ways. I don't want to say that they are all being disingenuous, since they appear to be sincere. But it is the sincerity of religieux who are aggrieved to discover that their unicorn has been exposed as a donkey onto which someone has fixed a narwhal tusk. Which leads to them sincerely shooting the messenger in the hope of suppressing the news.

I've read and reviewed a number of these articles (see selected blog posts below) including now two published critiques in 2020 and 2022. The articles that I've seen all seem to be quite poorly written and to fail in their stated objective of refuting Nattier. The anecdotal accounts I hear about the unimpeachable status of men like Fukui and his colleagues helps to make sense of this.

We see many scholars who specialise in some other field, write one article on the Heart Sutra and never return to it (Nattier and Huifeng included). Even highly regarded scholars seem to lose their objectivity when they write about this text. Critical thinking goes out the window, and we see a series of theological arguments and apologetics for sectarian Buddhist doctrines.

Nattier's magnificent, era-defining article was thus sabotaged by highly motivated theologians who were able to leverage their exaggerated social status as hierarchs and professors, as well as the intense sexism and, dare I say it, racial bias* of Japanese culture to mobilise a wall of rejection in Japan. And in the face of this, Nattier's European colleagues sat in stony silence and let it happen. Thirty years have passed with little change in academia; progress has come from outside of the ivory towers, from Huifeng (at the time a Buddhist monk in the Fo Guang Shan movement) and I.

* To be fair I think religious apologetics, sexism, and racial bias are rife in European Buddhist Studies as well. I've written about this. Here, I am specifically trying to understand the rejection of Chinese origins by Japanese academics led by Fukui. I think these generalisations are fair.

I'm glad Nattier finally decided to release this unpublished essay to the public. It's good that she now feels able to take the risk of pointing out how weak the arguments against her were back then (and now). As the only scholar actively exploring and writing about this today, I take heart. [Thanks, Jan].

The facts as I understand the are like this. The Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese, in the mid seventh century, from passages copied from T 223 and a dhāraṇī from T 901. It was probably composed by Xuanzang. It was modelled on a chāo jīng 抄經 "digest text" and was acknowledged by Kuījī and Woncheuk to be a bié shēng 別生 "separately produced" text rather than a sutra. The Sanskrit text is a back-translation from Chinese and, as far as I know, none of us thinks Xuanzang was responsible for this. The myth of the Heart Sutra emerged in various texts in the decades following Xuanzang's death in 663 CE.

How believers feel about these facts is a separate issue and that would seem to be their problem, not mine or scholars generally. No one expects a religious believer to have an easy time dealing with reality, especially when they claim to have an exclusive understanding of "the nature of reality" that is denied the rest of us. Ironically, Buddhists who religiously assert that the nature of reality is "everything changes" are the last people to embrace change if it involves their belief system.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Selected Blog posts and Unpublished Essays

"Japanese Reception of the Chinese Origins Thesis." (24 November 2017). A critique of Ishii Kōsei (2015).

"Review of Ji Yun's 'Is the Heart Sutra an Apocryphal Text? A Re-examination'." (01 June 2018). Ji argues for Chinese origins, but against the term "apocryphon". His article is problematic in many ways.

"Another Failed Attempt to Refute the Chinese Origins Thesis." (13 September 2019). A critique Harada (2002) based on an English language summary in the Wikipedia "talk" pages.

"The Heart Sutra Was Not Composed in Sanskrit - Response to Harimoto." (2021. academia.org).

"Just How Crazy is the Heart Sutra?" (23 Sept 2022). A critique of Karl Brunnhölzl’s absurdist article “The Heart Sutra Will Change You Forever” in the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar (September 29, 2017).

"An Open Letter to Buddhist Studies Academics." (23 December 2022). A request for fair treatment by academics.

Published Works Cited

Attwood, J. (2017). "Epithets of the Mantra in the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies,12, 26–57. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/155

———. (2020). "The History of the Heart Sutra as a Palimpsest." Pacific World, Series 4, no.1, 155-182. https://pwj.shin-ibs.edu/2020/6934

———. (2020). "Studying The Heart Sutra: Basic Sources And Methods (A Response To Ng And Ānando)." Buddhist Studies Review, 37 (1-2), 199–217. http://www.doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.41982

———. (2022). "The Heart Sutra Revisited." [Review article]. Buddhist Studies Review. 39(2): 229-254. [Critique of five articles on the Heart Sutra appearing in Acta Asiatica 121 and purporting to represent the "frontier" of Heart Sutra research]

Fukui, Fumimasa. (1994) ‘Hannaya shingyō no kenkyūshi - genkon no mondaiten.’ Bukkyōgaku 36: 79-99.

