If You Meet Conze on the Road, Set Fire To Him

Edward Conze is still considered by many to be the doyen of the field of Prajñāpāramitā Studies. He is still described in superlative terms and draws effusive praise verging on adoration from some scholars and religieux. I argued in my recent article (Attwood 2020) that this might not be wholly deserved and that we need to reconsider Conze's contributions (and his character). In that article, I gave some examples of Conze's character and his work on the Heart Sutra that I hoped would make people rethink their attitude to him.

In this essay, I will consider some aspects of Conze's philosophical work prior to his turn to mysticism (ca 1937); in particular, I will consider Conze's attitude to Aristotle's law of noncontradiction. This was the subject of Conze's postgraduate research after earning a German doctorate in philosophy (at the time equivalent to a British Master of Arts degree). Conze himself said that all his later ideas were contained in the book that would have constituted his PhD thesis or Habilitationsschrift, i.e. Der Satz vom Widerspruch "The Principle of Contradiction" (1932). To be clear, he is talking about the same Aristotelian principle, that most modern sources refer to as the law or principle of noncontradiction. The term "noncontradiction" seems to more clearly convey Aristotle's intent. 

Not long after it was printed, Der Satz vom Widerspruch was burned by the Nazis along with other books by communists. As Holger Heine (who recently translated the work into English) tells the story, "almost all of the five hundred copies of the first edition were destroyed [and] Conze's hopes for an academic career in Germany had come to naught" (xiv). There was an unauthorised reprint of 600 copies in 1976, produced by the German Socialist Students Association, however a literature review reveals very few citations of Conze's book or other work from the period up to 1937 when his midlife crisis began. It is safe to say that even Heine's enthusiastic attempts to resuscitate Conze's corpse have not led to signs of life. For someone who gets the kind of sycophantic praise that Heine and others heap on him, Conze remains a very minor figure in the history of early 20th Century Marxist philosophy, let alone philosophy generally. Still, given his elevated status in Prajñāpāramitā studies, those few of us who work in this field ought to at least make an effort to engage with Conze's earlier philosophy, given the influence it had on his later work.

In brief, the law of noncontradiction says that if logical contradictions were allowed, we could not make sense of the world. If I state that a proposition is true, the contrary of that proposition must be false. For example, if it is true that Conze was born in Germany, the contrary, that Conze was not born in Germany must be false. At face value this is trivial, but it has profound implications. In this essay I will explore the law of noncontradiction and Conze's attempt to invalidate it. 

Law of Noncontradiction

For Aristotle, the law of noncontradiction was the most fundamental axiom on which rational thought was based. It is what must be known if anything is to be known. It was not something that could be derived from first principles, but had to be true a priori for rational thinking to work at all. In his Metaphysics Aristotle states the law in at least three ways, which Gottlieb describes as ontological, doxastic, semantic.

“It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation” (Metaphysics IV 3 1005b19–20).

“it is impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not” (Metaphysics IV 3 1005b24 cf.1005b29–30. Emphasis added).”

“And since the contradiction of a statement cannot be true at the same time of the same thing, it is obvious that contraries cannot apply at the same time to the same thing.” (Metaphysics IV 6 1011b13–20).

Quotes are from the Tredennick translation (1933) as found on the Perseus Website.

The law of noncontradiction has to apply at the level of ontology. An object that exists and has certain attributes is not non-existent and lacking those attributes. As Conze puts it:

"We cannot judge that the same man is learned and is also not learned at the same time and in relation to the same group of facts, because in fact he is learned and cannot be not learned at the same time and in relation to the same group of facts" (1934: 207. Emphasis in the original).

At the level of belief, if one rejected it, one's thoughts would be disordered. I cannot logically believe that God exists and that God does not exist, though of course I can be undecided for various reasons. Aristotle notably makes a distinction between what someone says and what they believe. He is thinking of the latter, since lies are eminently possible.

And it must apply at the level of assertion because if it is not true then no communication would be possible. Communication depends on agreements amongst a language using community on what linguistic signs mean. If the law of noncontradiction does not hold then no such agreement is possible. 

The principle goes deeper than this. Being fundamental, it must apply to all things and the commonality of all things is their existence. This principle can be stated as "Being is not and cannot be non-being" (Conze 1934: 208). Although, as we will see, Conze never accepted the universal validity of this and states the opposite in his Heart Sutra commentary using a reduction of Suzuki's logic of sokuhi, i.e. "A is not-A" (on which see Suzuki, Negation, and Bad Buddhist Philosophy). 

Although we cannot argue for the law of noncontradiction on first principles, there are some approaches to justifying it.

Arguments for the Law of Noncontradiction

As evidence for the applicability of the axiom, we can cite the fact that reality is somewhat comprehensible, our thoughts are somewhat ordered, and communication is somewhat possible. Unlike traditional transcendental arguments I am hedging here (using "somewhat") and I will get into this shortly. The point is that with effort we can attain a very high degree of comprehensibility as represented in a vast body of mathematical formulae used in science to describe patterns of regularity we experience when we examine the universe. The intricate web of computers and communications networks that we call the Internet is one physical manifestation of this. If the principle of noncontradiction did not hold, something like the internet would be impossible. Some level of order is required, and though in practical terms this need not be absolute, it must be substantial.

Now let's address the issue of hedging. Aristotelian logic is the foundation of modern logic, it is not the whole of modern logic. The problem with reality is that our knowledge of it is necessarily indirect and incomplete. Aristotle sets out the ideal case in which we have perfect knowledge and reason infallibly. This is useful because it is a model for how things work under ideal conditions. If we did solve problems using reasoning, this is what it would look like. Of course we have known since the mid 1960s that this is not how we solve problems and that 90% of us routinely fall for simple logical fallacies. 

We always operate at some remove from the ideal. Our knowledge is inevitably partial, and there is always the possibility of unknown unknowns (aka the black swan effect). Still, the fact that reality is comprehensible at all is a sign that Aristotle's ideal is relevant to our world. The better our knowledge of the world, the closer we can come to this ideal.

Aristotle dismisses the idea that this axiom requires proof. It cannot be proved because it has to be in place in order for the notion of proving something to mean anything. However, what we can do is refute the opposite. Consider the contrary, i.e. the case where logical contradiction is the norm, i.e. A is not-A. In this case, whatever is true is also false. And whatever is false is also true. One could never know anything because whatever one knew would ipso facto also be unknown. One could not get out of bed in the morning because neither "bed" nor "morning" would stand for anything. Bed and not-bed are indistinguishable. If contradiction is the norm, then one is in a realm of utter nihilism. If what I said could mean literally anything at all, then utterances would convey no information. A lie would be true and a truth would be a lie; "turn left in 200m" would be indistinguishable from "eat a peach while the sun is out" or "the yellow flower is wilting".

Refuting the contrary does not prove the proposition. All we can say is that any scenario in which the law does not hold would be incomprehensible. And since our world is comprehensible, we have to assume that the law holds. 

In his rejection of the law of noncontradiction, Conze takes an exclusively logical approach and in particular his argument against the law of noncontradiction rests on the absolute validity of the law of noncontradiction. Aristotle warned against exactly this: "You cannot engage in argument unless you rely on [the law of noncontradiction]. Anyone who claims to reject [the law of noncontradiction] 'for the sake of argument' is similarly misguided." ‒ Gottlieb (2019).

Another reason that we might hedge on noncontradiction in the modern world is quantum physics. In this branch of physics we describe the state of a subatomic entity using the Schrödinger equation, and this gives us the probability of, for example, finding a given particle at any point in space at any given time. Unfortunately, the Schrödinger equation usually has more than one valid answer. Physicists typically take this to have an ontological counterpart in which the particle is in multiple locations (or states) called a superposition. However, once the particle (or the system of interest) interacts with its environment, then the possibilities collapse to one state with 100% certainty. Again this is interpreted as an ontology in which the interaction causes the cloud of possibilities to collapse down to one, also known as the collapse of the "wave function". This term "wave function" is confusingly used both for the abstract mathematics that describes the state of the particle and for the corresponding physical reality. In this view, the wave function is the particle or, more importantly, the particle is a wave function. The nature of subatomic entities is wave functions in fields.

In the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time, breaking the law of noncontradiction. This was intended as a criticism of the idea that "observation" caused the collapse of the wave function. Eugene Wigner went further and suggested that the observation had to be made by a sentient being, that somehow "consciousness" caused the collapse of wave functions. Not only was Wigner's wrinkle nonsense, but it is generally considered that the whole idea of observation is poorly defined, discussed in vague terms, and doesn't qualify as science. Still, we are left with the fact that, in quantum metaphysics, reality behaves in counterintuitive ways that apparently break the law of noncontradiction.

Think about a visual observation. A photon leaves the system of interest and strikes the retina, and causes an electrochemical cascade partly shaped by the frequency of the photon and what kind of cell it hit. This cascade arrives in the visual cortex and is interpreted as a visual stimulus. At no point does the eye or brain physically interact with the system. The eye is a passive receiver. Wigner wanted to say, and many people wanted to believe, that looking at something (or perceiving it) changes it. In reality the causality is the other way around. Changes in the system, resulting in the emission or reflection of photons, cause us to observe the system. Without that change our eye receives no photons. So observation by a human being cannot be the cause of anything. 

Conze was certainly ignorant of quantum physics and did not invoke it in his work. On the other hand, Aristotle was concerned only with the visible world and with the functioning of human reasoning as understood in his time. Which brings us to Conze's views on Aristotle.

Conze's Rejection of the Principle of Noncontradiction

Conze has said that all of his later thinking is contained in Der Satz vom Widerspruch. The book purports to be a Marxist critique of Aristotle. Typically, Marxists eschew the mechanical materialism of the nineteenth century and replace it with a materialism inspired by Hegel. In Hegel's dialectic, opposites (thesis and antithesis) clash and this leads to a resolution in which the extremes are unified (synthesis).

