The Extended Heart Sutra: Enter Avalokiteśvara

We now move on to Paragraph E in Silk's study of the Tibetan Text. Please note my published corrections for this passage in Conze's edition (Attwood 2015). Also note that the same sentence appears in another variant in Paragraph I of Silk's edition.

In Recension One (R1) this passage involves a variant on the first paragraph of the standard text, in which Avalokiteśavara does the Prajñāpāramitā practice and notices the five branches of experience are absent. Note that in R1 there is no interaction between the Buddha and Avalokiteśavara. I will discuss Recension Two (R2) separately because the subject matter is so different there is no comparison. Overall there is a considerable amount of variation that is difficult to explain.

The following translations reflect my conclusions, so if they are different than you expect it might be explained in the following notes (or it might just be a mistake).

Texts

Recension One

T 253. 爾時眾中有菩薩摩訶薩，名觀自在。行深般若波羅蜜多時，照見五蘊皆空，離諸苦厄。
Moreover, at that time, in that congregation there was a bodhisatva-mahāsatva named Avalokiteśvara. When he practiced the profound Prajñāpāramitā he examined the five skandhas [and saw they were] all absent, and he was separated from all suffering and misery.

T 254. 時眾中有一菩薩摩訶薩名，觀世音自在行甚深般若波羅蜜多行時，照見五蘊自性皆空。離諸苦厄。
Moreover, at that time, in that congregation there was a bodhisatva-mahāsatva named Avalokiteśvara. When he practiced the profound Prajñāpāramitā he examined the five skandhas [and saw they were] all void of self-existence (自性), and [he] was separated from all suffering and misery.

T 255. 復於爾時，觀自在菩薩摩訶薩行深般若波羅蜜多時，觀察照見五蘊體性悉皆是空。
At that time, when Guānzìzài bodhisatva mahāsatva practiced the deep prajñāpāramitā, he examined and saw the five skandhas [and] their [self?] nature is, without exception, is absent.

T 257. 時，觀自在菩薩摩訶薩在佛會中，而此菩薩摩訶薩已能修行甚深般若波羅蜜多，觀見五蘊自性皆空。
Then, Guānzìzài bodhisatva mahāsatva dwelled amidst the assembly, and this bodhisatva mahāsatva was already capable of practising the very profound perfection of gnosis; he examined the five skandhas [and saw] the absence of essence (svabhāva).

Skt. tena ca samayena āryāvalokiteśvaro bodhisatvo mahāsatvo gambhīrāyāṃ prajñāpāramitāyāṃ caryāṃ caramāṇaḥ evaṃ vyavalokayati sma pañca skandhāṃs tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyaṃ vyavalokayati [sma].
At that time, Ārya Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva mahāsatva practicing the practice with respect to the deep perfection of gnosis examined the five skandhas and [saw]* them as essenceless.

*reading vyavalokayati as paśyati sma

TibA. yang de'i tshe byang chub sems dpa' sems dpa' chen po 'phags pa spyan ras gzigs dbang phyug shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa zab mo spyod pa nyid la rnam par lta zhing / phung po lnga po de dag la yang rang bzhin gyis stong par rnam par lta'o//
Now, at that time, the bodhisatva mahāsatva Ārya Avalokiteśvara, observing the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom, observed that even the five aggregates are intrinsically empty.

TibB. yang de'i tshe byang chub sems dpa' sems dpa' chen po / 'phags pa spyan ras gzigs dbang phyug shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa zab mo spyod par rnam par blta ste / phung po lnga po dag la de dag ngo bo nyid kyis stong par rnam par blta'o//
Now, at that time, the bodhisatva mahāsatva Ārya Avalokiteśvara, observed the practice of the profound perfection of wisdom, and with respect to five aggregates observed that they are intrinsically empty.

Observations

離諸苦厄

T 253 and 254 have an extra phrase: lí zhū kǔ è 離諸苦厄 "apart/removed from all suffering and misery" means much the same as dù yīqiè kǔ è 度一切苦厄 "transcended all suffering and misery" in std text. Note that 苦厄 can be taken as one word (suffering) or two (misery and suffering).

The extra phrase is present in the Fangshan Stele, crafted in 661 CE (within about five years of the composition of the text) so we take it to be part of the original text. No other versions of the extended text in any language have this phrase and nor does any Sanskrit text, standard or extended. The translations of T 253 and 254 were, therefore, influenced by the standard text where other Chinese versions were not. We might infer in these cases that the translators understood the standard text to be authoritative.

Examining the Five Skandhas

The extended text has the same difference in sentence structure between the Chinese and Sanskrit texts that we see in the standard texts. In Sanskrit we have three verbal forms: caramāṇa, vyavalokayati sma, and vyavalokayati sma (Std and Para I: paśyati sma) but in Chinese we only have two: xíng 行 = caramāṇa and zhàojiàn 照見 = vyavalokayati sma.

Zhàojiàn 照見 doesn't really make sense as two standalone characters: zhào 照 means "shining, radiant; illuminate, make visible; reflection" and jiàn 見 is the usual verb "to see". This has led to some very odd translations such as "illuminatingly sees", where zhào 照 functions as an adverb. This is far from satisfactory and there is no consensus on how to translate it. If the two characters are a binomial reflecting the Sanskrit vyava√lok then we still have a problem with this as one phrase because the conclusion doesn't fit the premise.

I would like to propose a solution (suggested by the Sanskrit translation), which is that zhàojiàn wǔyùn jiē kōng 照見五蘊皆空 is, in fact, two phrases zhàojiàn wǔyùn 照見五蘊 "[he] examined the fives skandhas" and jiē kōng 皆空 "all void". The latter is minimal and requires us to interpolate much that we would naturally write in English or Sanskrit. Firstly it is implied that the skandhas were void or absent. Secondly the verb "to see" is implied by the context of the initial zhàojiàn 照見. If one looks, one sees something. All this can be left out in written medieval Chinese. Knowing that Sanskrit did not have this kind of flexibility, the Translator specified the verb paśyati sma. i.e. tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyan paśyati sma "And he saw them as lacking essence". I read the object here as tām "them" and svabhāvaśūnyan is a predicate of the object: so the basic sentence is tām paśyati "he saw them"

T 255 complicates matters somewhat: guānchá zhàojiàn wǔyùn tǐ xìng xījiē shì kōng 觀察照見五蘊體性悉皆是空. Guānchá 觀察 would seem to be a synonym of zhàojiàn 照見 and jiē kōng 皆空 is expanded out to tǐ xìng xījiē shì kōng 體性悉皆是空 "self-nature, without exception, is absence". Here tǐ xìng 體性 conveys svabhāva. In the standard Chinese text what Avalokiteśvara sees is jiē kōng 皆空 "all empty" or "all absent".

T 254 and T 257 also pick up the Sanskrit idea that the five skandhas are void of essence (i.e. svabhā-vaśunyan; zì xìng自性). It's possible T 255 intended this but a character got dropped because the text only has characteristic (xìng 性) but there are no text critical notes in the Taishō so this is speculative. T 253 has the same text as the standard version, i.e. jiē kōng 皆空.

Gambhīra

The Sanskrit has gambhīrāyāṃ prajñāpāramitāyāṃ caryāṃ caramāṇaḥ but from the standard text we expect gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ caramāṇaḥ. Is this a mistake? And if so, what kind of mistake is it?

1. is gambhīra an adjective of prajñāpāramitā or caryā?
2. should prajñāpāramitā or caryā be compounded?

In Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā I can find many occasions on which gambhīra is obviously an adjective of prajñāpāramitā but none in which is it an adjective of caryā.

The present participle caramāṇa is not used in either Aṣṭasāhasrikā or Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā, probably because it is the ātmanepada* (middle voice) form of the present participle and √car is usually parasmaipada (indicative), so that the expected present participle is carant (nominative singular caran) and this is the form we find throughout the two main Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. Although note that caramāṇa is found in the Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā (not translated into Chinese till the 11th Century), the Mahāvastu, and in many Pāli suttas (although the of the ātmanepada conjugations generally in Pāli is minimal).

*ātmanepada verbs are used to refer to actions directed towards the speaker (ātmane) and parasmaipada verbs used to refer to actions directed towards another (parasmai). Although the semantic distinction is virtually lost in Classical Sanskrit, the conjugations remain and have to be learned.

With verbs of practice or training prajñāpāramitā regularly takes the locative, because it is the locus of that activity, i.e. prajñāpāramitāyāṃ śikṣitavyam, "he should train in perfect gnosis" and prajñāpāramitāyāṃ caran, "practicing in perfect gnosis". Etc.

In this context caryā means the program of practice of a bodhisatva (i.e. bodhisatvacaryā) which has several formulaic descriptions. The prajñāpāramitā-caryā is the program of practice associated with prajñāpāramitā which, thanks to Matt Orsborn, we now associate with the yoga of nonapprehension (anupalambhayoga).

Tibetan

The Tibetan rnam par lta would appear to be a counterpart of the Sanskrit vyavalokayati sma. And both TibA and TibB have this verb repeated when TibA has rnam par lta and TibB has rnam par blta, neither of which seems to be right. All Jonathan Silk (1994: 34) says about this is:

"Although grammars (for example Inaba 1986: 137) state that lta is a present and blta a future, if there is any correspondence with the Sanskrit we might expect blta (rather than the stipulated bltas) to be a past."