Harada, Waso 原田和宗 (2002). 梵文『小本・般若心経』和訳 [An Annotated Translation of The Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya] (in Japanese). Association of Esoteric Buddhist Studies. pp. L17–L62.

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

Ishii, Kōsei. (2015). “Issues Surrounding the Heart Sutra: Doubts Concerning Jan Nattier’s Theory of a Composition by Xuánzàng.” [Translated 2017 by Jeffrey Kotyk]. Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu) 64 (1): 499-492.

Nattier, Jan. 1992. "The Heart Sūtra : a Chinese apocryphal text?" Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15 (2): 153-223.

———. (1995). "Response to Fukui Fumimasa on the Heart Sutra 1995." [Unpublished Essay] https://www.academia.edu/99934922/Response_to_Fukui_Fumimasa_on_the_Heart_Sutra_1995

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

What is a Text Anyway?

I often find myself having to stop and reflect on the process and methods I use to explore texts. There is no ideology of method in Buddhist studies; we simply do whatever we think is best at the time. Indeed, there is very little discussion of "Theory" in the sense that presently dominates other subjects in the humanities. So, as I decipher texts, I have to keep asking myself, "What do I have to assume in order for this approach to allow me to make valid inferences, and are those assumptions themselves valid?" Writing my thoughts down is often the best way to organise them. 

My task at present is to identify instances of the Chinese phrase  三世諸佛 in Prajñāpāramitā texts and compare parallels in the extant Sanskrit sources. The phrase means "all the buddhas of the three times" (Three 三 time 世 all 諸 buddha 佛). My hypothesis is that Sanskrit sources will always have atīta-anāgata-pratyutpannā buddhāḥ "past, future, and present buddhas". This is important because the Heart Sutra has "tryadhvavyavasthitā sarvabuddhāḥ" or "all the buddhas appearing in the three times". So far, I can say with confidence that this way of phrasing it does not occur in any of the Sanskrit editions of earlier Prajñāpāramitā texts. In the jargon it is a hapax legomenon, or a one-off (or perhaps a neologism). 

If my hypothesis is accurate, then this phrase in the Heart Sutra can only be a Sanskrit translation from Chinese. This would prove beyond any doubt that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese. To be clear, it is already beyond any reasonable doubt that this is accurate. I think I can make it certain. And this is important because some scholars are on the fence as regards the Chinese origins thesis, and some irrationally reject it. I hope to entice the fence-sitters down to earth and to leave the rejectors no wiggle room. It's part of my elaborate homage to the originator of the Chinese origins thesis, Jan Nattier (3 articles published, 1 submitted for peer-review, and 3 more planned). 

One Text or Many?

However, this task is far less straightforward than it might seem at face value. Take, for example, the first occurrence of the phrase in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Aṣṭa; "Perfect Gnosis in 8000 Lines"). It occurs in a speech that Maitreya gives in praise of transference of merit. In the translation produced by Kumārajīva’s group in about 408 CE, (aka  "T227") it begins at T 8.548a17 (Vol 8 of the Taishō Edition of the Chinese Tripiṭaka, page 548, panel a, line 17). 

It is easy enough to locate the same speech in Vaidya’s Sanskrit edition (72) [Page 127 of Conze's translation]. However, Vaidya's text is approximately three times as long as in T227. In the translation by Xuánzàng (T 7.791c29), the speech is almost twice as long again. Although we don’t have a Gāndhārī text of this chapter, we know that, in general, it is considerably less prolix than the Pala Era (8th - 12th Century) manuscripts used by Vaidya for his edition. Also, there are seven Chinese translations in total (though only one other is of any great interest). This raises the question of whether "parallel" is even the right term. 

There is, in effect, no single text of Aṣṭa. Each instance of Aṣṭa is unique. And we need to be very cautious about thinking of the Sanskrit text as “original”. In fact, the extant Sanskrit documents certainly do not constitute an “original” for Kumārajīva’s translation, but date from perhaps 400-500 years later. We no longer have Kumārajīva's source document (thought it probably was a Sanskrit translation). 