Marx and Engels "stressed the dialectical development of human knowledge, socially acquired in the course of practical activity [and] social practice alone provides the test of the correspondence of idea with reality—i.e., of truth." Britannica. This aspect of their thought is distinct from historical materialism and class struggle.

Conze attempts to explain human knowledge as a clash between magic and logic. However, rather than casting them in a dialectical relationship, which would see the triumph of a synthesis of the two, Conze sees the clash of thesis and antithesis as leading to the hegemony of one or the other. And as a result Conze is caught in a cleft stick. On one side is the hegemony of logic, which Conze loathes but relies on to make his point; on the other is the hegemony of magic, something he believes in but cannot use to make his argument (since magical arguments are not persuasive). Conze makes no bones about his view that magic is superior to logic. He outspokenly asserted this superiority in his Prajñāpāramitā work, despite continuing to tacitly use logic throughout. Using logic to show how logic doesn't work is not a very convincing rhetorical strategy.

Thus, also though the idea that truth is socially defined might have some merit, the argument that this leads us to necessarily abandoning the law of noncontradiction is still nonsensical. Rather, noncontradiction becomes even more important as a yardstick for truth. In the most extreme version of this approach, truth is that which does not contradict social norms. Even if we accept the full-on relativism of Conze's Marxism, the social nature of logic does not eliminate the need for the law of noncontradiction. The hardcore relativist imagines that they stand outside any system and can see the merits of each. This God's eye view is a nonsense however. Despite being a refugee, Conze was very much a man of his time, culture, and class, i.e. a minor German aristocrat of the early 20th Century. Conze's views on truth are just as socially conditioned as anyone else's. 

Unfortunately, Conze's antipathy to science has blinded him to the possibility that some observations are not culturally defined. Everyone experiences gravity, for example, and if they took the time to measure it, everyone would find that the acceleration due to gravity is ~ 9.8 ms^-2. We may have different accounts of gravity, but some are more accurate than others. As I pointed out in my article on Conze, the historian Carl R. Trueman makes the salient point that objectivity is not neutral or unbiased (2010: 27ff). Objectivity by its very nature excludes the majority of explanations. Objectively, magic is not real; astrology does not describe the influence of the planets on human beings, and "A is not-A" is nonsense.

Marxist ideas about materialism assert an objective world existing independently of the mind with the corollary that mind can exist independently of matter. The latter idea has long been disproved, but in the 1930s there may well have been educated people who sincerely believed in it. Conze, rejected the idea of an objective world, and instead substituted a magical world. To Conze, such ideas were axiomatic and he made no attempt to defend them. He simply asserted the existence of magic and of a magical reality. Citing my essay on Conze's place in Prajñāpāramitā research:

As he says, his “life-long acceptance of magic... has not been so much due to theoretical considerations as to the early acquired intuitive certainty that beyond, or behind, the veil of the deceptive sensory appearances, there lies a reality of magical, or occult, forces” ( Conze 1979: I 32). And in his view science “…has little cognitive value, but is rather a bag of tricks invented by God-defying people to make life increasingly unbearable on Earth and finally to destroy it” (1979: I 32).

These words were written at the end of his life, but they do appear to reflect an attitude that is apparent in his early philosophical work (1934, 1935, 1937).

It is true that magical thinking exists even today. I know many people who sincerely believe that the Heart Sutra is magical and who assume that by studying it some of that magic will rub off on me. And when I shrug and say, "magic isn't real", they are genuinely dismayed. Just because some people are attracted to the idea does not mean that magic is real or the magical thinking is appropriate to decision making. Generally speaking, magical thinking leads to poor decisions. 

Seeing Conze's work on Prajñāpāramitā in the light of his earlier work, as he suggested, is instructive. He is already using the terms "God", "the One", and "the Absolute" as synonyms when talking about mysticism in his 1934 presentation to the Aristotelian Society. Clearly he is drawing on several different traditions: Christianity, Neoplatonism, German idealism, and Theosophy. He even cites Mahāyāna Buddhism in passing. It is useful to read this paper since it helps us understand Conze's turn to Buddhism in terms of his earlier embrace of mysticism, which he defines as a state of "complete union with God, with the One". One can see much of his later attitude to Prajñāpāramitā in these earlier works. In another early essay, Conze notes, for example, the tendency of Mahāyāna Buddhism (amongst other ideologies) to what he calls mystical pantheism:

"Mysticism develops into mystical pantheism under two conditions, namely, that the state of ecstasy is considered to give a true, the only true image of reality, and further that the one object of ecstasy is expressly stated to include all reality." (1935: 212)

He also says:

"Generally mystical pantheists do not devote much attention to the consequences of their ideas on logical thinking, its categories and laws." (1935: 212)

This describes the later Conze and the way he writes about the Heart Sutra in 1946. For Conze, the mystical pantheist, "nothing except the One and infinite Absolute" exists and:

"All differences are then absolutely reduced to nought. Since contradictions are not possible without differences, the [law of noncontradiction] is meaningless and inapplicable." (1935: 212)

In effect, Conze shoehorns the epistemic rhetoric of Prajñāpāramitā into his own idiosyncratic mystical metaphysics. In my article I called this Conze's idiodoxy. Behind all of Conze's meandering thought is a conviction that reality is magical.

Now I could work through Conze's argument, taking it point by point. But we can short circuit this discussion by taking a step back. Conze's argument is, in immortal words of Michael Palin, "a series of connected statements intended to establish a definite proposition". Conze's aim is to discredit logic itself and to propose magic as the viable alternative, but in doing so he used a logical argument. Moreover, his target is specifically the principle of noncontradiction. "The validity of thought has a social origin and meaning... the delusion that a supersocial validity can be reached [using logic] has its social roots" (1934: 42).

In Conze's view, validity is merely a matter of belief. And belief is a matter of social convention. In his view if we all decided that logic was not valid, then it would not be. And this is how he imagines the world working prior to the systematisation of reasoning in ancient Athens. He argues that before logic, people lived by magical thinking rather than using reason. And moreover logic is inimical to magic:

Magic and logic are irreconcilable and unintelligible in terms of one another... this mutual hostility between them makes it impossible to regard magic as a form of logic or logic as a form of magic. (1934: 33)

In other words, there is a contradiction between magic and logic. And this concrete contradiction is central to Conze's argument that the principle of contradiction is not valid. Worse, if we say that the principle of noncontradiction does not hold, then it is equally valid to say that it does hold. If we allow contradiction, the result is nonsense. Conze wants to distinguish magical thinking from logical thinking, but a consequence of his conclusion is that logical thinking is magical thinking. In other words Conze is deeply confused about logic. And as noted there is nothing dialectical about this approach. Conze is not interested in synthesis, he is interested in defending magic.

Some will say that in jumping to the end I have misrepresented Conze's argument. So, even though the conclusion is self-defeating and based on false assumptions, I want to loop back for a brief look at that argument. There is some merit in locating logic or at least reasoning in the social sphere. Long time readers of mine will recall my enthusiasm for the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2011, 2017). Like Conze, Mercier and Sperber attack the classical understanding of reasoning. However, they do not share Conze's ulterior motive.

Classically, reason is a faculty of pure logic, free from external influences such as emotions, beliefs, or social conditions. Mercier and Sperber show that evidence has been accumulating from the mid 1960s decisively showing that this faculty doesn't exist. We can use logic, but most of us do not use it routinely. What we call reasoning has two aspects in their thought. In their earlier work (2011) they made the case that reasoning evolved to assist group decision making. Members of a group will propose different courses of action and then the group will use reason to weigh the relative merits of each proposition. In this view reasoning is social and even argumentative. By contrast, individual problem-solving tends to be based on "on intuitions of relevance." (Mercier & Sperber 2017: 43). The later work (2017) characterises reasoning as a process of producing reasons for actions after the fact. The evidence on reasoning shows that our decision making is based on many unconscious inferential processes. We decide and then, if need be, we produce reasons that seem to plausibly account for our behaviour. 

This critique by Mercier and Sperber is compelling but it is a critique of the classical view of reason. It is not, as I understand it, a critique of logic per se. Logic is affected by fuzziness and quantum uncertainty or indeterminacy but it is more or less intact as a way of validating reasoning processes. It is simply that people don't actually use logic that much unless trained to do so and then mostly in formal situations: e.g. when presented with a syllogism in a logic class. Mercier and Sperber are not interested, per Conze, in eliminating logic in favour of magic. Logic, in its modern guise, is intact. Rather it is the idea of humans as logic users that comes into question. The inferential processes we do use are not magic, they are heuristic. They are rules of thumb for surviving in the wild.

Conclusion

When we take Conze seriously as a philosopher we rapidly encounter all kinds of problems. It is no wonder, therefore, that his later works on Prajñāpāramitā were so confused and misleading. It is not simply that Conze did not pay attention to detail (by his own admission) with the result that his editions are faulty. It is not that his translations are execrable, barely qualify as English, and misrepresent the source texts in numerous ways. All of this is true. But taking into account his earlier work we can see Conze as pursuing an agenda that preceded and guided all his work on Buddhist texts and his interpretation of Mahāyāna Buddhism. 

His agenda is anachronistic. Conze imagines a golden age of magical thought and pines for it though he missed it by at least 2500 years. Worse, there is simply no evidence for his assertion that before logic was formalised in Athens people relied on magical thinking. Moreover, the argument is based on a now discredited understanding of what reasoning is. We evolved the capacity for speech, reasoning and inferential decision-making processes as part of becoming anatomically modern humans in Africa ca 200,000 years ago. These attributes didn't suddenly appear in Athens in 500 BC.