Inaba Shōju's study of classical Tibetan grammar is written in Japanese. So I cannot check to confirm this citation. But other sources confirm this observation. For example South Coblin (1976: 48) gives the paradigm as:

present: lta; perfect: bltas; future: blta; imperative: ltos.

Miller (1970) confirms but notes that some variations occur. The final-s is typical of the perfect, but not universal. Silk didn't offer any further explanation of the forms lta or blta in the Tibetan text when we expect bltas in both. He didn't resolve the problem but in his translations he translated what he expected to see (i.e. the past tense). This is odd because Silk is usually so particular and accurate, and his job as editor was to explain and resolve exactly this kind of problem. We're left with two recensions in Tibetan both seemingly with a different wrong tense (unless we read blta as a past perfect).

Note also that both TibA and TibB incorrectly separate out "closely examined" rnam par bltas from "the five skandhas" phung po lnga po with a punctuation marker or chad (/)

EDIT 6-8-20 A reader familiar with Tibetan suggests that the difference here is not so significant. blta and lta are pronounced the same. He suggests that since the time frame is established using the present form is understood as referring to the same period. 

Also in TibA, what on earth is zhing in the phrase rnam par lta zhing phung po lnga po?

EDIT 6-8-20 : according to a reader zhing here is "and". Which makes sense.

The mistake of having vyavalokayati sma twice when we expect paśyati sma the second time is also repeated here, though not in Paragraph I.

Recension Two

At this point R2 (T 252) is so different from R1 that we have to discuss it separately.

爾時觀自在菩薩摩訶薩在彼敷坐，於其眾中即從座起，詣世尊所。面向合掌，曲躬恭敬，瞻仰尊顏而白佛言：

At that time, Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva mahāsatva was abiding seated with the others; rising up from his seat amidst the congregation, he went to visit the Bhagavan, on one side he joined his palms, bowed respectfully, gazing respectfully at the honoured face, he said this to the Buddha:

「世尊！我欲於此會中，說諸菩薩普遍智藏般若波羅蜜多心。唯願世尊聽我所說，為諸菩薩宣祕法要。」

“Bhagavan, I want to preach to the bodhisattvas in this congregation the universal knowledge store, the heart of prajñāpāramitā. My only wish, Bhagavan, is that they will listen to me as I proclaim this exceptional (祕 ) summary of Dharma (法要).

爾時，世尊以妙梵音告觀自在菩薩摩訶薩言：「善哉，善哉！具大悲者。聽汝所說，與諸眾生作大光明。」

At that time, the Bhagavan, using the wondrous Brahma voice, addressed Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva mahāsatva: “Sādhu. Sādhu, Mahākaruṇika. May they listen to your preaching and their congregations grow and be greatly illuminated.”

於是觀自在菩薩摩訶薩蒙佛聽許，佛所護念，入於慧光三昧正受。

When this [was said], Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva mahāsatva, having received the permission of the Buddha, through the Buddha’s mindfulness, entered the wisdom light samādhi.

入此定已，以三昧力行深般若波羅蜜多時，照見五蘊自性皆空。

After he entered [samādhi] and settled, through the power of the samādhi practising the deep Prajñāpāramitā, he examined the five skandhas, each absent self-existence (自性).

Clearly this is not simply a variation on the same text. There is considerable variation in R1 but the versions are all apparently related, if only by similarity to the Std text. However, this story is very different. The Buddha is not in samādhi when Avalokiteśvara approaches him and they have a brief conversation which is entirely absent in R1 (consistent with the Buddha being in samādhi). Avalokakiteśvara seeks the Buddha's permission to teach and having been granted permission, it is he (Avalokiteśvara) that enters samādhi and has the insight that informs the rest of the text.

At this point the narrative (such as it is) begins to converge with R1, in that Avalokiteśvara converses with Śāriputra who asks a question and the reply constitutes the standard Heart Sutra.

My preliminary conclusion is that this is a separate attempt to extend the Heart Sutra. As we will see this thesis is supported by observations of the extended conclusion as well.

Conclusions

We see a lot more significant variation in this part of text and this entails developing more sophisticated explanations to account for them. I have sketched out some ideas of how we adapt the existing exegesis of this part of the extended text and the corresponding part of the standard text. In the case of the standard Heart Sutra, I think this helps to explain the differences between the Sanskrit translation and the Chinese source at this point in the text.

Chinese leaves out the verb meaning "see" because it is implied by the previous zhàojiàn 照見 "he examined". The Sanskrit and Tibetan texts definitely have the wrong verb (vyavalokayati for paśyati) but the canonical texts also seem to give this verb in the wrong tense, i.e. lta/blta, when we expect bltas. Although there is some suggestion that the final -s is sometimes left off the perfect making it look like a future.

I want to come back to the issue of the substitution of svabhāvaśūnyan for śūnyatā. In fact, the phrase svabhāvaśūnyan is absent from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā. What we do find is the list of eighteen or twenty kinds of śūnyatā (we are concerned with 16, 17, and 18)

1. Absence of internal dharmas (adhyātma-śūnyatā)
2. Absence of external dharmas (bahirdhā-śūnyatā).
3. Absence of internal-external dharmas (adhyātmabahirdhā-śūnyatā).
4. Absence of absences (śūnyatā-śūnyatā).
5. Great absence (mahā-śūnyatā).
6. Absence of the absolute (paramārtha-śūnyatā).
7. Emptimes of conditioned dharmas (saṃskṛta-śūnyatā).
8. Absence of the unconditioned dharma (asaṃskṛta-śūnyatā).
9. Limitless absence (atyanta-śūnyatā).
10. Absence of dharmas without end or beginning (anavarāgra-śūnyatā).
11. Absence of non-dispersed dharmas (anavakāra-śūnyatā). Sometimes avakāra-śūnyatā, avakārānavakāra-śūnyatā.
12. Absence of natures (prakṛti-śūnyatā).
13. Absence of all dharmas (sarvadharma-śūnyatā).
14. Absence of specific characteristics (svalakṣaṇa-śūnyatā).
15. Absence of non-apprehension (anupalambha-śūnyatā).
16. Absence of non-being (abhāva-śūnyatā).
17. Absence of being (svabhāva-śūnyatā).
18. Absence of non-being and of being (abhāvasvabhāva-śūnyatā).

Here svabhāva is not being used in the Madhyamaka sense but as a contrast to abhāva "non-being". That is to say that svabhāva appears to be used in the sense of sabhāva "with bhāva" and abhāva means "without bhāva". In the list of four kinds of śūnyatā, svabhāva "self-being" is contrasted with parabhāva, literally "other-being"

But Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā is constantly telling us not to take these as metaphysics, for example:

abhāvasvabhāvaśūnyatā abhāvasvabhāvaśūnyatāyāṃ na saṃvidyate nopalabhyate, abhāvasvabhāvaśūnyatāpi yāvad adhyātmaśūnyatāyāṃ na saṃvidyate nopalabhyate. (PvsP1-2: 146)

"... the absence of being and non-being does not perceive or apprehende the absence of being and non-being nor are the other kinds of absence perceived or apprehended."

In other words whether or not something exists is not distinguished when all sense experience has stopped. Similarly with respect to the list of four kinds of absence, the Upadeśa says (using Lamotte's reconstruction of the Sanskrit):

1. bhāvo bhāvena śūnyaḥ " being is absent from being"
2. abhāvo ‘bhāvena śūnyaḥ " non-being is absent from non-being"
3. svahāvaḥ svabhāvena śūnyaḥ "one's own being is absent from one's own being"
4. parabhāvaḥ parabhāvena śūnyaḥ "the being of others is absent from the being of others"

We have to keep in mind that in all these discussions the point of view is that of the meditator who has undergone cessation (nirodha) and is dwelling the absence of sense experience (śūnyatā). This is an attempt at a phenomenological description presented in terms of an Iron Age religious worldview.

Given that the extended text is a third generation born from the Chinese Heart Sutra, we might expect a little less variation on the one hand and less slavish copying of mistakes on the other. We have to keep in mind that the number of people who knew any Sanskrit in China at any one time was always small and most of them would not have progressed much beyond beginners level.

The leap from having Chinese as a mother tongue to learning Sanskrit as a second language in adulthood is formidable. The two languages are about as different as human languages can be from each other. We see this in the differences between the Chinese phrase jiē kōng 皆空and the Sanskrit translation: tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyan paśyati sma. Although we now understand that we expected tāṃś ca śūnyatā paśyati sma. It is not the case that Sanskrit has rules and Chinese does not. Chinese simply has very different rules from Sanskrit. Something else to keep in mind is that the texts we encounter are literary and are unlikely to reflect how anyone spoke in any language at the time.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

South Coblin, W. 'Notes on Tibetan Verbal Morphology.' T'oung Pao (Second Series). 62(1/3): 45-70.

Miller, Roy Andrew. (1970) 'A Grammatical Sketch of Classical Tibetan.' Journal of the American Oriental Society, 90(1): 74-96.