The prolixity of Xuánzàng's text may be an artifact of his translation process, which often includes an element of auto-commentary: i.e., the text commenting on itself.. Where we can compare the late 1st Century Gāndhārī manuscript we often see that the Sanskrit has expanded one adjective or verb with up to five or six synonyms. For example, where Gāndhārī might have, "speak"; the Sanskrit texts might have, "speak, teach, instruct, draw-out, reveal, illuminate". I think we can see this as a form of auto-commentary. 

This raises some philosophical questions. If Aṣṭa is in fact many texts, in many languages, and specific to particular practice communities in particular places, then are my methods sound? Because, in common with other scholars, I tend to assume a unitary text with at most minor variations that can easily be eliminated. But the variations here are huge and cannot be ignored. And, if it was officially translated, then it was authoritative to someone.

Philology

The basic approach of philology grew out of Bible Studies. As 18th and 19th Century European imperialists looted the world, they came across, amongst other things, very old manuscripts of the Bible that had differences from the received text in Europe. I imagine this must have been unsettling for Theologians at the time. Methods were developed to identify the ur-text and restore the Word of God (phew!). Those methods became the main tools of philology and provide Buddhist Studies with some of our most important tools. We, too, spend time collecting and assessing documents, creating critical editions (restoring the original or ur-text), and doing "higher criticism" based on this "original"

But if what I've been saying about Aṣṭa is true, then the possibility of reconstructing the ur-text is doubtful at best. We know from analysis of phonetic transcriptions of some words and names in the earlier Chinese translations and from the existence of a single badly damaged manuscript--carbon dated to ca. 70 CE--that the oldest Prajñapāramitā texts we know of were in Gāndhārī. In other words in the vernacular language of Gandhāra, a kingdom that roughly equated to the Peshawar region in modern-day Pakistan, though it extended over the Hindu Kush and into what is now Afghanistan, as well (hence the Bamiyan Buddhas). Mahāyāna texts began to be translated into Sanskrit around the 4th century CE. The oldest Sanskrit manuscript of Aṣṭa, by contrast, is from the mid 9th Century (it's held in the Cambridge University Library and I have seen the actual object). In other words it is 800-odd years removed from the origins. Lokakṣema's Chinese translation was produced in 179 CE from a Gāndhārī source text. Might it not have a greater claim to authenticity than a 9th Century copy of a 4th Century Sanskrit translation? 

Recently, one of the more inspirational professors of Buddhist Studies, Jonathan Silk, has raised many related issues. He has argued that a critical edition is, in fact, a new composition. The idea that a critical text represents the ur-text is simply a fantasy. The reconstructed text may not even be in the correct language. This is the case with the Heart Sutra. It was composed in Chinese, using a quote from Kumārajīva's translation of the Perfect Gnosis in 25000 Lines. Because it contains a quote, even the Chinese text is not a true ur-text because we can go several steps further back - right back to the Gāndhārī text of Aṣṭa. Other parts of the Heart Sutra may have been composed in the late 7th Century, but they show distinct influence from the idiom of Kumārajīva. 

Lest we think that the prajñāpāramitā literature is a special case, let me assure you that it applies to all Buddhist texts, including the Pāḷi texts. There is every reason to believe that the texts were not composed in Pāḷi but are translations. When we look at the Chinese translations of counterparts of Pāḷi texts they show the same trend, albeit to a lesser extent, as the Mahāyāna texts - later translations are more elaborate and edited for consistency (see, for example, my rough translations of the Chinese Spiral Path texts in the Madhyama-āgama). Consider also that, as yet, there is no proper critical edition of the Pāḷi Canon. The editions we have were from a very small number of documents. Alex Wynn is heading a project to produce such an edition, but the host monastery in Thailand, Wat Dhammakāya, is embroiled in multiple scandals, so will it have credibility? 

Mahāyāna texts were written down soon after being composed, or were perhaps even composed as written, as opposed to oral, texts. And, yet, they were dynamic, open to change, and seem to have grown over a period of some 6 or 7 centuries. Writing did not cause them to be fixed. Mahāyāna texts were anthologized (as in Śātideva's Śikṣasamuccaya) but they were not Canonised. Even the Pāḷi Canon underwent some post-canonical editing. 

Unlike the differences in the Bible, which were effectively an accumulation of mistakes and misreadings, Buddhist texts were actively changed and edited. And not always competently. Part of my work on the Heart Sutra will be repairing the damage done by inept ancient editors.