Magical thinking was undoubtedly present in the human intellect before the modern era and indeed well beyond it. Some people still childishly want magic to be real (and want Buddhism to be magical). An intellectual who rejects logic in favour of magical thinking now looks quaintly ridiculous. So does a Marxist who rejects materialism and dialectical arguments, nor less a Marxist who was bourgeoisie in his bones and never lost the attitudes and values of the German upper classes.

The eleventh century Persian polymath, Avicenna (aka Ibn Sina) had a plan for dealing with people who share Conze's rejection of Aristotle's law of noncontradiction, i.e.

“The obdurate one must be subjected to the conflagration of fire, since ‘fire’ and ‘not fire’ are one. Pain must be inflicted on him through beating, since ‘pain’ and ‘no pain’ are one. And he must be denied food and drink, since eating and drinking and the abstention from both are one and the same.”—Avicenna (2005: 43).

It was this that inspired my paraphrase of the easily misunderstood old Zen maxim "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." If you meet Conze on the road burn him, beat him, and starve him until he admits that burning is different from not burning, beating is different from not-beating, and starving is different from not starving. 

Unfortunately, we cannot put Conze the man through the ordeal of fire. We can, however, read and critically evaluate his oeuvre. If, as his acolytes say, Conze is a scholar of the highest rank, a veritable genius, with insight into the true nature of reality, then this critical examination can only further glorify His presence amongst us. However, if I am right then critical evaluation will topple Conze and the pedestal that devotees have placed him on. Very few people ever take the time to read Conze at all, let alone critically. Which means that his mistakes go unnoticed by the majority even when they have been pointed out in print. I have searched in vain for any mention of his philosophical works, any attempt to compare his earlier and later phases, or any critical evaluation of his contribution.

In writing critically about Conze, I see two main responses. One from scholars who work in or near Prajñāpāramitā, which is "about time someone said this". However, for the most part people are unwilling to openly criticise Conze. A few examples exist of people listing faults in his editions or translations, but these are almost inevitably accompanied by supplication and homage to Conze. I don't bow before false idols. 

The other response is from Conze acolytes who see my critical reflections as mere "hostility". This group appear to be shocked to discover a dissenting voice and view it as an expression of emotion rather than intellect. For true believers it seems to be difficult to imagine anyone who refuses to assent to Conze's self-confessed greatness. And this means that they don't engage with the content of my literary and philosophical criticism. In this sense, support for Conze has a cult-like quality to it. In the light of this, I have begun to see this aspect of my work as an attempt to normalise criticism of Conze so that we can get it all out in the open. 

In reality, I'm not particularly interested in Conze, Mahāyāna, or the Heart Sutra. These are simply vehicles for writing. My personal approach to Buddhism is far more rooted in Pāli texts and my understanding of early Buddhism gained through exploring ideas on those texts. Until discovering Conze's mistakes in the Heart Sutra, unnoticed by all and sundry for 70 years, I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Richard Gombrich and Sue Hamilton (Richard having been an informal mentor since we met in 2006). I have a certain amount of animus towards bullies but I'm mostly just shocked by the disparity between the poor quality of Conze's work and the superlatives that continue to be heaped on him. I'm more motivated by trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by this disparity than about hatred of Conze. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aristotle. 1933. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. Reprinted 1989. As found on the Perseus Website.

Avicenna. 2005. The Metaphysics of The Healing. Translated by Michael E. Marmura. Provo, Utah. Brigham Young University Press.

Attwood, J. 2020. "Edward Conze: A Call to Reassess the Man and his Contribution to Prajñāpāramitā Studies." JOCBS 19: 22–51. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/223

Conze, E. 1932. Der Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Theorie des Dialektischen Materialism. Hamburg. Reprinted 1976 by Frankfurt: Neue Kritik.

———. 1934. "Social Implications of Logical Thinking". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 35, 23-44. Retrieved February 4, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544248

———. 1935. "The Objective Validity of the Principle of Contradiction." Philosophy, 10(38): 205-218.

———. 1937" Social Origins of Nominalism ," Marxist Quarterly (January-March, 1937), pp. 115-124. Reprinted in Further Buddhist Studies.

———. 1953. “The Ontology of the Prajñāpāramitā.” Philosophy East and West 3(2): 117-129.

———. 1979. Memoires of a Modern Gnostic. Parts I and II. Privately Published.

———. 2016. The Principle of Contradiction. Translated by Holger Heine. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.

Gottlieb, Paula. 2019. "Aristotle on Non-contradiction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edited by Edward N. Zalta https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction

Heine, Holger. 2016. "Aristotle, Marx, Buddha: Edward Conze's Critique of the Principle of Contradiction." In Conze (2016: xiii-lxiii).

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) 'Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.' Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2017) The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.

Trueman, Carl R. 2010. Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway.

Edward Conze: A Study in Contradiction

A version of this essay has been published as:

"Edward Conze: A Call to Reassess the Man and his Contribution to Prajñāpāramitā Studies." JOCBS 19: 22–51. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/223 

 

I wrote this introduction to Edward Conze for my book on the Heart Sutra. 

No introduction to the Prajñāpāramitā would be complete without some reference to the eccentric German scholar, Eberhart Julius Dietrich Conze (1904–1979), aka Dr Edward Conze. I think this is particularly important because his reputation is rather inflated. There is no doubt that he was a gifted linguist and a pioneer of studying the Prajñāpāramitā texts, but he was also a snob, a racist, and a misogynist. People who are in no position to judge still rave about what a great scholar he was, but much of his scholarship is tainted by poor attention to detail and infected his peculiar personal religion. Since I am in the business of revising the history of the Heart Sutra, I may as well put Dr Conze into some perspective as well.

The key historical source for Conze’s life is his own Memoires of a Modern Gnostic (1979 I & II), written at the behest of Jan Willem de Jong (see Wiles 2018). The Memoires were published in two parts, the first being more biographic, the second his impressions of politics, people, and places. Conze wrote a third part, in which he gave frank opinions of certain people and included comments from parts I and II considered libellous by his lawyer. Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, as far as I can tell Muriel Conze destroyed part III and no copies remain. Which is probably just as well judging by parts I and II. Some years ago I asked Sangharakshita about the rumour that he had a copy and he definitely does not.

Jan Nattier (2003) noted several principles for extracting historical information from normative texts such as Buddhist sutras, one of which was the principle of embarrassment. This states that if something is included in a text which reflects poorly on the author, then it is likely to be true, for few authors set out to darken their own reputations. A great deal of what Conze says of himself reflects poorly on him and social changes in the last 10-15 years have not improved the outlook. Indeed some admissions approved by his lawyer in 1979, would very likely see him arrested in 2018.

Conze is a difficult figure to pin down. His own mother apparently said of him, “He himself is nothing at all, just a bundle of contradictions” (Conze 1979: I 29), though elsewhere it is apparent that their relationship was difficult. Reading the Memoires we meet a man who has many of the prejudices we might expect of someone with his privileged background, but who is nevertheless an avowed Communist and denounces his own class. He hates warmongering but is constantly engaged in personal conflicts, and harbours animosities based on perceived weaknesses and faults in others. He declares his own genius, but is, for all that, a rather sloppy editor and translator (something he admits); he is an industrious worker, but a rather lazy intellectual. He can say things like “Ever since the radio was introduced in the early twenties, I have hated it with all my heart and all my soul” (I 103), then a few pages later casually mention something of importance that he heard on the radio (I 113).

Conze was an intellectual who rejected science as a “bag of tricks” and instead embraced the anti-intellectual pursuits of astrology and mysticism. His “life-long acceptance of magic... has not been so much due to theoretical considerations as to the early acquired intuitive certainty that beyond, or behind, the veil of the deceptive sensory appearances, there lies a reality of magical, or occult, forces” (I 32).  This classic matter-spirit dualism, to go with his elitist, social dualism, is key to understanding his exegesis of the Heart Sutra. Even though he appears to adopt a language of non-dualism: his realm of non-dualism lies beyond this one. His is very much a dualistic non-dualism, with a Platonic/Romantic distrust of his senses.

Above all, in writing this, I want to correct the bias with which Conze is presented to the public. The picture of the mega-star scholar toiling selflessly to bring the Dharma to the people is contradicted by his own account of himself. For one thing, he made it clear that he despised the common people. “Speaking of ‘hoi polloi’, it has always been a cornerstone of my beliefs that there are two qualitatively distinct kinds of people... ‘the Noble ones’ and ‘the foolish common people’... the elite and the canaille” (I 52). The word canaille literally means “a pack of dogs”. Of course, this kind of bigotry, along with overt racism, was instilled into people of his social background from an early age and it would have been remarkable if he had risen above it; though this does not excuse it or make it any more palatable.

At times Conze seems to have something of a Messiah complex. For example, when he says, “From early times onwards it has been my conviction that I have come from a higher realm... and that I was sent to the Western barbarians so as to soften their hearts by teaching them the Holy Prajñāpāramitā" (I 55). And yet he had no tolerance at all for people he considered his social inferiors, let alone for "barbarians". A messiah who hated the people he had been sent to save.

Early Life

Adelle Köttgen & Ernst Conze
Date unknown. Family photo from Ebay

Edward Conze was, as he admits, a man of his class and age (1979 I iv). In other words, he was an early 20th Century, German bourgeoisie. The Conze family owned textile manufacturing plants in the small, but wealthy town of Langenberg, in Northern Germany near the Ruhr Valley (2016: xvii).  His mother's family,  the  Köttgen's were also "textile barons" (Heine 2016: xvii). Conze describes the 1903 marriage of his parents, Dr Ernst Conze (1872–1935) and Adele Louise Charlotte Köttgen (1882–1962) as, "a marriage between two factories" (I 1). 