The Extended Heart Sutra: The Buddha's Samādhi

Continuing my close reading of the extended text of the Heart Sutra, completing paragraph D in Silk's (1994) Tibetan edition. In this passage the Buddha enters a samādhi  (in Recension One). Recall that I am comparing:

• Conze's edition of the Extended Text (with caution)
• T 253, 254, 257 
• TibA and TibB and Silk's indicative translations 

I will make a few remarks about T 252 but, as I said previously, it seems to me to be a separate recension, probably a separate attempt to extend the standard text. R2 starts to diverge from R1 at this point notably because the Buddha does not enter samādhi. This event is skipped and Avaklokiteśvara starts a conversation that goes in a wholly different direction until such time as it merges with the standard text. The ending is also very different. This will be more apparent in the next instalment. 

So the passage of interest in the texts that are under discussion are:

253  佛世尊即入三昧，名廣大甚深。
Buddha, Bhagavān, entered the samādhi named Vast and Extremely Profound.

254  世尊入三摩地，名廣大甚深照見。
the Bhagavān, entered the samādhi named Vast  and Extremely Profoundly Examined.

255  世尊等入甚深明了三摩地法之異門。
the Bhagavān, entered the  Profoundly Illuminated Samādhi and preached the Dharma. 

257  世尊即入甚深光明宣說正法三摩地。
the Bhagavān entered the Profound Illumination and Proclaiming the True Dharma Samādhi. 

Skt.  bhagavān gambhīrāvabhāsaṃ nāma dharmaparyāyaṃ bhāṣitvā samādhiṃ samāpannaḥ| 
The Bhagavan, having taught a Dharma teaching named “profound illumination”, entered samādhi.

Tib A  de'i tshe bcom ldan 'das zab mo snang ba zhes bya ba chos kyi rnam grangs kyi ting nge 'dzin la snyoms par bzhugs so //
the blessed one was entered into the concentration of the preaching of the Dharma called “profound illumination” (Silk 1994: 172)

Tib B  de'i tshe bcom ldan 'das zab mo'i chos kyi rnam grangs snang ba zhes bya ba'i kyi ting nge 'dzin la snyoms par zhugs so //
the blessed one was entered in the concentration called “Illumination of the Profound Preaching of the Dharma”. (Silk 1994: 173)

The Name of the Samādhi

Sanskrit

In the Sanskrit manuscripts the name of the samādhi is not given. The Buddha taught (bhāsitva) a dharma-paryāya or "Dharma teaching" called (nāma) "Profound illumination" (gambhīra-avabhāsa). Then, he "entered a samādhi" (samādhi saṃpannaḥ). The order of the actions is given by the gerund (bhāsitvā) which indicates an action preceding the main verb, which as here may be substituted with a past participle (saṃpanna). So the sequence is dharmaparyāyaṃ bhāsitvā then samādhi saṃpannaḥ. 

Bhāṣitva is not used in Pañcaviṃśati. Elsewhere we see it used with respect to a verse or some verses, i.e. gāthāṃ bhāṣitvā "having spoken these verses". For example, in the Ajitasenavyākaraṇa:

athāyuṣmān ānando bhagavata imā gāthā bhāṣitvā tūṣṇīṃ sthito 'bhūt / 
Having spoken these verses to the Bhagava, Elder Ānanda stood silently.  

However, this need not be significant. Because we know the extended text was composed after the standard text, probably not before the end of the 7th Century (neither Kuījī nor Woncheuk mention it). So whoever added the extra parts was using 8th Century Sanskrit, not 1st or 2nd Century Sanskrit. 

Dharmaparyāya in this context probably means practical instruction as opposed to an inspirational talk (dharmakathā) or doctrinal sermon (dharmadeśana). Some manuscripts have other names for the dharmaparyāya, notably the Hasedera manuscript (Jb) has gambhīra-avasaṃbodhaṃ though the latter part is not a real word.

In Buddhist Sanskrit is is common for both a dharmaparayāya and a samādhi to have a name. 

Chinese

The distinction between dharmaparyāya and samādhi is not made in the Chinese except for T 255 which we know was translated from the Tibetan. In fact, the Chinese texts of R1 all seem to collapse this passage down to the Buddha entering a samādhi. In R2 he does not even do that.

T 253 and 254 call the samādhi (sānmèi 三昧, sānmóde 三摩地 ) "extensive" guǎng dà 廣大 (mahat, vaipulya) and "profound" shèn shēn 甚深 (gambhīra). We have a term corresponding to gambhīra but we don't have one that corresponds to avabhāsa (illumination). We might expect a word including the character guāng 光 such as guāngmíng 光明or guāngzhào 光照.

There are no text critical notes in either T 253 or 254 that might help explain this. The phrase guǎng dà shèn shēn 廣大甚深 is used fairly often, including in Xuanzang's Prajñāpāramitā translations. So it's not some random mistake, but there is some kind of misunderstanding at work here. 

In T 254, the addition of zhàojiàn 照見 onto guǎng dà shèn shēn 廣大甚深 is a puzzle. Zhàojiàn does occur earlier in the text as a binomial verb and thus doesn't seem to parse here. Possibly just a scribal error, but why was it not picked up as such?

T 255 and T 257 do a better job of conveying the Sanskrit, i.e. "profound (shèn shēn 甚深) illumination (míng liǎo 明了)" and "profound (shèn shēn 甚深) illumination (guāng míng 光明)". This is just what we expect.

T 255 mentions a dharmaparyāya (fǎ zhī yì mén 法之異門) although T 257 has a phrase that is similar, i.e.  xuān shuō zhèng fǎ 正法宣說 which means "proclaim the true Dharma" (saddharma) but appears to include this in the name of the samādhi.

Tibetan

TibA looks like a translation of the Sanskrit:

de'i tshe (at that time) bcom ldan 'das (bhagavan) zab mo snang ba (profound illumination) zhes bya ba (called) chos kyi rnam grangs kyi (of the dharma teaching) ting nge 'dzin la snyoms par bzhugs so (he entered the samadhi). 

Although this is more ambiguous than the Sanskrit, it appears that one could read it as saying the "concentration of the dharma teaching called..." as Silk (1994) has it. Perhaps his rendering of the particle kyi here is a little too literal (I see other options in my Tibetan dictionary).

The text of TibB has the same terms but they have been shuffled—four of the five syllables of the last phrase have moved forward into the middle of the first— and the result is less like the Sanskrit.

zab mo snang ba zhes bya ba chos kyi rnam grangs kyi
zab mo'i chos kyi rnam grangs snang ba zhes bya ba'i kyi

Now, I don't know Tibetan grammar or syntax, so I can't comment on which is the correct or better reading, but given that Silk translated both TibA and TibB without comment, I'm guessing that both versions make sense. Similarly, I'm not sure what the difference between zab mo and zab mo'i is. All I can do is a get a sense of the sentence construction and compare to the Sanskrit text. However, I think that the last kyi belongs to the phrase chos kyi rnam grangs (dharma-paryāya; dharma teaching). It seems to make less sense attached to zhes bya ba meaning "called, titled" etc and which comes after the name. In any case, TibA certainly follows the Sanskrit and the transposition in TibB would be a typical scribal error.

Whether the Tibetan was translated twice or once and then evolved into two recensions is moot. Silk notes that without a proper edition of the Sanskrit it's very difficult to understand the relationship of the Tibetan texts. We can provisionally say that Ben Nourse's unpublished work on the Dunhuang manuscripts suggests the existence to earlier Tibetan texts that correspond with the TibA and TibB. 

Conclusions

What can we say about this? At the beginning I stipulated that a Sanskrit text was likely the source for all the extant versions of the extended Heart Sutra. This conjecture is consistent with the Tibetan recensions, T 255 translated from Tibetan, and T 257 which all appear to be translations of something like the extant Sanskrit text though they are all confused about the distinction between having given a teaching (dharmaparyāyaṃ bhāsitvā) called Profound Illumination (gambhīrāvabhāsaṃ nāma) after which he entered samādhi (samādhiṃ samāpannaḥ).We can at least say that the grammar and syntax of the Sanskrit is all quite standard and parsable (unlike the standard version). 

The earlier Chinese texts present some problems. T 252 appears to be a different recension in which the whole subject of the Buddha's presence and his samādhi are handled very differently. T 253 and 254 concur with each other on the name of the samādhi but they do not concur with any other texts. Furthermore, there is something not quite right about the name of the samādhi in these text, although the term used is a common one. Whether something has been lost in translation or they had a different source text is not clear. 

Admittedly, this is one of the most problematic areas of the text and the confusion here is at something of a peak (even if we ignore T 252). As yet I see no simple explanation that would account for the differences. I see what look like scribal errors but too few to account for all the differences. I simply don't understand how we got from Sanskrit to Chinese (or vice versa since I have not ruled out this possibility) for this passage. 

The one positive is that the oddities in the texts are often individual to the texts and thus diagnostic. For any translation we should be able to see to which of our existing texts it was made. I can already reliably do this with the standard text, usually by reading the first paragraph.

~~oOo~~

The extended Heart Sutra: Nidāna

I'm beginning a close reading of the extended text of the Heart Sutra. Having spent a good deal of time on the core section that it has in common with the standard version, I will be focused on the extra passages. 