History of Ideas

For me, this impression is reinforced by the history of Buddhist ideas. We all know that Buddhist doctrines changed over time. Buddhists experimented with many varieties of worldview over time and now have such a broad range of views that any attempt to conceptually unite them necessarily fails. Buddhism has not been a single religion for about 2000 years now. We've evolved into distinct (incompatible) species. Of course we know that there were innovations, and some of us have adopted one or other innovation as our standard view, but we seldom get real sense of why there are variations. What drove Buddhists to innovate?

The obvious answer is dissatisfaction with the doctrines obtained from the earlier texts (aka The Pāḷi Canon). In other words, we have to ask: If the Pāli texts are so authoritative, why did all Buddhists (including Theravāda Buddhists) keep inventing new doctrines and changing the old ones? Often to the point of completely abandoning the earlier material (especially in Tibet and Japan).

While I was researching the history of the ideas of karma and rebirth, I identified a couple of probable reasons for innovation that I still have not seen in any books. My prime example is that karma requires consequences to manifest long after actions, while dependent arising denies that this is a possibility - "when this ceases, that ceases." Once the action has ceased, the possibility of a future consequence should entirely vanish.

Now, Buddhists had four choices: leave it incompatible; modify karma; modify dependent arising; or modify both. Initially they opted for modifying dependent arising in various ways (though all that survived was two variations on the kṣanavāda, or doctrine of momentariness, and the dvayasatyavāda, or doctrine of two truths.). However, later, when the karma doctrine no longer fit their needs, they also modified karma (On this see my 2014 article in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics). 

Over time, Buddhists changed things. They changed what seem like central doctrines and they changed seemingly sacred texts. Often they went down blind alleys. Modern Buddhists tend to have some knowledge that things changed, since most of us have read books from different traditions and experienced the confusion of terms and ideas. On the other hand, very few of us understand the dynamics that produced these changes. The "why" question is often left blank. A notable except is Ronald M. Davidson's Indian Esoteric Buddhism, which describes the socio-economic and geopolitical forces that may have contributed to the rise of Tantric Buddhism. 

Conclusion

I don't expect anyone will rush out and start learning multiple traditional languages (though Pāḷi is not so hard, and we have an excellent Pāḷi teacher in Cambridge). But I hope that we can move towards a more sophisticated view of texts. I'll finish with some key points

• Buddhist texts have complex histories and change considerably over time.
• With very few exceptions all the texts we have are translations.
• Sanskrit is very seldom an "original" language. 
• Chinese is far more important than we have so far grasped. 
• Buddhist texts were always unsatisfactory to Buddhists.
• This unsatisfactoriness was a major driver of doctrinal innovations. 
• On-going doctrinal innovation is a feature of the history of ideas in Buddhism.
• Innovation causes legitimation anxiety for Buddhists.
• Each generation has adapted the Dharma to their needs, while claiming to be reinstating what the Buddha taught.
• Pāḷi texts (or their analogues in Gāndhārī and Chinese) are perhaps the most important single source of arguments and disputes in the long history of Buddhism. 
• There is, and can be, no Buddhist "Bible" nor indeed anything that we might call "Basic Buddhism". 

All the best for the solstice. 

~~oOo~~

Is There Any Such Thing as 'a Text'?

Lines from a Buddhist Sutra
British Library

Most Buddhists will be familiar with the problem of finding two different translations of a text they are inspired by and discovering that the two are inexplicably different. This experience was partly what motivated me to learn Pāli and then Sanskrit (and to dabble in Chinese) in the first place. I remember reading the Bodhicāryāvatara in two translations and being puzzled at the differences. I did not realise at the time that one was a direct translation of the Sanskrit and the other was a secondary translation from the Tibetan translation, which helped to explain some of the major differences. 

If we aren't motivated to learn a scriptural language in order to see for ourselves what the text is saying, presuming it is possible to understand it, then we have limited choices. What most people seem to do is make an aesthetic judgement on which English rendering appeals more. I often hear people say that they prefer this or that translation with no reference to the source language. A monoglot Buddhist will say that some translation captures the meaning and some other translation more literal, with no apparent irony. How does one assess the success, let alone the literalness of a translation when one cannot read the language it was translated from?

Another approach I commonly see is to seek out as many translations as possible and hope to triangulate what the underlying text says. One sees quite elaborate attempts at new renderings of texts with no reference to the Sanskrit or Pāḷi, for example. I've even seen these referred to as a new 'translation'. An old friend used to study the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta by giving each participant in the study group a different translation to read from. Sometimes this is successful and other times not.

Thus we Buddhists make choices between translations on superficial and subjective bases, and we probably think of the translation we are familiar with as "the text". Do we ever stop to wonder what "the text" means if "the text" can be rendered 20 different ways in English? Aren't the different translations in fact different texts?