Ernst Conze studied law at Bonn University (gaining a doctorate) then joined the Auswärtigen Amt (Foreign Office), where he served in Berlin and Antwerp, before being posted to Britain as a Vice Consul. Eberhart was born in London, in 1904. However, the family soon returned to Langenberg where Ernst became a magistrate in Wipperfürth and Cologne. He became District Court Director in Düsseldorf, and from 1924 to 1934, he held the office of President of the Reich Disciplinary Chamber (Langenberger Kulturlexikon 2009: 262). Adele was a painter of some talent, even exhibiting her work in 1930 (Langenberger Kulturlexikon 2009: 875). In old age, Adele converted to Catholicism and moved to a monastery near Heidelberg.  

Eberhart's paternal grandfather, Gottfried Conze, was deeply involved in the monarchist politics of the German Empire under Wilhelm II and in "the Protestant Church" (Lutheran?). One of his great-grandfathers, Gustav Köttgen, was part of the nascent Communist movement in the mid-1800s. Frederick Engels came from the same region and a similar background and Conze claimed some familial relation to him (though it is not clear how they were related).

His parent’s marriage was unhappy and he did not have a good relationship with his mother (I 4). He notes that she had great potential but was forced into the life of a small-town hausfrau with no prospect of escape. She was bored and bitter and since young Eberhart leaned towards his father, she included him in the enmity she felt for Ernst Conze. His younger brother, Wolf (b. 1906), however, was the object of her affections. This seems to have affected Conze's relations with women generally. Accused of grooming a young woman in one of his classes he complains that it is ridiculous because she is blond and he does not even like blonds but prefers women who look like his mother.

Despite the nationality of his parents, being born in London entitled Conze to British Citizenship. Both his parents were Anglophiles as well as Anglophones. When he visited England in 1924 he renewed his citizenship and thus, when he fell afoul of the Nazis, he was able to escape to Britain.

Conze's attitude toward the National Socialist Workers Party or "the Nazis" is instructive. Fundamentally, Conze resented authority, but more so when he perceived power to be wielded by people he considered socially or intellectually inferior to himself.  He described Hitler as someone literally possessed by demonic forces but he also says that Hitler "illustrates the danger of allowing the lower middle classes to exercise power" (I 9). Hitler was not one of the social elite and thus lacked the upbringing and education to fit him for leadership (I 11). Indeed, it is likely that the mocking epithet "Nazi" reflects the same social prejudice, since it was a German shortening of Ignatius. The German bourgeoisie of that time would often tell jokes in which the butt was a Bavarian peasant named Nazi (Forsyth 112-3). 

Conze claims to have hated the Nazis, though he shared some of their views on race and democracy. He was deeply prejudiced against Africans and people of Africa heritage; e.g., “In due course [Notting Hill Gate] was finished off by the blacks, who slowly moved down from Paddington Station” (I 64). He writes about being "driven out of Notting Hill by the blacks” (I 102), but also notes, “My further comments on the negrification [sic] of Notting Hill Gate manifestly contravene the Race Relations Act of June 1977. They are therefore removed to Part III” (I 65). Dr Conze's bowdlerised remarks passed in 1979 but would be considered hate speech now. Even when he writes positively of Jewish people, he cannot help but use racial labels in essentialist ways. That someone is "a Jew" or "Jewess", for example, is always made clear, whereas he does not insist on referring to, say, Tucci, as "Italian" or de Jong as "Dutch". It is a curious fact that the mainstream were at the time, and are now, all too willing to overlook Conze’s overt racism. 

Conze recounts that his first contact with Buddhism was aged thirteen when he read an account of Buddhism by Lafcadio Hearn (I 6). His interest in Buddhism continued through his university days. Shortly after gaining his PhD, he was introduced to Theosophy and astrology by Prof. Verweyen (I 9). Later on, he says that “the Conze family had always harboured a number of Theosophists though they were usually of the Rudolf Steiner persuasion.” (I 31) As a child, an aunt gave him a copy of Annie Besant’s translation and explanation of the Bhagavadgītā: “I was terribly excited by it” (I 31). In 1939 he also became a convert to astrology. He writes:

“Astrology has set me inwardly free from the claims a technological society can make on my allegiance. It has convinced me that Science, its basic, ingredient, has little cognitive value, but is rather a bag of tricks invented by God-defying people to make life increasingly unbearable on Earth and finally to destroy it” (I 32).

We should keep in mind that Conze was 10 when World War I broke out and 14 when it ended, through his teens and early 20s he must have been acutely aware of the impact of the war and the crushing burden of reparations. He lived through, though does not mention, Germany's brief period of hyperinflation. Combined with his background and what we know about his parents, we can imagine why Eberhart saw the world in apocalyptic terms. Another sign of the contradictions at work in Conze is that just four pages later in his Memoires he writes that:

“In the [1935 book] ‘Scientific Method of Thinking’ I spelled this out for practical Englishmen by saying that mankind was doomed unless [it] could apply to the ordering of Society the same kind of Scientific Methods which had led to all these discoveries in the Natural Sciences and that dialectical materialism provided that method” (I 36).

The idea that dialectical materialism might be in any way related to the scientific method demonstrates that, like many anti-intellectuals, Conze is almost entirely innocent of any knowledge of the subject that he hated. In any case, astrology and Theosophy were to influence his views far more than science throughout his life and were only reinforced by his contact with the well-known Japanese Theosophist, D. T. Suzuki.

As a young man, Conze had an intellectual infatuation with Communism. In 1932 he published his magnum opus, The Principle of Contradiction. The book is concerned with the philosophy of dialectical materialism rather than the practical or economic aspects of Marxism. Conze has said of the book, "In fact it contains all my later ideas without exception" (1975: ix). This is a telling statement. Conze already knew what he thought about everything before he approached Buddhist texts more seriously. Subsequently, his method was to look for and find confirmation of his views in those texts. Anyone who adopts this approach is bound to succeed.

His anti-authoritarian attitudes led him to help organise political activities, particularly once the Nazis rose to prominence and then power. Conze' communist affiliations in Germany and Britain later caused his application to work in the USA to be declined. Curiously, for a Communist, Conze appears to have nothing good to say about the working classes. The best we can say is that working class people seem to avoid his direct gaze and disapprobation. Judging by the Memoires, the point of Communism was to bring down the ruling elite, destroy the modern world, and take us back to the pre-industrial society; it was not to hand the means of production to the workers. Speaking of his visit to Spain in 1936 he says "In rural Spain I caught a glimpse of pre-Industrial man and I realized how much we have lost." (I 19).

Despite apparently being a Marxist, Conze appears to have no sympathy for class struggle, let alone class warfare. He was unembarrassed about dividing society into the elite and the dogs, to call himself a member of the elite, and to suppose that the elite ought to be in charge. We can only imagine what Marx would have made of this bourgeois attitude. Conze's was more the intellectual communism of the unhappy rich boy trying to get back at the parents who did not love him, than the practical communism of an oppressed worker seeking a fairer world. But he does not see this. In a classic case of psychological projection, describing English communists, Conze writes: "Most came from Public Schools and harboured obscure resentments about their parents, headmasters and the [Officer Training Corp]." (I 21).

Most relevant to the history of the Heart Sutra, young Eberhart showed early promise as a linguist, claiming that by twenty-four, he knew fourteen languages (I 4). Heine (2016) suggests that these included German, English, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, Sanskrit and Pāli. His family's wealth allowed him to pursue a university education in a desultory fashion, moving around half a dozen different universities until he found a teacher to his liking. He describes himself as "rebellious", but I suspect he simply felt superior to his teachers. Being unwilling to put up with anyone he judged inferior and having more or less unlimited funds, he simply moved on. Surprisingly, given his approach, he completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Cologne in 1928 (aged twenty-four). His post-graduate studies saw him continue the pattern of moving around.

He moved to Britain in 1933, largely to escape the Nazis. His stories about this vary. Early in the Memoires, he says he was warned by Nazis to flee in a rather bland encounter over the flying of a flag from his balcony, but later (I 40, n.1) he recalls being chased by the Gestapo and hiding from them in a mental hospital. There are many times in the Memoires where he seems unsure about whether to be humble or to brag and ends up humblebragging. In his introduction to the recent reprint of Conze's Principle of Contradiction, Holgar Heine (2016) suggests that, in fact, it was the public burning of most of the copies of the first German edition of this book by Nazis soon after it was published that led Conze to leave Germany.

We can only presume that it was around this time that Eberhart became Edward because he does not say. Conze had a variety of jobs during and after the war, supporting himself by teaching evening classes in German, psychology, and philosophy. Later, some bequests made him financially independent. The one permanent academic position he was offered was in the USA and the government there saw him as an undesirable alien because of his past as a Communist and his unwillingness to cooperate with them on exposing other communists. He saw the immigration officials as inferior and thus toyed with them for his own amusement, but it backfired on him. For a time Conze continued to be interested in left-wing politics and he made connections in the British Labour party, particularly with Ellen Wilkinson. Together, the two wrote anti-fascist pamphlets and two short books.

On fleeing Germany, Conze had married his partner, Dorothea Finkelstein, as much as anything to prevent her from being sent back to Germany and certain death because she was Jewish. This marriage of convenience (at least as far as Conze was concerned) did not last long; they separated soon after the war, briefly reconciled, but then Conze embarked on a series of affairs with his students that he took little or no trouble to hide. In the Memoires, he recounts, over several pages in small type, sexually assaulting a female student as though it were an amusing anecdote (II 116-118). On reflection he says:

“I did not want a wife at all, but a servant who would look after me while I was doing my scholarly work. If it had not been for the servant shortage which set in after 1918, I would never have had any motive to marry at all” (I 31).

Conze and Dorothea were eventually divorced in 1962. Conze had met Muriel Green, who was to become his second wife, some years earlier in 1948. The two lived together as a married couple and Muriel changed her name to Conze by deed poll. However, their marital status occasionally caused problems for him, as it was unusual, even scandalous, at the time. Conze credits Muriel with providing the material stability that enabled him to continue his work. He was apparently incapable of any domestic task. However, before he met Muriel, Conze went through a crisis.