We do not yet know in which language the Heart Sutra was extended. The traditional consensus is that the Chinese and Tibetan versions are translated from Sanskrit. This is plausible enough but we also know that the same consensus holds for the standard version and that it is incorrect in that case; the standard Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese. Part of the reason for doing a close reading of this text is to see if more information can be gleaned from the terms, the grammar and syntax, or the idiom of the various versions. 

As I have said there are two broad groups of texts:

Recension One

• Sanskrit (with many variants)
• T 253, 254, 257. 
• TibA, TibB, T 255 (trans from Tib)

Recension Two

• T 252.

Recall that TibA is in the Tantra section of the Kanjur and TibB is in the Prajñāpāramitā section.

Whoever created the extended Heart Sutra did so to supply certain missing elements that a sūtra was expected to have in Tang China. Of these some occur at the beginning in what is called the nidāna "basis" (or "frame" in English) and it is these elements that I will begin with. These elements are found in the beginning of paragraph D in Jonathan Silk's (1994) divisions of the Tibetan text (which I will be following in these essays):

• the opening phrase "thus have I heard", 
• a statement of the place and occasion for the teaching, 
• a statement of who was in the audience, 
• the presence of the Buddha or the Buddha's invitation to speak; 

In many Pāli texts, the Buddha is alone and the protagonists go to meet him and go through a familiar routine of greeting him, exchanging pleasantries, and then sitting off to one side and asking a question. In the Mahāyāna sūtras we usually find the Buddha already surrounded by followers. In the early Prajñāpāramitā texts it is only Arhats who are present, but gradually bodhisatvas are included. As we will see there is considerable variation amongst the different accounts in the Heart Sutras.  So our texts for this essay are:

Recension One

T 253: 如是我聞：一時佛在王舍城耆闍崛山中，與大比丘眾及菩薩眾俱。

Thus have I heard. At one time, the Buddha (佛) was in Rājagṛha on Vulture Peak Mountain, along with a great congregation of bhikṣus together with a congregation of bodhisatvas.

T 254: 如是我聞：一時薄誐梵住王舍城鷲峯山中，與大苾蒭眾及大菩薩眾俱。

Thus have I heard. At one time, the Bhagavan (薄誐梵) was in Rājagṛha on Vulture Peak Mountain, along with a great congregation of bhikṣus together with a great congregation of bodhisatvas. 

T 255: 如是我聞：一時薄伽梵住王舍城鷲峯山中，與大苾蒭眾及諸菩薩摩訶薩俱。

Thus have I heard. At one time the Bhagavan (薄伽梵) was in Rājagṛha on Vulture Peak Mountain, along with a great congregation of bhikṣus together with many bodhisatva mahāsatvas.

T 257: 如是我聞：一時，世尊在王舍城鷲峯山中，與大苾芻眾千二百五十人俱，并諸菩薩摩訶薩眾而共圍繞。

Thus have I heard. At one time, the Bhagavan (世尊) was in Rājagṛha on Vulture Peak Mountain, along with a great congregation of 1250 bhikṣus together with many bodhisatva mahāsatvas and together they circumambulated (圍繞). 

Skt: evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān rājagṛhe viharati sma gṛdhrakūṭe parvate mahatā bhikṣusaṃghena sārdhaṃ mahatā ca bodhisattvasaṃghena.

Thus have I heard, at one time the buddha was staying at Rājagṛha on the Vulture Peak together with a great congregation of bhikṣus and a great congregation of bodhisatvas. 

TibA. 'di skad bdag gis thos pa dus gcig na / bcom ldan 'das rgyal po'i khab bya rgod phung po'i ri la dge slong gi dge 'dun chen po dang / byang chub sems dpa'i dge 'dun chen po dang thabs gcig tu bzhugs te /

Thus I heard at one time: the Blessed One was staying on the Vulture Peak in Rājagṛha, together with a great assembly of monks, and a great community of bodhisattvas,

TibB. 'di skad bdag gis thos pa'i dus gcig na / bcom ldan 'das rgyal po'i khab na / bya rgod phung po'i ri la / dge slong gi dge 'dun chen po dang / byang chub sems dpa'i dge 'dun chen po dang / thabs gcig tu bzhugs te /

Thus it was at one time when I heard this that the Blessed One was dwelling at Rājagṛha, on the Vulture Peak, together with a great assembly of monks and a great assembly of bodhisattvas,

TibA and TibB are more or less identical except for thos pa versus thos pa'i in the first phrase and an extra locative particle (na) on the end of rgyal po'i khab (Rājagṛha) in the second. It's not clear to me why Silk's two translations are so different given this relatively inconsequential difference in the sources.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library expects 'di skad bdag gis thos pa dus gcig na /  "thus I have heard at one time" and thos pa'i seems to be an error, as pa'i is identified as a genitive case marker. All comments on Tibetan are provisional and have not been checked by a Tibetologist. 

Recension Two 

T 252. 如是我聞：一時佛在王舍大城靈鷲山中，與大比丘眾滿百千人，菩薩摩訶薩七萬七千人俱，其名曰觀世音菩薩文殊師利菩薩彌勒菩薩等，以為上首。皆得三昧總持，住不思議解脫。

Thus I have heard: At one time, the Buddha was in Rājagṛha on the mountain of Gṛdhrakūṭa, together with a great bhikṣusaṃgha of 100,000 and 77,000 bodhisatva mahāsatvas in all, those named Avalokiteśvara Bodhisatva, Mañjuśrī Bodhisatva, Maitreya Bodhisatva, were the leaders.* All had attained the samādhi of always remembering, and abided in inconceivable liberation.

Possibly Maitreya was "at the head" (yǐ wéi shàng shǒu 以為上首), cf. Conze's translation of  Pañcaviṃśati: "and Maitreya the Bodhisattva, the great being, at the head of many hundred thousands of niyutas of kotis of Bodhisatvas." (1975: 38).

Numbers niyuta and koti are usually "a million" and "100 million", but can vary. I'm not sure why Conze didn't translate them. Conze almost always opts for obfuscation to highlight the perception of mysticism. But worse, I fear he has simply translated the passage incorrectly because the word he translates as "head" pramukhair is in the instrumental plural. It cannot be referring to Maitreya. In refers rather to the bodhisatvas in their masses. Pramukha means "facing; foremost, principal etc.". In Sanskrit the passage is maitreyeṇa ca bodhisatvena mahāsatvena, evaṃ pramukhair anekair bodhisattva-koṭī-niyuta-śata-sahasraiḥ sārdham. "and together with Maitreya Bodhisatva Mahāsatva. Thus [the] foremost many hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of bodhisatvas".

Note also that the last sentence is not found in any other Heart Sutra text.

Observations

The term bodhisatva-saṃgha strikes me as unusual. This is at least in part because the Buddhist saṃgha has four parts: bhikṣu, bhikṣunī, upāsaka, upāsikā or in the vernacular, monks, nun, laymen, and laywomen. The mahāyāna bodhisatva was a new invention that did not fit into the traditional social distinctions and, at least in theory, could be drawn from any one of the four traditional groups. T 255 omits saṃgha for the bodhisatvas even though both Tibetan recensions have the equivalent, i.e. byang chub sems dpa'i  dge 'dun. However, the impression appears to be incorrect. In Chinese the phrase púsà zhòng 菩薩眾 occurs in a number of translations including Karuṇā-puṇḍarīka-sūtra and throughout Xuanzang's Prajñāpāramitā translations (T 220).  If anything the phrase púsà mó hē sà zhòng 菩薩摩訶薩眾 is even more common especially in T 220. And it is used repeatedly in the Sanskrit text also. 

While most of the texts do not mention numbers, which many sūtras do, some of them add numbers. It's a distinctive feature of Buddhist sacred texts that if a scribe feels like it they can just alter details like this. Mostly the texts just say "with a large" saṃgha, i.e. 大比丘眾, mahatā bhikṣusaṃghena sārdhaṃ,  dge slong gi dge 'dun chen po dang. T 257 adds the detail that the bhikṣusaṃgha was 千二百五十人俱 "one thousand, two hundred, fifty men in all". T 252 (R2) which is supposed to be the earliest Chinese translation completed in 741 CE, has the most elaborate with 100,000 百千 bhikṣus and 七萬七千 77,000.

Chinese numbers are mercifully simple after the duodecimal numbering system of Indo-European numbers. By this I mean that we have individual names for the first 12 numbers and only then revert to a standardisation of larger numbers in decimals... eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Sanskrit has quite a few oddities, twenty is not a combination of 2 dva and 10 daśa but viṃśati. This inconsistency is seen across Indo-European and is conjectured to have existed in Proto-Indo-European as wīḱṃt- where 2 is *d(u)wo- and ten is *deḱṃ(t). The decade numbers all have ḱṃt for our English -ty (Latin ginti). In Sanskrit wīḱṃt-  the standard transitions—ḱ → ś and ṃ → a—gives us *wīśṃt(i) and metathesis → wīṃśat(i). In Sanskrit w and v are homophones. 