Critical Editions

But the situation is almost unimaginably worse than this scenario. Because most translations are from critical editions. In the process of making a critical edition one collects up all the surviving 'witnesses' (manuscripts, inscriptions, and earlier editions) and examines each one, possibly correcting scribal errors. Typically each witness is different from all the others, even when they are copies of the same 'original'. Scribes inadvertently introduce errors, large and small, and editors deliberately make amendments, subtractions and additions. Then choosing the best manuscript (best can be judged on any number of bases) one notes all the variations from the best one in the other manuscripts. Traditionally this is first done on a large grid. To produce a critical edition one selects from the variations to produce a text that is consistent and coherent. And if this does not produce a comprehensible or likely reading an editor can suggest an unattested reading that fits better (hopefully with notes to explain the logic of their choice). The editor tries to reconstruct the text as it was first transmitted, or as the author intended it to be. The result is a single text with all the variations footnoted and usually extra notes on amendments (though one of the great problems of Indian textual studies is the practice of silently amending non-standard Sanskrit forms thus obscuring dialectical variants).

And it is these critical editions which end up being translated. In the case of the Heart Sutra for example, Conze consulted more than two dozen sources all different from each other. And he made a number of decisions about the author's intention that in retrospect look doubtful at best or were simply wrong (as discussed in my series of essays on the text earlier in 2013). So each translation hides complexity, sometimes vast complexity, and an industrious process of simplification that is fully subject to human foibles. 

But still worse, some Indian texts can now only be understood by reference to commentaries, often centuries removed from the composition of the text and written by sectarians. Again in the case of the Heart Sutra the commentaries disagree on how to interpret the text along sectarian lines.For example tantrikas treat the text as tantric because it contains a dhāraṇī. And more often than not the commentary itself must undergo textual criticism in order to reconstruct the author's text because it too is subject to all the processes of change that affect a text. 

There is no Diamond in the Diamond Sutra.

Take the Sanskrit Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra as an example. For a start the title ought not to be translated as Diamond Sutra or even Diamond Cutter. This was a choice made by Max Müller in 1884 and has been slavishly repeated ever since. But as Conze remarks in the notes to his 1957 edition, the word vajra was very unlikely to be understood as meaning "diamond" by its audience. In that milieu vajra almost certain meant 'thunderbolt' (that wonderfully unscientific word that combines thunder and lightning). Really, we ought to translate vajra as 'lightning bolt'.

Chedikā is from √chid 'to cut off, amputate; cut, hew, split'. A noun form is cheda 'cutoff; cut' and the adjective is chedaka 'cutter, cutting' and in the feminine chedikā. Sandhi rules dictate that initial ch is doubled to cch when preceded by a vowel. Then we ought to ask what kind of compound vajracchedikā is.  Other compounds with -ccheda suggest that it is the first member of the compound which is cut off - i.e. guṇaccheda 'cutting the chord' or dhyānaccheda 'interruption of meditation'. These are tatpuruṣa compounds. Monier-Williams lists no other compounds ending in the feminine -cchedikā. Since "cutting off the lightening" is an unlikely rendering and it is in the feminine gender following prajñāpāramitā which is also feminine, we must suspect a bahuvrīhi compound (i.e. it is an adjective describing prajñāpāramitā): "the perfect wisdom that cuts like lightening". I think this is probably what it means. So really we should refer to it as the [Cuts like] Lightning Sutra, though it's extremely unlikely that the facts will result in a change. 

The Manuscript Tradition and Editions.

Paul Harrison and Shōgo Watanabe have provided us with a detailed account of the history of editions of the Vajracchedikā (Vaj). There are now ten published editions, including Harrison & Watanabe. The first of these was produced in 1881 in Devanāgarī by the redoubtable F. Max Müller. Müller had four witnesses of which two were copies of the same original and two were Chinese block prints. All of these witnesses post-date the composition of Vaj by at least 1500 years. They are copies of copies of copies and each copying introduced errors. It was Müller who introduced the system of breaking the text into sections. His numbering has been retained in subsequent editions, but they do not occur in any manuscript.

Not long after Müller produced his edition a number of manuscripts of Vaj were found and began to be published. Aurel Stein discovered a Central Asian ms. in 1900 that was published by F. E. Pargiter in 1916 (P). This manuscript is thought to date from the late 5th or early 6th century (though dating on palaeographic grounds can be doubtful). Five of the nineteen folios had been lost and many others were poorly preserved. The Pargiter text appears to be similar to the Chinese translation by Kumārajīva (401 CE).