A visit to Spain in 1936 left him feeling disillusioned

"From the very start I saw clearly that a huge senseless tragedy was shaping itself, that many people (two million by the end) would be killed for nothing whatever and that few would gain anything from all this turmoil."

His comments on the situation in Spain led to a series of vituperous clashes with members of the British Labour Party, who were, to be fair, at that time under the influence of the Soviet Union. Conze says that he abandoned leftist politics at this point, but one imagines that he jumped before he was pushed. Already averse to many aspects of industrialised, "urban civilisation", Conze was now thoroughly disillusioned with the left, with modern democracy and secularism (I 26-7). Aged 35, he found that he was at an impasse. In short, he had a mid-life crisis. In his memoriam for Suzuki, he says:

“My political faith had collapsed under the impact of Stalinism and of what I had observed in Spain, my marriage had failed, my job seemed distinctly bleak, I had even started to consult psychoanalysts, and there seemed nothing left that I could live for.” (Conze 1967)

Midlife Crisis

Conze & Suzuki

It was at this point that Conze turned to religion, specifically to Buddhism. He credits this to his acquaintance with three men: D. T. Suzuki, Har Dayal, and Graham Howe. Of these three, Suzuki seems to have been the strongest influence. Zsebenyi (2004) suggests that it was reading Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism that helped Conze to see a way forward. 

Suzuki’s wife, Beatrice Lane, was a major figure in the Theosophical world. While he retained his ties with Zen Buddhism, Suzuki frequently presents Zen in metaphysical terms borrowed from Theosophy. It seems to have been Suzuki who introduced the vocabulary of “the Absolute” and “the Transcendental” into Buddhism. Given Conze's existing preconceptions about the world, we can imagine how this mystical absolutism might have appealed to him. Indeed, it led to a radical change in lifestyle for a period.

Under the impulse of D. T. Suzuki’s message I then withdrew into a private wood belonging to a Quaker friend of mine in the New Forest, and practised as much meditation as can be practised in this evil age. (1967)

This was the wood called Sandy Balls, located near Godshill Village, in the New Forest, Hampshire. The owner, Aubrey Westlake, warned him that the hut was unheated and none had dared to over-winter there, but Conze, determined to live an ascetic life, did so. He joined an irregular community of Tolstoyan Christian Communists, eccentrics, and gypsies. The local villagers apparently decided that Conze was a spy and reported him to the police. When this failed to produce the desired result, they tried to set fire to the wood. This was during WWII which Conze avoided serving in on medical grounds but also as a Buddhist conscientious objector.

Conze applied himself to meditation, probably using Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga as a guide. As a result, he says, that he “experienced a great elation of spirit” (I 45). Living an ascetic life left Conze with the symptoms of malnutrition, such as chronic diarrhoea and degeneration of the gums leading to the loss of all his teeth (I 47). His description suggests that he had scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency common amongst sailors before 1747 when James Lind described the efficacy of citrus fruit in preventing the disease. The combination of malnutrition, cold (“very cold indeed” I 46), sleep deprivation, and long periods of meditation probably contributed to the delusions he apparently experienced: “Unbidden, several psychic faculties came my way” (I 46). A great deal has been written about the effects this kind of punitive ascetic lifestyle can have on religious experiences. On top of this, Conze was already firmly convinced of a matter-spirit dualism that would have dominated how he interpreted any interesting experiences that he might have had. Such strong convictions can only be confirmed in the mind of the believer.

Conze does not say how long this period was, though it only takes about four weeks for the first symptoms of scurvy to appear. After an unspecified time, he was inclined to stop: “I also felt that I had gained as much insight as I could bear in my present body or realise in our present social circumstances” (I 47). No doubt the physical suffering caused by this lifestyle would have been difficult to bear; malnutrition causes extremely unpleasant symptoms. In the introduction to Further Buddhist Studies, he relates,

"Thereafter I decided to adopt an indirect approach and thus between 1946 and 1968 remained content to edit and expound the ancient Sanskrit texts of the philosophia perennis."

Note here the reference (in Latin) to the idea of the Perennial Philosophy. This is the idea that all the worlds religions share a single metaphysical truth and all traditions aim to realise that truth. This view was popularised in Britain by Aldous Huxley and the Theosophists. Conze seems to have been a fervent believer in this view.

At about the same time as the deterioration of his health due to malnutrition was making his retreat untenable, his first wife, Dorothea, asked him to move back in with her for the sake of their daughter. So he moved to Oxford and was assigned a job in the Ministry of Agriculture. This led him back into the world of academia.

Scholarship

Living in Oxford, with an undemanding job, gave Conze time to study and access to research materials in the Bodleian Library and the India Institute. He took Sanskrit lessons from Prof Burrow and met F. W. Thomas, with whom he collaborated on a translation of a Sanskrit Jain text. Academic connections led to further literary ventures and, after 1945, to invitations to teach abroad, including in Germany. Summing up the factors that enabled him to become a Buddhist scholar he cites:

“…unusual innate intellectual ability is only part of the story. I have also had the good fortune to be able to devote my entire life to continuous and almost unbroken studying and have kept up my one-man monastery through thick and thin” (I 51).

In fact, Conze lived with his wife, who he apparently saw as his servant, and this is hardly a "one-man monastery". He has already admitted that he eschewed meditation after the disaster of his retreat in the New Forest. Conze was no monk.

Lacking a permanent academic post, he made his living teaching evening classes in psychology and philosophy. He might have had a position in the USA, but his past as a Communist prevented him from ever being more than a temporary visitor in that country. And even then immigration officials and his attitude towards them made travel there difficult for him.

Conze produced some general books on Buddhism as well as editing and contributing to an anthology of Buddhist texts. This was at a time when books about Buddhism in English were still uncommon, and most of the books that did exist betrayed the misconceptions of the early European scholars. As such the books were well received and two, Buddhist Scriptures and are Buddhism: Its Essence and Development, are still in print (if only in cheap Indian editions). While Conze's work was an advance on what came before, his idiosyncratic take on Buddhism meant that he often simply substituted one set of misconceptions for another. This was partially corrected by the appearance of more genuine books about Buddhism, but Conze was so influential that his views altered the narratives of Buddhism in the West. 

Despite his personal animus towards so many people - his wife referred to him as "the old man who hated everyone" - Conze had a number of productive collaborations, for example, with Jan de Jong, Giuseppe Tucci, I. B. Horner, and Lew Lancaster. For D. T. Suzuki he expressed “unlimited admiration, little short of idolatry” (I 78). However, D. T. Suzuki is also a problematic figure. McMahan singles Suzuki out as a Romantic Modernist:

"In his discussion of humanity and nature, Suzuki takes Zen literature out of its social, ritual, and ethical contexts and reframes it in terms of a language of metaphysics derived from German Romantic idealism, English Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism" (McMahan 2008: 125).

John McRae has pointed out that Suzuki's approach is frequently incomprehensible. "[His] most cherished methodology seems to have been to describe some aspect of Zen as beyond ordinary explanation, then offer a suitably incomprehensible story or two by way of illustration" (McRae 2003: 74). Conze adopted a similar strategy in his exegesis of Prajñāpāramitā. As far as Conze was concerned, the literature pointed to a perennial Truth beyond the comprehension of most people. It is the scripture of a spiritual elite of which, again, he believes himself to be a member.

Given his other comments, we can presume that Conze saw a confirmation of his own views in Suzuki's ravings about Prajñāpāramitā, especially in Suzuki's rejection of logic. I also think Conze realised that this was a field in which he would never be inferior to anyone because there was no competition at the time. With his typical German energy and industry, he could easily and quickly dominate the empty field of Prajñāpāramitā Studies and never have to answer to an inferior mind again. His obscurantist approach allowed him to exclude would-be critics simply by affirming contradictions like "A = Not A". How does one argue with a man who insists that logic and rationality play no part in the Truth? What's more, he could assert that as a meditator, he had special knowledge (I think few people realised the brief extent of his experiment with meditation or that the principal outcome was not insight, but scurvy and derangement). Conze was the tailor who made the Emperor's new clothes, according to a design by Suzuki. The crowds of scholars and Buddhists who knew no better simply went along with it (and largely still do). 

Conze set himself the task of translating all of the Prajñāpāramitā texts into English. In a number of cases, as with the Heart Sutra, this also involved editing the Sanskrit texts. Conze wrote a long essay outlining the extent and history of the Prajñāpāramitā literature (1960) and published a lexicon which was intended to be expanded into a dictionary of Prajñāpāramitā (1967b). These now circulate as pdf files and despite their many flaws have not yet been superseded.

Surprisingly little subsequent work has been done in this field since Conze. At least some of this reluctance must be because Conze made the subject seem unattractive to rationally minded students of Buddhism. The very qualities that made him the king of Prajñāpāramitā may well have ensured that there was little interest in following his example.

I will make some specific comments on his approach to the Heart Sutra below, but can here cite comments by Harrison & Watanabe about Conze's work on the Vajracchedikā. Rather than creating a critical edition, Conze takes an unsystematically eclectic approach to the text.  It is based mainly on Müller's edition but occasionally he changed the wording, conflating the various manuscript sources arbitrarily. He does not list the differences between his witnesses exhaustively (2006).

"Nevertheless, most subsequent translations and studies have relied on Conze's edition, and philosophical questions have also been addressed on the less than solid foundation it provides. Here lies a major problem" (Harrison & Watanabe 2006: 92; My emphasis).