There is more confusion however, because 19 can be nava-daśa but it can also be ūnaviṃśati or twenty minus one, where ūna means "diminished" (in the Heart Sutra all dharmas are said to be an-ūna "undiminished"). Past 100, one can write eka-śataṃ "one and a hundred" or one can write ekādhikaṃ śataṃ "one hundred exceeded by one". Worse still the names of numbers change form so 2, 20, 102, 200 are dva, viṃśati, dvādaśa, dviśataṃ, and dve śate. 3, 30, 103, 300 and tri, trayodaśa, triśataṃ, trīṇiśatāni. 6 is ṣaṣ but 16 is ṣoḍaśa. Sometimes numbers are only distinguished by accents in Vedic and these are lost in Classical Sanskrit, so we have dvíśatam 102 and dviśatám 200. And of course, being adjectives, numbers take the gender of the noun they describe.

The higher numbers are 1000 sāhasram, 100,000 lakṣa (Hindi lakh), 1,000,000 niyutaṃ, and 10,000,000 koṭi (Hindi crore).

In Buddhists texts the way the count of people is usually phrased is a certain number of hundreds of them. There is a special way of writing 1250 which is "13 minus a half times a hundred", i.e. "twelve and a half hundreds". So the Aṣṭasāhasrikā opens with the Buddha

mahatā bhikṣusaṃghena sārdham ardhatrayodaśabhir bhikṣuśataiḥ
together with a large bhikṣu-congregation consisting of thirteen minus a half hundreds of bhikṣus.

I'm not sure what the significance of this number 1250 is but it crops up quite a few times in this context.

  1  一  yī 

  2  二  èr

  3  三  sān

  4  四  sì

  5  五  wǔ

  6  六  liù

  7  七  qī

  8  八  bā

  9  九  jiǔ

10  十  shí

Chinese numbers are fully standardised - the digits are given on the right. To make larger numbers they are just combined logically. Twenty is èr shí 二十. 99 is jiǔshíjiǔ 九十九. They have signs for 100 bǎi 百 and 1000 qiān 千. The largest number word is wàn 萬 meaning "ten thousand" but also "myriad, innumerable".

It's as if in English we counted one, two, three... ten, ten-one, ten-two, ten-three... two-ten, two-ten-one, two-ten-two, two-ten-three... and so on up to nine-ten-nine, hundred. It's sometimes said that the relative simplicity of Chinese numbers gives children who speak one of the Chinese languages an advantage in maths, but this could be urban legend. Still, I find this standardised system very attractive, just as I admire the way Sanskrit is written as it is pronounced.

There are a number of ways of writing bhagavān in Chinese, i.e. it can be transcribed as 薄誐梵 MC bwɑk̚ ŋɑ bɨɐm^H or  薄伽梵 bwɑk̚ ɡɨɑ bɨɐm^H, or translated as (Pinyin) shìzūn 世尊. (Note the superscript H indicates the "departing" tone). These differences are inconsequential, although they do show that even has late as the 8th and 9th Centuries translations were not standardised and individual translators still felt free to choose their own way of doing things. In the past I've argued against this as it puts the reader at a disadvantage if they have to remember multiple ways of referring to the same concept. And in Buddhism where every technical term seems to have at least two different meanings, things are already confused enough.

There are also two different ways of writing bhikṣu, i.e. bǐqiū 比丘 (MC piɪ^X kʰɨu) and bìchú 苾蒭 (MC biɪt̚  t͡ʃʰɨo). Note the superscript X indicates rising tone. The spelling bǐqiū 比丘 is more common but looks like it might reflect a Middle Indic form like Pāli bhikkhu (the /kʰ/ sound is what we expect for /kh/ in Pāli). Gāndhāri shows a lot of variation including both bhikhu and bhikṣu.

Conclusion

In the standard Heart Sutra odd idioms and calques from Chinese gave the game away and allowed us to conclude that the Sanskrit text was a translation of the Chinese. In this first part of the extended text nothing stands out. There is some variation that is consistent with how Mahāyāna texts evolved over time.

The next part of the text is the Buddha entering Samādhi.

~~oOo~~

The Extended Heart Sutra: Sources

Very little critical or comparative work has been done on the extended Heart Sutra. I've tended to ignore it because there has been so much to do on the standard text. I've been interested in the origins of the text and the extended version is a later development. With most of my philological and historical work on the standard completed and awaiting publication, I have been making some notes about the extended text.

The majority of the extant Heart Sutra manuscripts and inscriptions are of the extended text. There are five canonical Chinese versions and two canonical Tibetan Versions. There is a Sanskrit manuscript in Japan and about a dozen manuscripts from Nepal have been described, although I think dozens more are extant. And then there are the Dunhuang texts—over 180 in Chinese and 90 in Tibetan—which reflect nine different version of the standard and extended texts and some hybrids. 

Most of the Extended texts conform to a single recension, i.e. they all seem to have common origins, though with many minor variations. I will call this Recension One (R1). There seem to be a number of variants of R1 and part of the purpose of the coming series of essays is to identify these through close comparison of the available documents. There is also a Recension Two (R2) which is represented by a single text, T 252 a canonical translation attributed to Fǎyuè 法月 (Skt. *Dharmacandra) and Lìyán 利言, and dated ca. 741 CE. If the attribution and date are reliable then this is the earliest evidence of the extended text.

In this post I'll describe the extant texts in more detail. In my last post, I raised the question of whether the Heart Sutra ever went to India. I concluded that we didn't have enough information but that it was plausible that the transmission was from China to Tibet and that Vimalamitra, as the man credited with the canonical Tibetan translation, might have had something to do with this. Although his connection to China seems tenuous, a private message from Joel Gruber (whose PhD dissertation was on Vimalamitra) suggests that he thinks it likely that Vimalamitra did visit China on his way to Tibet.

I will look at the Tibetan versions with the help of Jonathan Silk's critical edition. But I don't think we can say much about the Heart Sutra in other countries on the periphery of Tang China such as Khotan, Kucha, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, or Vietnam. This may be bias because I don't read any of the relevant languages, but my impression is that no textual innovations occurred in these countries. They adopted the standard Chinese text without modification, except perhaps chanting it in the local pronunciation - thereby ensuring that it was incomprehensible in either language. I'm open to being proved wrong about this, but in any case for now I'm covering Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan, focussing on the early 8th to the late 9th Centuries. The scholarly (as opposed to the religious) history of the text in these other countries has yet to be written in English.

Texts

Sanskrit 

We now know that the Sanskrit text of the standard Heart Sutra was composed in China. We don't yet know where the extended text was composed.

The main exemplar of the Sanskrit, the manuscript from Hase Temple (Jap. Hasedera 長谷寺 aka Haseji), is said to have been brought from China in the early 9th Century. The manuscript also includes a Sanskrit text, a Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit, and a copy of the Chinese translation by Prajñā (T 253). Müller's 1884 diplomatic edition was based on hand copies of the Hasedera manuscript. Vaidya's edition is based on it or on Müller's edition. Conze relies heavily on Müller.

It's not mentioned on the Hasedera website and it does not seem to have been digitised. It's unclear  to me where this document is now. 

Perhaps a few dozen Sanskrit manuscripts survive from Nepal, largely in European collections and largely undocumented. For example, the catalogue of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project has many likely candidates that have not been fully described. However, these 19th and 20th Century copies are of little use in studying the text. In 2014, I described a manuscript from Nepal digitised as part of the Endangered Archives Program. Manuscript EAP676/2/5 required 142 footnotes to detail all the omissions, additions, and errors. These manuscripts are the result of many generations of copying without error checking because the scribes did not know Sanskrit. The  resulting documents are objects of magic and worship, not intended to be read. The effort required to describe each in detail is probably not worth it.

It seems that the standard and extended texts in Sanskrit may have been made from a different ancestor text (unrelated to T 252). The standard Sanskrit texts all contain extra-negations that make no sense, e.g. na prāptiḥ → na prāptir na aprātiḥ and in the nidānas: na avidyā → na vidyā na avidyā. These additions are present in the Hōryūji (法隆寺) manuscript and the Amoghavajra Chinese transliteration (T 256), our principal sources for the Sanskrit standard text.  Of the extended texts, these extra negations are found in the Hasedera ms. but not in any of the Chinese translations or the Nepalese manuscripts.

Sanskrit users were to be found in small numbers outside of India in antiquity, mainly working as translators.


Tibetan Texts

The one place that the extended text was definitely in use was Tibet because there it became the Heart Sutra. The standard text was largely overlooked although copies of the standard text transliterated in Tibetan script and translated into Tibetan language are amongst the cache of Heart Sutra texts from Dunhuang. 

Jonathan Silk (1994) has described two canonical recensions of the extended text in Tibet (TibA and TibB) in detail. TibA is in the tantra section of the Kanjur, while TibB is in the Prajñāpāramitā section. There is considerable variation and hybridisation between the two texts in the fourteen extant editions of the Kanjur, most of which are xylograph printings. Ben Nourse has linked the two Tibetan canonical recensions to the two versions of the text found at Dunhuang but has not yet published this work.

What Silk's study highlights, far better than Conze's rather chaotic work on the Sanskrit, is that the history of this text is complex. Even in this short text from the mid 7th Century, there are major variants before the end of the 8th Century, and dozens of variations have come down to us. Manuscripts both diverge and converge so that the usual stemma diagram of simple binary branches (based on Darwin's evolutionary tree?) is entirely inadequate to the task. The tree metaphor has strictly limited applicability (see my essay Evolution: Trees and Braids. 27.12.2013).