A partial manuscript was found in 1931 as part of a cache of texts discovered near Gilgit (G). The seven surviving folios are dated to the 6th or 7th century. This ms. was not published until 1956 in a Roman script edition. A facsimile edition was published in 1974. Another Roman script version was published by N. Dutt in 1959 which used portions of Müller to fill in the gaps. However none of the Roman script editions were entirely reliable and in 1989 Gregory Schopen published a new edition which corrected the many mistakes. Schopen's edition is available online from the Gretil Archive.

Amongst several editions of the complete Vaj brought out after these finds, only Conze's 1957 publication has attracted any attention. Conze based his edition on Müller's, but presented it in Roman script and included amendments based on the published versions of P and particularly G. Conze introduced a number of innovations such as western punctuation and hyphenated compounds. "However, Conze did not use M consistently as his base text, occasionally making changes to the wording in which he conflated his various witnesses arbitrarily. He also failed to list the differences in his witnesses exhaustively." (Harrison & Watanabe 92). Never-the-less Conze's edition has become, as it were, canonical and most subsequent studies and translations have been based on his edition and this means, for example that "philosophical questions have also been addressed on less than solid foundations..." (92). 

In 1961 P. L. Vaidya produced yet another edition based on Müller but, as per Conze, with "improvements" based on G as it was then (unreliably) published. This text is widely available on the internet via the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon and the Gretil Archive for example. And yet Harrison & Watanabe conclude it "can safely be set aside" (92). Similarly the edition by Joshi simply rearranges the text of previously published editions. 

Finally we have an incomplete ms. (MS 2385) discovered in the Schøyen Collection dated to the 6th or 7th century, and recently published by Harrison & Watanabe  (2006). This text is missing it's ending. Fortunately the Schøyen ms. (S) is very similar in character to the Gilgit ms. (G). Indeed S and G are closer to each other linguistically than either is to the edition of Pargiter (P). Both contain a number of similar Prakritic features (see Harrison & Watanabe (97-99) S contains sections 1-16c; whereas G contains sections 13b-14e and 15b-32b. And thus, while they are not identical where they overlap, together G and S make up a reasonably consistent single text (see below).

In addition a total of twelve identifiable fragments of Vaj have been discovered in Central Asia. Other texts have been catalogued but are presently lost somewhere in the Nepalese National Archives it seems!

So to sum up the most widely used edition of the Sanskrit Vaj is unreliable; the most widely available to those outside academia is also unreliable. An important problem in the history of this text is that the sources available to Müller are considerably longer than P, G or S. Do we treat this as one text that was added to, or do we treat this as one text in at least two recensions, one shorter and one longer? 

One of the weird things about Vaj is that it suggests that anyone who recites "even one verse of four lines" (catuṣpadikām api gāthāṃ) stands to benefit. But this text is not in verse. There's no evidence that it ever was in verse except this phrase. Is it a stock phrase that was used unthinkingly? Or did the text once exist as verse? As far as we know only one Prajñāpāramitā text is in verse: the Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā.

So far we have a Sanskrit text, available in multiple recensions and versions which may well not point back to a single point of origin, and known far and wide by the mistranslated title. The situation in Chinese is almost as complex with seven different translations of texts which vary in length and quality. 

The Text in Translation

When we read a translation it is almost always the case that this background complexity is completely suppressed or at best highly compressed. 

When it comes to translations we are similarly blessed with many options. Max Müller published his translation in 1894. Conze has published three versions of his English translation with only the most recent being widely available. As with the Heart Sutra, Conze's edition has become standard amongst Buddhists, but when examined it is problematic. My preliminary assessment is that Conze's translation of Vaj suffers from his beliefs getting in the way, just as in his Heart Sutra. Conze in particular embraces paradox and nonsense because it fits his preconceptions about Prajñāpāramitā, but this causes him to mistranslate and to obscure the ways in which the text does make sense.

Schopen has published both a translation of the Gilgit ms. and a complete translation. And translations have also appeared by Mu Soeng, Red Pine  and Richard H. Jones. Now we can add the translation by Harrison of the combined S and G manuscripts. Apart from Schopen and Harrison all the available translations are based either on Müller's or Conze's Sanskrit editions with all their faults. As one might expect there are a number of translations from Chinese also, mainly from Kumārajīva's translation.