In the notes on his translation of the Gilgit and Afghan manuscripts of Vajracchedikā, Harrison (2006) shows that the major problem involves the negations. Conze takes a metaphysical approach to these, whereas Harrison shows that they were probably intended as an epistemic observation: see my essay The Use of Negation in Vajracchedikā. Similar problems attend Conze's other translations. His work is unsystematic and directed toward confirming his idiosyncratic, Theosophy-inspired, anti-intellectual personal religion. As he admits:

“I am constitutionally incapable of registering meaningless details correctly (that is the price of being an intuition type). Even when reading proofs I miss most of the misprints, because I automatically read, not what is there, but what ought to be there. In addition, both my interest and my training in grammar leave much to be desired…” (I 92)

Unfortunately, the details that Conze misses are not “meaningless” but have quite major implications for how we understand the text. In the case of the Heart Sutra, his mistakes garbled two passages. Curiously enough, so little scrutiny did his work receive that these mistakes went unnoticed for almost seventy years. Such was his mystique and the expectation of nonsense that he created. Note that reading what ought to be there is exactly the method that I ascribed to Conze above. I believe this unconscious bias operated on many levels. Conze pursued confirmation of his beliefs and found it. 

Similarly, Conze’s translation of the Large Sutra is randomly eclectic. He does not rely on a single edition, but chops and changes, drawing first from this and then that source without any clear boundaries. He acknowledges that some will find this method “questionable” (1975: x) which is an understatement. On the other hand, almost none of the research agenda he sets out in his introduction has been followed up. Again, he did a lot of work himself, but only a handful of scholars continue his work. As he says, the translation [of the Large Sutra] is a continuation of his work on the Abhisamayālaṅkāra; a text “so elliptic and cryptic that a translation was considered impossible” (I 68-9). Now that we have a good edition (Kimura 2010) of the Nepalese manuscripts that he describes as “often unbelievably careless and corrupt” and a good facsimile edition of the Gilgit Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā (Karashima et al 2016), we can judge Conze’s methods quite accurately. It is often difficult to match his text to the available Sanskrit texts because his primary orientation was to the Abhisamayālaṅkāra rather than the text itself. As we will see this results in a whole other layer of confusion as regards the Heart Sutra.

Such issues will seldom surface for the average reader since they mainly read translations by popular religious figures. These people often don't bother to learn Sanskrit but simply paraphrase Conze and offer a few etymologies of varying accuracy. On the whole, religious translators have been oblivious to problems in source texts and simply gloss over any difficult passages as though they make sense. However, if there are problems with the source text, the translation is unlikely to be better. Dealing with Conze’s translations reveals him to be one of the most quixotic and idiosyncratic of Buddhist translators. Indeed, Paul Griffiths (1981) singles Conze out as the foremost practitioner of “Buddhist Hybrid English”, in which a translation uses mainly English vocabulary but is presented with Sanskrit syntax. In Conze's case, the choice of vocabulary often boggles the mind as well. Harrison brings this out in the introduction to his translation of Vajracchedikā.

"I has been a long cherished ambition of mine to make a translation of a Mahāyāna sūtra in which nobody courses in anything, speaks thus, or produces a single thought... although we have thoughts, think them, entertain them, although thoughts arise and occur to us, we never 'produce' them. Linguistic oddities such as this are best avoided" (Harrison 2006: 136).

Although Harrison does not say so, all of these examples of linguistic oddities are drawn from Conze's oeuvre. Conze was a great mangler of the English language. With Conze, we must constantly be on the alert not just for awkward translations but also for erroneous translations. Conze frequently allows his metaphysical imagination to inform his translations – very many verbs seem to mean “exist” in his vocabulary when very few of them mean that in Sanskrit. Being concerned, as he is, most of the time, with absolute being, he tends to torture his translations so that they appear to share his obsession. It took me many years to realise that Conze had fundamentally misunderstood the Prajñāpāramitā.

In his chronology of Prajñāpāramitā, Conze lumped the Vajracchedikā and Heart Sutra together as a period of contraction in Prajñāpāramitā texts ca 400 CE. This idea cuts across the trend of all Mahāyāna texts to expand over time. We now know that the Vajracchedikā is likely very much earlier and in fact follows the usual trend of expanding as it goes. The Heart Sutra, by contrast, was composed in China as a 抄經 chāo jīng or digest text, ca. 645-661 CE.  The earliest Prajñāpāramitā text was probably the one that evolved into the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, although the Vajracchedikā is likely to have been another Prakrit text of a similar vintage from a different area (one with less easy access to the Silk Road). Unfortunately, Conze's chronology of Prajñāpāramitā is still in use.

No scholar has since approached Mahāyāna Buddhism with quite the enthusiasm and industry of Conze. However, industry and enthusiasm in the absence of proper discipline or guiding principles simply run amok. The great shame is that so much of what he did needs to be done over but, at the same time, there seems to be little interest in Prajñāpāramitā in academia. Mysticism is not as sexy as it once was and the mainstream is focussed on the more rational aspects of Buddhism. A handful of scholars struggle away, year after year, to bring Prajñāpāramitā into the light, but the heavy burden of Conze makes that difficult. 

Heart Sutra

Conze first published a translation of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra in the journal of the Buddhist Society, The Middle Way in 1946 (see 1948: 51). His Sanskrit edition appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1948. This was subsequently revised in 1967. The edition makes reference to Chinese texts and includes some quoted Chinese characters. Since Conze makes it clear in the Memoires that he did not speak or read Chinese, he ought to have credited the person who helped him with the Chinese. Between 1955 and 1957 Conze published a series of articles in The Middle Way. These were collated and published as Buddhist Wisdom Books (1958), which contained a translation of and commentary on the Vajracchedikā and a version of the Sanskrit text of the Heart Sutra along with a translation and commentary. A second edition appeared in 1975.

The Sanskrit edition of the Heart Sutra that Conze published contained a number of simple grammatical errors (Attwood 2015, 2018b). I'm sympathetic to Conze's inability to proofread as I suffer a similar affliction. However, I find readers will often pick up on mistakes I miss, and editors are usually very sharp-eyed when it comes to mistakes of mine (I'm very grateful to them for it). Where were Conze's readers and editors? And where were his critics for 70 years? Many scholars, some of the best in our field, looked at Conze's edition of the Heart Sutra and did not notice the obvious mistakes. I feel obliged to ask why not, but hesitant to supply answers because I fear there is no excuse. 

Conze presented the Heart Sutra as a Mahāyāna version of the four noble truths (or “holy Truths” as he calls them), going to elaborate lengths to try to make make the case for this (1958: 90, 100-1). The idea is based on the commentary in the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. Apart from the fact that Conze’s arguments are not convincing, when we look at his translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā organised with subject headings taken from the Abhisamayālaṅkāra (Conze 1975), it shows that the Heart Sutra does quote from the section labelled as expounding the noble truths (āryasatyāṃ). However, the passage begins with the last few lines of the paragraph that supposedly outlines the second truth (samudaya) and ends halfway through the section on the third truth (nirodha). The Heart Sutra includes nothing from the paragraphs on the first (duḥkha) or fourth (marga) truths. So, at best, the reference is partial. In reality, the author of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra strains our credulity, because even reading the full passage the connection with the noble truths is not apparent. 

The text is shoehorned into the traditional categories, obscuring what it is actually talking about. Which tells us that that author of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra was not that interested in the text, but had their own agenda that the text was made to serve. And Conze does much the same thing. Interestingly, this is the most prominent feature of all the commentaries on the Heart Sutra since they first were recorded in the late 7th Century. Take this observation with the one about the unnoticed errors ,and we find a systematic picture of commentators telling us what the text means with almost no reference whatever to the text. 

To top it all, the Heart Sutra also appears to say that there are no four noble truths. Conze gets around the apparent contradiction by denying that "no" means "no". It cannot be an "ordinary negation", he says, “because it is used in a proposition of which one term, i.e., ‘emptiness’, is itself a self-contradictory unity of Yes and No.” (1958: 90) Unsurprisingly, Conze goes on to admit that this kind of rhetoric confused everyone who he had read his book before publication. Without any trace of irony, he refers to the effects of his self-contradictions as leaving his readers “dazed by so much splendour” (1958: 90). This might be an attempt at humour or it might be Conze's delusions, it's hard to tell at this remove. 

Another curious feature of Conze's commentary is the elaborate attempt to relate the wording to Abhidharma texts. The Prajñāpāramitā texts are, if anything, resistant to Abhidharma ideas, for example, retaining the simpler early Buddhist schema of five skandhas, rather than indulging in the proliferations that accompanied the development of dharma theory. In fact, there is no reference in the Heart Sutra to words that positively connote the Abhidharma. It is simply a coincidence that they both employ common categories that predate the Abhidharma. There is good reason to think that the Prajñāpāramitā movement was quite conservative and preserving meditative and doctrinal traditions that were old by that time.

Conze’s contempt for ordinary people is evident throughout his commentary on the Heart Sutra. He says, for example, that:

“This Sutra is not meant for the stupid, the emotional, or the uninformed. Other means will assure their salvation. Everything that is at all worth knowing is contained in the [Heart Sutra]. But it can be found there only if spiritual insight is married to intellectual ability, and coupled with a delighting in the use of the intellect.” (1958: 99).

We already know that Conze sees himself as amongst the elect and has a touch of messianic delusion. The influence of Theosophy can be seen in many statements such as 

“‘Emptiness’ is our word for the beyond, for transcendental reality… this is the mystical identity of opposites” (1958: 83). “[The bodhisatva] is able to bear the absolute aloneness of his solitary Spirit” (1958: 94)

“The series of negations… does not add up to nothingness, but points the way to a unique ultimate reality” (1958: 95)

“When viewed from the subject-side, the transcendental reality is known as ‘thought only’, because, one and simple, free from duality and multiplicity, it is without a separate object. This Thought, or Spirit, forms the very centre of our being” (1958: 96)

None of this has anything to do with Buddhism or Prajñāpāramitā, and most of these terms do not even have Sanskrit equivalents. When we read the Prajñāpāramitā sutras in Sanskrit or Chinese we find there are no spirits, no absolute being, no mystical identity, and no ultimate reality. Instead, we find a narrative based on the experience of cessation and the epistemological and/or soteriological consequences of the fact that experience may stop in meditation without the loss of consciousness. Conze looked for his perennial philosophy in Prajñāpāramitā and because he “read what ought to be there” he found it, even though it was not there.