In the Dunhuang cache there is a T 215 transliterated in Tibetan script, a Tibetan translation of T 251, extended texts corresponding to TibA and TibB, as well as one or two hybrid texts that combine features of standard and extended texts.

Far more than in other traditions, Mahāyana Buddhists actively changed their sacred texts over time creating a plethora of versions. 

Chinese Texts

The extended text is seldom, if ever, referred to in China where the standard text (T 251) is used exclusively. However, five versions of the extended text are preserved in the Chinese canon. Chinese and Japanese commentaries are all on the standard version. At least two modern translations of these texts can be found on the internet (e.g. T 252 and T 253) but to the best of my knowledge, none has been published. 

Representing R1 we have:

• T 253, translated by Bānruò 般若 (*Prajñā), with Lìyán 利言 et al.788 CE.
• T 254, translated by Zhìhuì lún 智慧輪 (*Prajñācakra), 861 CE. 
• T 255, translated from the Tibetan by Chos grub (aka Fǎchéng 法成), 856 CE.
• T 257, translated by Dānapāla, 1005 CE.

And representing R2 we have:

• T 252, translated by Fǎyuè 法月 (Skt. *Dharmacandra) with Lìyán 利言 ca. 741 CE

It is interesting that Lìyán 利言 was involved in both T 252 and T 253. I cannot find much information about him. We need a qualified Sinologist to look into the attributions and the dates associated with these texts. I cannot help but wonder if Prajñā (Bānruò 般若) and Prajñācakra (Zhìhuì lún 智慧輪) are definitely two different people. On the other hand, the two texts do have quite major differences.

T 255 was found in the Dunhuang cache.

TibA and TibB are both versions of R1. 

The structure of the Extended Text

The extended text adds material at the beginning and the end of the standard text. As we know, the standard text was considered by Chinese Buddhists to lack essential features of a Buddhist Sutra, specifically the opening phrase "thus have I heard", a statement of the place and occasion for the teaching, a statement of who was in the audience, the presence of the Buddha or the Buddha's invitation to speak; it does not conclude with an endorsement of the speaker (if it was not the Buddha), or an exhortation to disseminate the text, or the audience rejoicing in the teaching and committing to practice it.

The point is also made by Shāmén Yuánzhào 沙門圓照, in 794 CE, i.e. “However, [the Heart Sūtra] only has the main text and no nidāna or exhortation to disseminate” (但有正宗並 無序分及流通分。T 2157,  55.878c08). 

The extended versions add precisely these aspects.

It was previously thought that the longer text came first. This would be very unusual for an India text and is this not consistent with the India origins thesis. Neither Indian nor Chinese Buddhists would have removed the essential features of a sūtra from the extended version. Either could have added them. I'm not sure about Tibetans as I'm not so familiar with their textual practices, but they also seem unlikely to have removed these features. By far the most likely scenario, especially given the facts that have emerged in the last five years is that the extended version was created (probably twice) on the basis of the standard text.

Opening

In both recensions the standard opening paragraph is woven into the extended version, whereas the closing section (rejoicing) is simply tacked on after the dhāraṇī.

It appears that all the surviving versions contain a mistake that must go back to a common ancestor. Where in the standard text, Avalokiteśvara examined (vyavalokayati sma) the five branches of experience (pañca skandhāḥ) and saw (paśyati sma) that they are devoid of svabhāva (svabhāva-śunyan), the extended text inadvertently has vyavalokayati sma again for paśyati sma. The combination of "look/examine" (vyava√lok) and "see" (√paś) is not present in the Chinese, but is a canny addition to the Sanskrit text by whoever forged it. The combination of "look" and "see" works the same in Sanskrit as it does in English. The two languages also share the cognitive metaphor: TO SEE IS TO KNOW.  The difference is between seeking and finding, and it is lost in all the extant Sanskrit extended version and in both recensions the Tibetan as well.

By contrast the Chinese versions of the Extended text retain the Chinese syntax of the standard version, with just one verb, in which, Avalokiteśvara "clearly sees the five branches are absent" (zhàojiàn wǔyùn jiē kōng照見五蘊皆空). T 253 and 254 show further conflation with the standard text when they add to this "[he is] parted from all misery"  (lí zhū kǔ è 離諸苦厄。) which reflects the standard text's "transcending all miseries" (dù yī qiè kǔ è 度一切苦厄 。).

Another point of difference is the audience. Recension 1 has the Buddha on the Vulture Hill "with a great congregation of bhikṣus and a great congregation of bodhisatvas" (mahatā bhikṣusaṃghena sārdhaṃ mahatā ca bodhisatvasaṃghena). Bodhisatvasaṃgha is an unusual term. T 257 adds the detail that 1250 monks are present (與大苾芻眾千二百五十人俱).

The reason for believing that T 252 is a second Recension is that the details, while formulaic, are substantially different from the other versions in any language, while the other texts are all similar (though certainly not identical).  T 252 also specifies the size of the assembled congregations "together with a great bhikṣu congregation of  100,000 and 77,000 bodhisatva mahāsatvas in all" (與大比丘眾滿百千人，菩薩摩訶薩七萬七千人俱) and then names Avalokiteśvara, Mañjuśrī, and Maitreya as the leaders of the bodhisatvas. 

Closing

The closing passage of R1 is several paragraphs. Avakokiteśavara concludes, the Bhagavan emerges from his samādhi and praises Avalokiteśvara, Śārputra rejoices, then the whole world rejoices and everyone commits to practising the teaching. In R2 this is all condensed to a single generic paragraph, which matches the last part of R1.

Summary

I've said many times that the Heart Sutra has been neglected by academia but it has also been the victim of mistakes and misdirections that might have made it a less attractive prospect for academic study that its immense popularity amongst Buddhists implied.

If the standard text has been neglected, then outside of Tibetan religious circles the extended text has been abandoned. There are no studies of the extended text that I am aware of, other than those produced by the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan religious figures. Thus there is scope for continuing study. 

Many questions about the extended text remain open, including:

• Why are there two recensions?
• When was the Heart Sutra extended and by whom? 
• Where the extensions added in Chinese, Sanskrit, or perhaps Tibetan?
• Was the text known in India? 
• Where do the dates and attributions of the Chinese texts come from?

I hope to be able to begin to address some of these questions in the coming weeks or months.

~~oOo~~

Did The Heart Sutra Ever Go To India?

For the longest time it was assumed that the Heart Sutra was composed in India, a product of the larger Prajñāpāramitā movement. The conventional wisdom was that Buddhism flowed in only one direction along the Silk Road, from India to China. Edward Conze placed the composition of the Heart Sutra in about the 4th Century, along with the Diamond Sutra, as part of a trend of abbreviation. This picture has completely fallen apart. Every detail of it has been contradicted by subsequent research.

Rather, the Heart Sutra is a Chinese text, composed, in the mid seventh century, mainly of passages copied from Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation, with a spell from the Dhāraṇīsamucaya. Importantly, it now seems certain that the Heart Sutra was composed after Xuanzang returned from his pilgrimage so, whatever his involvement, he could not have spread the text to India. So the questions of who did spread the text and when remains open. There is also the question of who added the opening and closing passages of the extended text.

I'd been wondering about what evidence there was of the Heart Sutra in India. To the best of my knowledge, the oldest "Indian" document is the Nepalese hooked-script palm-leaf manuscript (Cambridge ADD 1680) dated on paleographical grounds to the 13th Century. The evidence for the text in India prior to this turns out to be preserved only in Tibetan, in the form of a translation of the extended text attributed to Vimalamitra (pictured above) and several commentaries that are attributed to Indians who travelled to Tibet.

The Indo-Tibetan Commentaries

In 1988, Donald Lopez published The Heart Sūtra Explained, a study of seven Heart Sutra commentaries preserved in Tibetan. These were composed by authors with Indian names or whose biographies refer to them as Indian. They are:

• Kamalaśīla. (c 740-795). Visited Tibet.
• Vimalamitra. Travelled to Tibet late 8th C. 
• Atīśa. (ca. 982-1054). Visited Tibet 1042 CE. 
• Vajrapāṇi. 11th C. Lived in Nepal and later Tibet.
• Mahājana. Little is known. Visited Tibet 11th C.
• Praśāstrasena. Nothing is known. 
• Jñānamitra. Nothing is known.  

Lopez's later book, Elaborations on Emptiness (1996) adds another "Indian" commentary, by Śrīsiṃha, but the author was in fact Chinese born and educated. For my purposes this is not an "Indian" commentary.

Of Praśāstrasena and Jñānamitra we know nothing at all besides being attributed as commentators on the Heart Sutra and, in Jñānamitra's case, one other commentary extant in Tibetan. Lopez (1988: 8-13) considers that neither went to Tibet, but his reason for saying so is an argument from absence, i.e. there is no extant record of their presence in Tibet. Of course this does make it less likely that they went to Tibet, but arguments from absence are weak. The men who were recorded got swept up in Tibetan politics, so perhaps the others simply kept a low profile. 