Unfortunately the translation by Harrison is relatively inaccessible, though it is based on by far the most carefully constructed edition. There is in fact one interesting and useful presentation of the translation on the web based at Oslo University's Bibliotheca Polyglotta. Though the website in theory makes the text available to everyone, I don't think many Buddhists will find the site, and many won't feel comfortable with the presentation in multiple languages and versions, it is not formatted for easy printing for off-line study, and it lacks all the extensive discussion and notes from the publications mentioned. It would be advantageous to have a popular publication with the Sanskrit text and Harrison's translation (with notes) side by side.

One development mentioned briefly above is worth drawing attention to. Promoted as "a new translation" (it is not) the Diamond Sutra website, by one Alex Johnson, is an extreme example of using English translations found on the internet to try to triangulate the underlying text and produce something more comprehensible, though in this case he has singularly failed to find the text. What the author has done, essentially, is to produce a collage of all the versions. No attention is paid to which text has been translated into English - though translations from Chinese are invariably from Kumārajīva's version and from English from Müller or Conze. At times it strays very far from the Sanskrit and/or Chinese text as the elaborations of previous translators are incorporated to produce a rather bloated and turgid rendition of little doctrinal or literary merit (though clearly Johnson has laboured long to produce this, he'd have been better to spend his time learning Sanskrit or Chinese). Nor is any attention given to the context of the sutra. A single example should suffice: in Section 5 he has the Buddha say, "When you see that all forms are illusive and unreal, then you will begin to perceive your true Buddha nature." But "Buddha nature" is entirely anachronistic and out of place here. It is never mentioned in the text. This late Buddhist idea has been crowbarred into the text in a most inelegant way. The Sanskrit text here is "hi lakṣanālakṣanataḥ tathāgato draṣṭavyaḥ" (Harrison 115). This says: "For a Tathāgata should be seen from the non-characteristic of characteristics.” [As ever arguing against naive realism and reification of sense data] Reconciling Johnson's purple prose with this statement is impossible, and I would say, pointless. And yet if you search "Diamond Sutra" what do you find? 

Complexity

The purpose of this account based on the examination carried out by Harrison & Watanabe is to highlight how complex the manuscript traditions are and how the processes of textual production in the present suppress complexity at every stage, thus to some extent falsifying the witness statements. Vaj is actually not a complicated case, but it highlights a problem that Buddhists simply don't think about. As I said with respect to the Heart Sutra, it is not so much a "text" as a tradition with multiple, competing, variously unreliable, texts. I don't want to go down the road of post-modern textual criticism and deny the existence of the text altogether. For one thing I don't know enough about post-modernism to be credible. But we are obliged to think more about what we mean by "the Diamond Sutra". The production of the text we read is a process in which various scribes and editors have been involved. Many decisions have been made to prune the tangled mass of the tradition in order to present us with reading matter and ideas as homogeneous and simple as possible. Reality is somewhat different:

"... we ought to expect multiple branching of the manuscript tradition, with enlargement and other textual changes not fully present in some of the branches, despite the late date of their witnesses. This presents the editor of texts like this with considerable problems which cannot be gone into here, but to put it in a nutshell, the idea that the wording of any Mahāyāna sūtra can be restored to some original and perfect state by text-critical processes must be abandoned: all lines do not converge back on a single point." (Harrison 240. Emphasis added)

So according Harrison there might not be a (discoverable) single point of origin, a single authoritative text. And this is an argument against criticisms of Conze. That fact that Conze's version is popular with Buddhists is what makes it authoritative, however uncritical those Buddhists have been. Perhaps we have to consider that his version, with all it's faults, is no less valid than other versions? But wouldn't this be rather too defeatist? Ought not errors of reading and translation be repaired? Awkward and infelicitous, not to say inaccurate, translations can be improved on. Though experience does suggest that given the choice Buddhists will cling to a familiar corrupt text rather than embrace a repaired new one.

Conclusion

In the last twenty years I have gone from naive follower to engaged reader, to published scholar. I've discovered along the way that editors and editions can be unreliable. In my education as a Buddhist I was inculcated with the greatest respect for Dr Conze. My Buddhist teacher dubbed him one of the great Buddhists of the 20th century. But as a scholar his methods left much to be desired and his particular Buddhist beliefs seem to have hampered his scholarship. Most of his work is problematic and all of it needs redoing. I hope to do this for the Heart Sutra in the English speaking world (by formally publishing the material I've been blogging) and clearly Harrison, Watanabe and Schopen have done so for the Diamond Sutra. The Sanskrit edition of the Aṣṭasāhasrika-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra is apparently good enough, so we only require a re-translation of that text (several partial translations have been produced, but as yet no one has undertaken the whole task).