This is not the work of a great scholar. He was certainly a busy scholar and worked in a field largely neglected by others, but Conze has thoroughly misunderstood the Heart Sutra in particular and the Prajñāpāramitā in general. 

Conclusion

That Conze deserves a place in the history of the Heart Sutra is undisputed. However, he has been dead long enough that we can see his life and his contributions in perspective. Summing up his contribution, Eric Zsebenyi (2004) says, “Conze’s pioneering accomplishment is still hailed as a model of meticulous scholarship, and he ranks among the greatest and most prolific modern translators of the Buddhist tradition.”  This may have been true at the time Conze died, but by the time I started regularly interacting with academics, it was not. No one I met while studying Sanskrit and attending conferences spoke highly of him as a translator or editor, though some do still acknowledge him as a “pioneer”. He was certainly prolific, but his work, like the man himself, was deeply flawed and full of contradictions. No one looks to him as a model scholar any longer. For myself, I have certainly had to spend a good deal of time and effort to understand and correct Conze’s many errors of translation and interpretation.

In perspective, Conze cuts a lonely figure. He believed himself to have been sent to soften the Hearts of barbarians, but this messiah could not love the people he was ostensibly sent to save. He characterises, Avalokiteśvara as "the Lord who looks down" (mistranslating the verb ava√lok) but, in fact, it is he who looks down on the world. And with disgust rather than compassion. Indeed, he could never wholly get along with another person. As he says, “Throughout my life I have been a stranger on this earth and never felt at home anywhere. Nor have I ever found anyone who was completely congenial or whom I could trust altogether” (54).

A more tragic epitaph for a Buddhist Messiah can hardly be imagined. Conze was a classic outsider as described by Colin Wilson, his former neighbour in Notting Hill Gate, in his book, The Outsider. The man that supposedly sees the world too clearly and cannot make their peace with what they see. On the other hand, Conze also seems to have worked well with certain colleagues who shared his privileged social background. He adored Suzuki and names many other men his friends. The fact is that the Memoires is addressed directly to Jan de Jong.

Above all, Edward Conze was a bourgeois Romantic. He had the bourgeois sense of heroic and even messianic destiny and entitlement (which, in fact, he shared with the Nazis). He hated modernity and fantasised about an idealised pre-industrial past when the elite were truly elite and the peasants were illiterate and happy. He had the Romantic distrust of his senses and of intellect, logic, and rationality; preferring intuition, astrology, and mysticism. He was obsessed with perfection and transcendence and, at the same time, loudly contemptuous of imperfection and inferiority. And he saw “blacks” as inherently inferior (another attitude he shared with the Nazis). Put another way, while preaching non-duality, Conze had all the characteristic prejudices of someone who accepts a profound matter-spirit duality as described in my essay  Metaphors and Materialism).

Whether Conze was contrary by nature or became that way through upbringing is a matter for speculation. We can imagine what changes his circumstances in life might have wrought on him, but we don't know and we mostly only have his word for it. The fact is, that he was a man marked by contradictions, in every aspect of his life. And yet, his reputation for greatness persists in Buddhist circles. Just as no one ever seems to really read the Heart Sutra, no one ever seems to really read what Conze wrote about himself. We might want to think about why the establishment have been so willing to overlook his faults, both confessed and apparent. Having read his Memoires in detail again, and having cleaned up the mess he made of the Heart Sutra, I find myself unwilling to participate in the beatification of Edward Conze. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward.
—— 1946. ‘The Heart Sutra.’ The Middle Way, xx. 5, 105.

—— 1958. Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. George Allen & Unwin. Second edition 1976.

—— 1967. 'In Memoriam Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki 1870-1966.' The Eastern Buddhist. II/1.
—— 1975. Further Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays. Oxford, Bruno Cassirer
—— 1979. Memoires of a Modern Gnostic. Parts I and II. Privately Published.

Forsyth, Mark. 2011. The Etymologicon. Icon Books.

Harrison, Paul. (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra', in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p.133-159.

Harrison, P. & Watanabe, S. (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā.' in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p. 89-132.

Heine, Holgar. 2016. 'Introduction' in The Principle of Contradiction. Lexington Books. First published in German as Der Satz vom Widerspruch. Hamburg, 1932. Langenberger Kulturlexikon: Immaterielles Kulturerbe der UNESCO. http://www.unter-der-muren.de/kulturlexikon.pdf

McRae, John (2003), Seeing Through Zen. Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, The University Press Group.

McMahan, David (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Wiles, Royce. 2018. Correspondence Between JW de Jong and Edward Conze Concerning “Memoirs Of A Modern Gnostic” (1979). Discovering de Jong. https://blogs.canterbury.ac.nz/dejong/2018/09/03/correspondence-between-jw-de-jong-and-edward-conze-concerning-memoirs-of-a-modern-gnostic-1979/

Zsebenyi, Eric. 2004. ‘The Perfection of Wisdom: Iconoclast, astrologist, communist sympathizer, and devoted practitioner, Edward Conze translated Buddhism for the West.’ Tricycle Magazine, Fall. 2004. https://tricycle.org/magazine/perfection-wisdom/

Fixing the Broken Heart Sutra.

In this essay I do several things. I show that Conze bungled the editing of the Section VI of the Heart Sutra (Section VII in my nomenclature) and how to fix the received text. I review research by Huifeng which shows that the original Sanskrit translator also bungled, and go into detail on how to fix his mistakes. I incidentally show that Red Pine is also a bungler. By doing the basic philology that should have been done a century ago, I explain the grammar of this passage of the Heart Sutra and how to better construct it in Sanskrit. I give a revised Sanskrit text that is far more consistent with existing Chinese texts. I once again ponder the dire state of Buddhist philology. 

~o~ 

One of the many linguistic puzzles of the Heart Sutra is the construction nāstitvād that one finds in Conze's Section VI. I have been worrying away at this problem for five years and just now had a breakthrough, but it requires some context. The text in Conze's revised, 1967 edition and 1975 translation of the Heart Sutra tells us: 

Tasmāc Chāriputra aprāptitvād bodhisattvo  prajñāpāramitām āśritya viharaty acittāvaraṇaḥ. Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. 

Therefore, O Śāriputra, it is because of his non-attainmentness that a bodhisattva, through having relied on the perfection of wisdom, dwells without thought-coverings. In the absence of thought-coverings he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can be upset, and in the end attains to Nirvāṇa (Buddhist Wisdom Books).

Almost everything about this translation is wrong. It is one of the most egregious examples of Buddhist Hybrid English in the entire canon of Buddhist translations. The English is execrable and incomprehensible. "Non-attainmentness" is a rather ugly neologism. And what on earth is a "thought-covering" (and why is it hyphenated)? Nor have other translators ever really got to grip with this passage. Those who purport to translate it from Sanskrit have failed to see a very basic mistake in Conze's Sanskrit (incidentally repeated by Vaidya in his edition). Red Pine simply dismisses the rules of Sanskrit grammar at this point with hand-waving and produces a translation that fits his preconceptions but has nothing to do with the underlying text (See p.137 of his book). 

As with previous essays of this kind, I will make frequent use of the Chinese. In a previous essay, I worked through Huifeng's treatment of the Sanskrit acittāvaraṇaḥ in light of the Chinese text. I accepted that he was right to reinterpret the passage, but disagreed on the definition of the key verb. He wanted 罣 to mean "hang" and I insisted on the more basic meaning of "stick".

The Chinese passage in T2521, which most East Asians take to be the Heart Sutra, reads (though note that the punctuation is modern):

以無所得故，菩提薩埵依 般若波羅蜜多故，心無罣礙；無罣礙故，無有恐怖，遠離顛倒夢想 ，究竟涅槃。

And this means more or less the same. I'll work through the differences as we go.  The first difference is to notice that the Chinese text has no "therefore Śāriputra" here.

Next, Huifeng has shown that aprāptitvād is an incorrect translation of 以無所得故.  In fact, Kumārajīva most often uses these characters to represent anupalambhayogena. And Huifeng makes a very good case for taking this word with the previous section and as ending a sentence. So if we make these corrections we get a working text that looks like this

Tasmācchāriputra śūnyatāyāṃ na rūpaṃ… na prāptir nābhsamayo anupalambhayogena ॥  

Bodhisatvo prajñāpāramitām āśritya viharaty acittāvaraṇaḥ. Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. 

Now, bodhisatvo does not just start a new sentence, it starts a next paragraph or section. Focusing now on this new paragraph, since we have eliminated the possibility that 心無罣礙 means acittavaraṇaḥ, it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād (and anyway this is a very weird construction). Moreover, there is no verb like viharati "dwell" anywhere in Chinese.

Unfortunately, although he gave an English translation which conveyed the correct reading of the Chinese, Huifeng didn't give a Sanskrit reading (and declined to do so when I pestered him in person). With the help of some colleagues I came up with an alternative Sanskrit reading based on the hints in Huifeng's article:

yo bodhisatvaḥ  prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati ।

The mind of the bodhisatva who relies on perfection of wisdom, does not get stuck anywhere.

The phrase "does not get stuck" could also be "does not get attached"  But how to deal with Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ? It is at this point that Red Pine simply abandons grammar and simply makes up a translation to suit his purposes. But the fact is that there is nothing very difficult here, except that Conze has once again led us astray.