The rest—Vimalamitra, Vajrapāṇi, Kamalaśīla, Atīśa, Mahājana—are all recorded as having visited Tibet although such traditions may date from centuries after the events. Of these, Vimalamitra and Kamalaśīla are considerably earlier than the others, both men having lived in the 8th Century. The Tibetan Kanjur credits the translation of the Heart Sutra to Vimalamitra and it is to him that I now want to turn.

Vimalamitra

Joel Gruber, whose doctoral dissertation was on the biography of Vimalamitra (2016) outlines the salient facts for a website called The Treasury of Lives. However, "biography" is a term that can only be used loosely in this context. The story of Vimalamitra is a hagiography, a religious legend rather than a reliable historical account. Such stories were never intended as history. Rather, they celebrate religious values, or they reinforce the perceived exceptionalism of particular forms of Buddhism (in this case, Dzogchen), or they serve a political purpose such as linking a figure to a lineage as part of a legitimation strategy. Gruber likens biographies of Buddhist saints to modern day superhero movies, except that secular leaders do not claim to have superman in their lineage.

These "Lives" play the role of what Joseph Bulbulia has called “charismatic signalling.” The primary purpose of charismatic signalling is to provide a way to “align prosocial motivations” in large religious movements: “Charismatic culture supports cooperative outcomes by aligning powerful emotions, motivations, and intentions among potentially anonymous partners, toward collective goals” (Attwood 2019). The goals of communities vary and, in Tibet, local cultural norms were every bit as influential as introduced Buddhist (specifically Tantric, and Dzogchen) norms.

Because each community reworked the story to suit their needs, there is a great deal of variety in the details of the hagiographies. And some of the stories were only codified centuries after the putative events of the putative characters' lives. So we have to use these stories judiciously. As Gruber notes of Vimalamitra, who is thought to have been active in the 8th Century:

"Vimalamitra’s biography began to take shape in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, during the formative years of a distinctly emerging Nyingma tradition." The Treasury of Lives. 

Despite his apparently important role in early Tibetan Buddhism, Vimalamitra is not written about for 400 years. Two commentarial texts are widely accepted as attributable to Vimalamitra:

"Despite these concerns, the legitimacy of two of Vimalamitra’s works found in the early imperial catalogues of texts, The Extensive Commentary to the Heart Sūtra (shes rab snying po’i rgya cher 'grel pa) and The Commentary to the Seven Hundred Stanza Prajñāpāramitā (shes rab kyi pha rol du phyin pa bdun brgya pa'i 'grel pa), remains near certain."

That is to say, his role as Indian saint and magical progenitor of Dzogchen is primary for those who wrote his biography, but Gruber infers a kernel of historical fact. On the other hand:

"We know that texts were attributed to Vimalamitra to establish the Indic pedigree of Nyingma texts that were labeled either too Tibetan or Chinese" (Gruber 2016: 98)

As flawed as Reggie Ray's Buddhist Saints in India is, the basic of idea of the life of a saint following a template is correct. It's just that each religious community seemed to work from a slightly different version of the template. Unfortunately, this means that the undisputed facts are slim. And I say, unfortunately, only because the point of his essay is historical and the ahistorical hagiographical stories are the only sources we have.

Life

According to the medieval Tibetan sources, Vimalamitra was an Indian Buddhist born in Western India who studied Tantric Buddhism in Bodhagāyā (which is in Eastern India). Gruber notes that Chinese sources on Vimalamitra contradict this and refer to Vimalamitra as Tibetan, but the Chinese stories were every bit as ahistorical.

A relatively late detail makes him a student of the foremost Tantric exegete of the day, Buddhaguhya (also roughly 8th Century), but this seems to have been interpolated to boost his credentials. Vimalamitra excelled in his studies along with his Dharma brother Jñānasūtra. The two play foundational roles in the mythology of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. One night both had a dream in which Vajrasatva directed them to travel to China to study with Śrīsiṃha (more on him below). Vimalamitra and Jñānasūtra both journey to China, but they are separated.

"While returning to India following his stay in China, [Vimalamitra] encountered his dharma brother, Jñānasūtra, to whom he revealed some of his experiences and realizations under the tutelage of Śrī Siṃha, thus persuading Jñānasūtra also to pack his bowl and seek this most profound doctrine in China." The Treasury of Lives. 

Gruber comments that "The series of events that follow mark a peculiar development that seems intended to elevate Jñānasūtra to a position of lineal authority over Vimalamitra." In other words the story is not simply a hagiography, but it also has a normative, even political agenda.

Meanwhile, Vimalamitra's hagiography now intersects with the hagiography of the first Buddhist king of Tibet, Trisong Detsen (khri srong lde btsan, c.742-c.796). The king sets out to attract Indian paṇḍitas to his kingdom and Vimalamitra is one of those who answer the call. In keeping with Tibetan myth, there is local opposition, which Vimalamitra overcomes through manifesting his magical powers (he reduces a statue to ash and then reconstitutes it).

Little is known about Srīsiṃha (Lopez 1996: 12). He is said by Tibetans to have been born in China and to have studied at Mt Wutai before travelling to Bodhgāyā in India. Srīsiṃha was a teacher to Vairocana, who was one of the first Tibetan students of Śāntarakṣita in Tibet. Kamalaśīla was an Indian student of Śāntarakṣita. He is said to have been murdered after defeating a Chinese Chan master in debate in Tibet. So these figures are all closely tied to the early dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet. Srīsiṃha seems not to have gone to Tibet himself. Vimalamitra is credited with the translation of the version of the Heart Sutra in the Kanjur. But we have no idea how legitimate this attribution is.

I now want to back-track and consider the idea that Vimalamitra went to China, since if he did visit China he could have picked up the Heart Sutra there. 

The China Connection

This detail of Vimalamitra travelling to China to study tantra should strike us as odd. Joel Gruber comments in his PhD dissertation, "As far as I am aware, there is not another instance in which an Indian Buddhist departs the birthplace of the Dharma in order to study more efficacious Buddhist meditative techniques in China" (2016: 61). So how credible is this odd detail? Dylan Esler says:

"Although Chinese sources consider Vimalamitra (Ch. P'i mo la) to be a Tibetan, his Indian origin is more likely, since most of his works are written in a distinctly Indian scholastic style, and his association with the tantric movement is sufficient to explain his attraction to the simultaneous approach without making him a proponent of Ch'an." (37)

It's not entirely clear which Chinese sources Esler is referring to. We do know that Xuanzang refers to a man whose name is transliterated as Pímòluó-mìduōluó 毘末羅蜜多羅 and means "Stainless-friend (Wúgòu yǒu 無垢友) which is what vimala-mitra means (Records of the Western Region. T 2087, 51: 892b4). However,

"Xuanzang’s Vimalamitra was the circa seventh-century Kaśmīri scholar accused of being a proponent of the Hīnayāna and an enemy of the Mahāyāna. The Vimalamitra who wrote the Commentary to the Seven Hundred Stanzas and Commentary to the Heart Sūtra was clearly an advocate of the Mahāyāna. (Gruber 2016: 102-3)

Clearly more than one person was called Vimalamitra. There seem to have been two distinct individuals:

1. Vimalamitra (I) was a Kashmiri Ābhidharmika whom Xuanzang might have met in India. 
2. Vimalamitra (II) an early Dzogchen practitioner later associated with Nyingma and Śrīsiṃha.

Gruber notes that Giuseppe Tucci and Paul Demiéville tried to link the two but they lived a century apart and this is not credible. We know from my previous research that the Heart Sutra was composed after Xuanzang's return to China and after 654 when Atikūṭa translated the Dhāraṇīsamuccaya. Vimalamitra's commentary is largely concerned with the bodhisatva-yāna but he does cite the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi aka the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, the earliest systematic tantra that Stephen Hodge dates to ca 640 or a little earlier (2003: 11). Vimalamitra's visit to Tibet seems to be in the 790s.

The connection of Vimalamitra (II) to China turns out to be a late, and highly improbable, attempt to connect him with Śrīsiṃha for the purposes of strengthening the particular Dzogchen lineage he had become associated with. And this seems to be the main purpose of the Vimalamitra (II) character. Gruber continues:

"A majority of Vimalamitra’s earliest biographies, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries... make no mention of the trip to China featured within the Great History. In response to [the Nyingtik tantras] low profile in India, the Great History informs the reader that the only copies of the Dzokchen tantras,which originated in India, were in China with Śrī Siṃha." (Gruber 2016: 99). 

I recently discovered the late John McRae's (2003) Rules of Zen Studies, the third of which is Precision implies inaccuracy. In this view, numbers, dates, and details are literary tropes. Details supplied are a function of temporal distance from the events. This rule clearly applies also to this Dzogchen lineage and to the Heart Sutra in general. Over time, Buddhists add details, clarify vagueness, specify relationships, and smooth over contradictions. Later stories are full of the kinds of details that lull historians into a false sense of security, while the earlier stories, though more accurate, are so imprecise as to be useless for the purposes of historiography. This detail of this trip to China is not credible. This is unfortunate because, at least in China, Vimalamitra stood a chance of finding a copy of the Heart Sutra.

The Extended Heart Sutra

To the best of my knowledge no comparative study have been made of the extended version of the Heart Sutra. Thus we don't as yet know if the extra parts of the text were composed in Sanskrit or in Chinese. We don't know if the origins of it are discernable. This is yet another basic research task that the Buddhist Studies community has neglected. The overall research program is completely haphazard. 