But all of this is simply to play the same old game and something about it nags me. A standardised text is almost a lie. It rests on the idea, drawn from Classical scholarship, of a single author sitting down and composing a text that was then corrupted by scribes over time. But Buddhist texts don't seem like this. They almost always seem to be the product of local traditions (plural) preserved in local dialects and languages.

Clearly Buddhist texts are not like Vedic texts. They are not revelations of eternally unchanging texts. They have not been preserved with the kind of fidelity that Vedic oral texts have. Given that we live 800 years after Buddhism died out in India, the home of Sanskrit text production, we must wonder how much or how little of the variation has survived the burning of Buddhist libraries. If we have this many variations now, how many more were lost? 

Buddhists are often fundamentalist when it comes to texts. We have a 'cult of the book' as Gregory Schopen terms it. The book itself becomes an object of worship (I know of at least a couple of Buddhist shrines that have never-read books on them). The book itself symbolises knowledge, but is in conflict with the anti-intellectual injunction against the written word as definitive. In this view, wisdom cannot be put into words except as nonsense and paradox. So even though the Diamond Sutra is a sacred text, it need not be read, though it is chanted from memory in many monasteries and widely studied

The Buddhist tradition is strangely hostile to complexity at times. We are always trying iron out wrinkles, usually with unintended consequences. It begins to seem a little quixotic to insist that our texts are unitary phenomena. Was the Vajracchedikā composed as single text? Did it once stop at what Conze calls "The First Ending" (§13a) only to be restarted by a latter author? How did the later authors justify adding words, lines and sections? Were they like Alex Johnson, i.e. well meaning but incompetent editors trying to resolve textual variations without really understanding the text? If Harrison is right and the lines do not converge then which Vajracchedikā do we take to be authoritative. In China it's usually the translation by Kumārajīva that is authoritative if there is a choice (though as discussed, this is not true in the case of the Heart Sutra) 

Practising Buddhists often resolve these conflicts and contradictions by changing the frame of the discussion and invoking the authority of personal experience. Which is to say they sidestep the textual issues by trumping the authority of the text with a higher authority. Only in doing so they retain the text as object of worship as the (ultimately faulty) encapsulation of "perfect wisdom". On the other hand historically merely hearing the Vajracchedikā is said to have brought about miraculous conversion: in ancient times for example for Huineng the patriarch of Zen and in modern times by Sangharakshita who, aged 17, both realised he was a Buddhist after reading an early translation from the Chinese and also had a series of mystical experiences that shaped his approach to Buddhism (and indeed to life) subsequently. 

The other frame change we like to invoke is to cite "the Absolute", a term drawn from German idealism but applied to Buddhism especially by Conze. Sometimes the term non-dual is used instead though the meaning is more or less the same. Modern Buddhists frequently believe that there is a viewpoint that stands outside the framework altogether and sees things as they are - though heaven forbid that we call this the god perspective! The Absolute is beyond words and concepts and yet encompasses all words and all concepts. And crucially the Absolute can be invoked to resolve all doubts and all disputes. If one cannot think through a problem to a satisfactory conclusion that is because not all problems are amenable to thought or reason. Some problems and doubts are only resolved by adopting the godlike perspective of the Absolute.  This is the viewpoint which insists that wisdom cannot be put into words except as nonsense and paradox.  Unfortunately credibility is strained at times when people who clearly do not have access to this perspective, use nonsense to silence questions and stifle discussion. 

So, is there any such thing as 'a text'? I spend my time reading and studying and creating texts. However, the sacred Buddhist text as a unitary object with well defined boundaries is a fiction. With a tradition like the Prajñāpāramitā we have a number of texts which represent the tradition in different ways at different times, but are themselves far from stable or fixed. The modern day obsession with fidelity of transmission does not seem to have been shared by our Indian antecedents. Texts were changed as expedient. Mistakes were as likely to be conserved as correct readings were. Better to think of a text as a sketch of a tradition from a particular place and time, seen after several generations of copying. It may be clear and focussed and relatively helpful in understanding the tradition which produced it, or it may be obscured and blurred and unhelpful. Sometimes it's hard to know which. Most Buddhist texts in fact seem to continue to be composed over a considerable period of time that may only have stopped with the destruction of Buddhism in India.

~~oOo~~