In his 1948 edition, the last word in the sentence is nishṭhā-nirvāṇaḥ. Let us start here. Nirvāṇa is an adjective and thus properly takes the gender of the noun it describes. Buddhists often use it as a noun, and when they do so it is invariably neuter. The eagle-eyed reader will note that here nirvāṇaḥ has a masculine nominative singular ending. This can mean only one thing (and there is nothing "vague" here, contra Mr Pine)  which is that nishṭhā-nirvāṇa is a bahuvrīhi or adjectival compound. And it is describing a noun in the masculine nominative singular case. In Conze's Sanskrit, there is no such noun in this sentence. However, there is one in the previous sentence, i.e., bodhisatvaḥ (and note that -aḥ followed by p is unchanged, so bodhisatvo is wrong in Conze).

This tells us that Conze has blundered (again). Here we have just one sentence. It also tells us that we don't need prāpta. Prāpta (the passive past participle of prāpṇoti "to attain") was added to provide a verbal derivative because, just as in English, a Sanskrit sentence has to have a verb or a verbal derivative acting as a verb. By dividing one sentence, with one main verb, into two sentences, Conze has created an ungrammatical entity. Ancient scribes added prāptaḥ or in one case the verb prāpṇoti, but it was never needed. It also makes Red Pine's decision to take atikranto as the verb look silly (not to mention that this leaves viparyāsa undeclined, which is also not allowed).

The rules of grammar in any language are not simple. But the person who composed the Sanskrit followed those rules and it is the subsequent editors, translators, and commentators who have been at fault. Conze was an expert in Sanskrit so I cannot imagine why he went off piste in this case. Other experts, some of whom I hold in the highest esteem, have also failed to notice which rules were being applied.

There are, in fact, three bahuvrīhi compounds in a row, all of which describe the bodhisatva:

1. atrastaḥ “one who is without fear”  
2. viparyāsa-atikrāntaḥ “one who has overcome delusions”
3. niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ “one who has extinction as his end”

 So our working text now reads

yo bodhisatvaḥ  prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati  cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād so atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇaḥ

A quick comparison with the punctuation of the Chinese text T251 tells us that the editors of Taishō were on the same wavelength (though inconsistently; in T250 they side with Conze and break the passage into two sentences!). But we can refine this further. I said above "it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād". Based on Huifeng's research the Chinese characters most like mean asaṅgatvād "because of being without attachment". And this gives us

yo bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati asaṅgatvād so atrasto viparyāsātikrānto nishṭhānirvāṇaḥ |

However, when we look again at the Chinese we notice some further issues with these adjectival compounds. Firstly there are four of them in Chinese, and secondly the two key texts T250 and T2521 are different.

T250: 無有恐怖，離一切顛倒夢想苦惱，究竟涅槃。
T251: 無有恐怖，遠離顛倒夢想，究竟涅槃。

Well, take this a step at a time, and it is well worth taking our time because the first part of this provides us with a nice little insight. From the Sanskrit, we are expecting an adjective which means "he is not afraid". What we get is "non- 無, existent 有, terror 恐怖". Typically, we read this as "being without fear" to match the Sanskrit. But let's look again at the passage with the previous word added and without the modern punctuation.

無罣礙故無有恐怖遠離顛倒夢想

This is what the Sanskrit translator saw in the 7th Century. He had to figure out where the breaks come. We can see where the modern editors have put the breaks, but what if the translator became a little confused at this point and bracketed out the wrong characters and thought he saw something like this:

無 [罣礙故無有] 恐怖 遠離 顛倒 夢想

Now, this is an unlikely reading, but I'll tell you why I am highlighting it.  If we take the bracketed characters 罣礙故無有 the phrase 無 [罣礙故無有] 恐怖 says something like "not—because of the non-existence of mental obstructions—afraid". So is 無有 here the source of nāstitvād? There is no other explanation I can think of and no other explanation has ever been offered, to the best of my knowledge. Although the Chinese text is mangled in the process, we know it is not the first time the translator has mangled the text in the process of translating it into Sanskrit. But we also know that the translator does understand that 無 corresponds to the Sanskrit prefix a- or to the negative particle na. Which is to say that he knows better than to use nāstitvād when a- or na would do, and thus nāstitvād is in need of some explanation. If there is another explanation, I'd love to hear it.

Then we have some pairs of characters:

• 恐怖 "afraid" 
• 遠離 "goes beyond" = Sanskrit atikranto. 
• 顛倒 "delusion = Skt viparyāsa" 
• 夢想 "dream thoughts" i.e., illusions = Skt māyā.

In Chinese, the order of 遠離, "goes beyond"  and 顛倒, "delusion", suggests an active verb. And on this basis it would be possible to quibble with the construction of the Sanskrit. But I propose to leave the basic structure intact here. The translator has also mushed 顛倒 and 夢想 together into the familiar Sanskrit word viparyāsa, when he might have included the concept of māyā. Adding māyā here would be interesting in light of my observation about the relation of śūnyatā and māyā (soon to be published, but preliminary notes blogged) Now we want viparyāsātikrānta to be a descriptive compound and we would read this as "the bodhisatva has overcome delusions." I think we could follow the Chinese more precisely by having viparyāsmāyātikrānta. 

Note that T250 and T251 differ slightly here (added spaces for comparative purposes)

T251: 遠離        顛倒夢想,
T250:     離一切顛倒夢想苦惱.

The extra bits are 一切, meaning "all" (literally, "a single cut"), and 苦惱, meaning "misery and trouble", where 苦 is the character most often used for Sanskrit duḥkha. In T250, 離 means "depart, go away"; while in T251, 遠離 has the same meaning, but with greater emphasis. A similar distinction is found in Sanskrit between atikranta and saṃatikranta, for example.

The final piece of the puzzle, then, is how to translate 究竟涅槃. As I have explained in another previous essay, niṣṭhānirvāṇa was a poor choice. Kumārajīva uses these characters for a nirvāṇaparyavasānam. In our text it is being used an adjective of bodhisatvaḥ and must be given in the masculine nominative singular: nirvāṇaparyavasānaḥ. This gives us a final text:

yo bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati asaṅgatvād so atrasto viparyāsamāyātikrānto nirvāṇaparyavasānaḥ |

Of course, there are always difference ways to translate passages from one language to another. One only has to look at English translations of the Heart Sutra which continue to multiply and diverge from each other. With the Heart Sutra each exegete appears to be trying to put their own unique stamp on the text rather than all of us working towards a common understanding and a single standard translation. In other words, in the usual Buddhist critique, translating the Heart Sutra is more often an occasion for egoism than for transcending self. Rather ironic, really.  

At the very least, this essay has shown, again, how poorly the Buddhist community has been served at times by philologists and traditional exegesis. Here is a short text, barely 250 words or characters, that is supposed to be chanted daily by millions of Buddhists, and we still don't have an accurate text to chant.

I have spent a considerable part of the last five years forensically examining this text in Sanskrit and Chinese, with help from key allies, and have been posting my many notes here as I go in the form of more than 30 essays. My third peer-reviewed publication on the text will be out in November 2017. Not everyone is going to be able to follow the argument in this essay, but I hope some of you will at least try. Experience shows that traditionalists will resist any call to change the Heart Sutra and will probably deny that anything is wrong with the text. But people need to know that the familiar Heart Sutra is deeply flawed and in need of surgery. And that the so-called authorities on the text have never noticed this stark fact.

I confess that I am thoroughly vexed by all this bungling. I am far from the best person to be trying to sort this mess out, but the best people have come and gone and the mess remains. Some of them have made huge contributions to the field and clearly had bigger fish to fry, but the Heart Sutra is not exactly inconsequential in Buddhism. That is has been left in this state by philologists does my head in. If I can understand it, why did they not? I'm not special. Something as simple as noticing that a neuter noun is declined as masculine and therefore must be an adjective is just basic Sanskrit. You learn this in the first month of the first year of studying the language. How does anyone miss this, let alone everyone? I also missed it for years. I have studied this passage before and thought about how to translate it. I suppose I'm now something of an expert on the text (if not an authority) but if you look around the internet there are dozens of people with strong opinions on how to understand the text. It's just that none of them seems to actually read the text in Sanskrit and think about how to parse the sentences. 

In particular, in my circles, Conze and Red Pine are treated as reliable guides, but are, in fact, often, or even mostly, unreliable. Neither of them deserves their reputation for scholarship. Both are bunglers and have set back understanding of this text amongst Buddhists by decades. Kazuaki Tanahashi is not much better. Though his book is an improvement on Pine's, it is full of careless errors or just plain ignorance of Sanskrit. The dozens of commentaries are just rote recitations of sectarian gibberish. Mu Soeng frankly seems like a lunatic and his opinions on Sanskrit are laugh-out-loud wrong. The Dalai Lama is just going through the motions, reciting some ancient commentary by rote. D T Suzuki is busy doing his Mr Spock impression. It's all so depressing. How does the most popular text in Buddhism come to be treated so shabbily? It is gold. But not for the reasons that any famous Buddhists think it is. 

People often ask me what book they should read on the Heart Sutra. I get blank looks when I say that, in my opinion, it is better not to read any of the books currently available. They are full of inaccurate information. I mean it. The more you read about the Heart Sutra, the more wrong information you are assimilating that will only have to be unlearned in the end. I hope to remedy that situation soon by publishing a small book which gives an overview of recent research on the text (including mine, of course, but a few other people like Huifeng and Jan Nattier). In the meantime beware of fake Heart Sutra news, I guess. You're better off setting the sūtra  to one side and talking to someone who has some real depth of experience in meditation. Come back to it when you have experienced cessation for yourself. That would help head-off the most egregious wrong views. 

~~oOo~~

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

Conze, Edward. (1967) The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167. Modified version of Conze (1948).

Conze, Edward. (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. George Allen & Unwin. First Ed. 1957.

Huifeng. (2014). ‘Apocryphal Treatment for Conze’s Heart Problems: “Non-attainment”, “Apprehension”, and “Mental Hanging” in the Prajñāpāramitā.’ Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 6: 72-105. http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/75