Perhaps the strangest part of the Heart Sutra story is not that a Chinese non-sūtra was accepted as an Indian sūtra by 661 CE through the production of a forged Sanskrit text and the attribution of the "translation" to Xuanzang. The strangest part is that anyone would take this version of the Heart Sutra that is accepted as a sūtra and make the effort to turn it into a sūtra by adding the missing parts that Chinese Buddhists were willing to overlook. Thus it is often assumed that the nidāna, etc, must have been added for the Indian market if not by an actual Indian.

We just keep assuming that the text has a connection with India. Chinese Buddhists accepted that the Heart Sutra was Indian despite the fact that the text fails the basic test of sutrahood - does not start evaṃ maya srotraṃ, doesn't specify the occasion, does not feature the Buddha speaking or endorsing the speech of another, and does not feature the audience venerating the teaching. Of course this did strike 19th Century Western scholars as odd but Asian Buddhists seemed very certain about it. We can now see that the Chinese Buddhist community were duped into believing the Heart Sutra to be Indian by the forgery of the Sanskrit text (I presume a physical document was produced) and the attribution of the "translation" to Xuanzang who had been to India.

Because the standard text does lack the basic features of a sūtra no one is surprised to find a version of the text in which these missing features have been supplied. It is assumed, again that these details were supplied in India. One argument would be that it is not surprising that the Chinese would not add these details because they accepted the standard text as authentic. But one could equally argue that the discomfort with the lack lingered. We have noted that Chinese Buddhists continued to add details to the Heart Sutra myth, including a forged "earlier" translation by Kumārajīva that is first mentioned in 730 CE. The tension caused by this pseudo-sūtra seems to have taken some time to wear off.

No one seems to have considered that another place where the tension of the missing details would have been strongly felt was Tibet. And, unlike India, Tibet shares a border with China. After the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) Tibetans occupied Dunhuang and remained in power there until 848. Note that this period covers the presumed time-frame of Vimalamitra (And Kamalaśīla). As a consequence, many Tibetan texts were found in the library cave at Dunhuang. We've known for at least 35 years that copies of the standard Heart Sutra text in Tibetan exist amongst the Dunhuang cache of texts (Zwalf 1985. See also the transcription of British Library Or.8212/77 by Joy Vriens). Tibetan versions of the standard text were not included in the Tibetan Canon. Also found at Dunhuang are a variety of versions of the extended text as well as texts that are hybrids of two.

Perhaps a Tibetan added the missing details? And when the Indians went to Tibet they encountered the new text there.

Is there any evidence linking the Heart Sutra to India?

Indian Evidence

We have all taken the Tibetan versions of the "Indian" commentaries as evidence for the Heart Sutra in India in the 8th Century. Where we know anything at all about the men involved, we know that they went to Tibet and little more. What does this tell us about India? We are assuming that they all encountered the text in India but there is no documentary evidence of the text in India at any date. The oldest Nepalese manuscript of the extended Heart Sutra is Cambridge ADD 1680 dated to the 13th Century on paleographical grounds.

The earliest dated Chinese translation of the extended version is credited to an Indian monk whose name has been reconstructed as Dharmacandra (T252). The Zhēnyuán Catalogue published ca 800 CE records that Dharmacandra (法月, 653–743) was from Magadha and travelled to China via Kucha arriving in Chang'an in 732 (T. 2157; 878b12–879a5). He is said to have translated the extended Heart Sutra ca 741 CE, the same year he left China for Khotan/Kashgar (where he died in 743). Khotan is on the northern border of Tibet. Although he is said to have arrived in China with texts, he was only able to translate them with the help of his local disciple Lìyán (利言). Who is to say that he did not encounter the text in Central Asia or China? 

In fact, the nidāna of T 252 is very different from the other Chinese translations, the extant Sanskrit, and the Tibetan recensions. They all mention a bodhisatvasaṃgha (an unusual term) but T 252 also uniquely gives the numbers of bhikṣus (100,000) and bodhisatvas (77,000) present. Dharmacandra's final passage is also much shorter and different in structure to all the other versions. So at least two recensions of the extended Heart Sutra exist, not counting the hybrid texts from Dunhuang. It is possible that the missing details were supplied more than once, but that one version became the standard.

Donald Lopez says:

"Among the esoteric teachings given by Śrīsiṃha to Vairocana, which he in turn gave to [King Trisong Detsen], is [his] tantric commentary on the Heart Sutra, further testifying to its wide appeal in Pāla India, even among tantric yogins" (1996: 13).

If I am right, then this story is the only reference to the Heart Sutra in India, since of the other commentators only Śrīsiṃha did not go to Tibet. On the other hand, Ṣrīsiṃha was in fact Chinese and studied Buddhism in China, and we now know the Heart Sutra was Chinese. And this is a precise detail that implies temporal distance and inaccuracy! Contra Lopez, we know that the text was popular in Pāla-era Tibet but we have no historical evidence whatever of the text in Pāla India whether amongst yogins or anyone. 

There's a special form of bias called the street light effect. In the old story, a man is looking for his keys under the street light. It turns out that he probably dropped his keys elsewhere but he is looking under the street light because that is where the light is. Dunhuang is where the light is. Not only was it an important centre of Buddhism and textual copying during the Tang and Song, but the dry desert environment ensured the survival of artefacts. A large collection of extant documents draws our attention, especially when there is a distinct lacks of texts from India because of the disappearance of Buddhism from India coinciding with the decline and fall of the Pāla Dynasty and the rise of Muslim rulers in Northern India in the 12th Century. 

Still, it is important to consider that, during the very period that Buddhism was being spread to Tibet, Tibetans occupied Dunhuang and much of Gansu, keeping the Chinese out of Central Asia for around 80 years. During the occupation, Tibetans were not only interested the Heart Sutra, as we can see from the many copies they made, but they also tinkered with the text, producing new versions of it. The so-called Indian commentaries are attributed to people who are either unknown to us for any other reason and about whom we literally know nothing, or they are figures whose biographies have been elaborated long after the time when they were supposed to have lived. There is, in fact, no direct evidence of the Heart Sutra from India itself.

Conclusions

Long habit has us associate the Heart Sutra with India. After many years studying the text I'm confident that most of this story is fallacious. The Heart Sutra was composed in China and the Sanskrit text is a forgery. The details of the myth of the Heart Sutra were added later. McRae's third rule of studying Zen—Precision implies inaccuracy—applies.

The "Indian" evidence turns out to be Tibetan evidence. The largely mythical character of Vimalamitra is said to have translated the Heart Sutra and composed a commentary on it. But we know nothing about Vimalamitra with any certainty. His historicity is based on the attribution of these texts to him, so we cannot turn this around and rely on his historicity to authenticate the texts. The attributions are facts but they may not be factual. The texts do exist, but the case of the Heart Sutra is instructive. The Xīnjīng is traditionally thought to be a translation of a Sanskrit text by Xuanzang, but it is not. Xuanzang was probably involved in composing the text, but it was no translation. 

Cambridge manuscript ADD 1680 is dated to the 13th Century, but this is some 500 years after the events which we are seeking to clarify. It doesn't tell us anything. The Dunhuang collections are interesting but under-studied, so it is difficult to draw conclusions. Even so, Dunhuang is nowhere near India and no Sanskrit manuscripts were included in the cache. At the time Vimalamitra was active, Dunhuang was occupied by Tibetans, providing a direct route for the Heart Sutra from China to Tibet.

The historicity of the "Indian" text is rather doubtful. It is certainly not based on any direct evidence. The whole idea of the Heart Sutra in India is really just a series of assumptions. This is not an ontological argument that those assumptions are wrong. Rather, it is an epistemological argument about how we claim to know what we know. Conclusions in the absence of evidence are fatuous. Such evidence as we have has to be interpreted just right in order to support the idea that the text was known in India. And this is not the parsimonious approach. Buddhist Studies is far too reliant on these kinds of assumptions. 

Religious histories and biographies are not objective or neutral. We really need to take a step back and think carefully about the kind of evidence we have available to us on anything related to Buddhism in antiquity. Physical artefacts are few and far between before ca 200-300 CE.  

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

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Campany, Robert F. 1991. “Notes in the Devotional Uses and Symbolic Functions of Sūtra Texts as Depicted in Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tales and Hagiographies.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 14(1): 28-72.

Esler, Dylan. 2005. "The Origins and Early History of rDzogs chen." The Tibet Journal 30(3): 33-62.

Gruber, Joel. 2016a. Vimalamitra: The Legend of an Indian Saint and His Tibetan Emanations. PhD Dissertation, UC Santa Barbara.

Gruber, Joel. 2016b. "Becoming Vimalamitra: Manufacturing the Supernatural in Tibetan Buddhism." In Religion: Super Religion, ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. New York: Macmillan education handbook series.

Gruber, Joel, 2020 "Vimalamitra," Treasury of Lives, accessed May 16, 2020, http://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Vimalamitra/9985.

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McRae, John R. 2003. Seeing Through Zen. University of California Press.

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Zwalf, W. 1985. Buddhism, Art and Faith. London: British Museum.