THE HEART SUTRA – PART ONE
by Josh Bartok

Good evening everyone. Please sit comfortably. As you do, please endeavor to maintain this spacious broad attention of zazen as you listen.
 
Tonight I am going to talk about the Heart Sutra. With this talk, I just hope to orient us all to the Heart Sutra, point some things out, and perhaps make it a little more rich and alive for us.
 
I’m going to take this bit by bit. The first three lines:
 
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva when practicing deep prajna paramita
Clearly saw that the five aggregates are empty
And thus relieved all suffering.
 
There’s a whole lot going on even in that opening. The being who is talking in this sutra is Avalokiteshvara, so this is the background, setting the stage. Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion. That’s interesting because this is a sutra about prajna, about deepest wisdom, so you might expect Manjusri Bodhisattva to be the one talking. Manjusri is the Bodhisattva who is associated with wisdom. His flaming sword is the sword that cuts through delusion. But here we have Avalokiteshvara – her name means “The One Who Perceives or Beholds the Cries of the World” or "The one who regards the cries of the world." Right here in the beginning we see that Avalokiteshvara, through practicing prajna paramita, relieves all suffering, not just some suffering, and just her own. Please be challenged by that. One of the next things we can see is that Avalokiteshvara practices. Avalokiteshvara has to practice prajna paramita. Even the great Mahasattva Bodhisattva of Compassion, even that being has to continue to practice in every moment to relieve the suffering of all the world. And she does indeed see the world, and the suffering beings in it, and the suffering beings in her own mind.  It isn’t that there are no beings, no world. There is suffering, within, without, neither within nor without.
 
Prajna paramita – prajna is translated often just as wisdom. Prajna paramita is the perfection of wisdom, the best knowing of wisdom, or as we chanted in our dedication, wisdom beyond wisdom, which is a presentation that I find really satisfying. I also sometimes hear those as "wisdom beyond mere wisdom." It’s the wisdom that isn’t dependent at all on any of the contents of your mind. It’s the wisdom that isn’t any kind of wise or pithy saying. It’s the wisdom that isn’t even any deep penetration or experience of kensho, a deep penetration of emptiness. It’s beyond all that.
 
Clearly saw that the five aggregates are empty.
 
This is part of what we are practicing in our zazen, what we are seeing as we open the hand of thought as things arise in our minds. In the version we chant, the five aggregates are form, sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness. Let’s first talk about the word aggregate, and then about the five specific ones. Aggregate in our version is a translation of skandha. Another more literal translation is “heap" or "pile"—as in a pile of junk. Take away each individual piece of junk in the pile, and the pile itself is gone. There is no "heap essence" or "fundamental pile nature" that exists apart from the collection of individual pieces of junk.  These are the things that pile onto what we ascribe self-nature to, the things we mistake our self and all beings for. In fact, these are comprised only of the aggregates. The teaching of Buddhism is that aside from these things – form, sensation, perception, formations, and consciousness – there isn’t any other thing that remains and is precisely us. And yet, again, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t meaningful to talk about existence, to talk about beings, about suffering, about the world. But we should perhaps ask ourselves what precisely we are talking about when we do so.
 
The best analogy for the relationship of the aggregates to the thing we ascribe existence to is a rainbow. A rainbow is a phenomenon. There exists a thing that is a rainbow. Nobody is denying that rainbow exists. However, the rainbow is in fact an interaction of light coming in at a specific angle, an observer in this specific relationship, the particles of water suspended in the sky, the interaction of light and particles. All of these things produce the experience of “there’s a rainbow.” But a rainbow isn’t anything other than the water, the light, the perspective. There’s nothing you can grab that is the rainbow. In the same way, there’s nothing you can grab that is us, that isn’t our form (which is to say our body), or our sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness. These latter four things are the traditional Indian way of breaking down all the contents of the mind. And there is a way too in which even form is mind!
 
I want to unpack formations. What we are saying there is mental formations. Those are like karmic imprints of your mind, conditioned patterns of your mind, all of your beliefs, all of your reactivity, all of the things that come together and create your personality. That’s in the category of formations. What these five things are meant to include are everything that arises in your mind. This is why we say that in zazen  there aren’t two kinds of mental experience, of mental phenomena, mental dharmas that arise. There aren’t the ones that you grab onto because those are the good ones, and then the other ones that you practice letting go of. There’s only the phenomena that arise. And with regard to all of them, we do just one thing: open the hand of thought and return, over and over, to this.
 
Also included in the category of formations is volition -  willing, impulses, the urge to action and the urge that precedes physical movement, for instance. Coming back to zazen, this is why we practice stillness. Not because movement is bad, or because there’s anything inherently excellent about stillness. In practicing stillness we’re gradually able to see the urge to move. In our ordinary life we just respond to it. We scratch our nose, we shift around. That doesn’t teach us a great deal. So we start to change our relationship to it when we allow that urge to arise and then don’t act on it. In that moment we see that we are not identical with that urge.
 
In the category of perceptions are all of the things you see and all of the physical reactions you have. Again we practice embodying of this realization of emptiness. Even if we don’t have a cognitive insight into it, we practice embodying our insight into the emptiness of pain each moment we remain still, each moment we sit undestroyed by pain in our knees, in our backs, in our shoulders, in our minds. All of that arises and passes away.
 
I’m going to use three main sources tonight. The first one is Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra. It's a really lovely book, nice and brief. As somebody who spends all day reading Dharma books  I’m extremely grateful for a little conciseness! One in the background that I want to commend to you is actually the Heart Sutra chapter in Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality.  It is strangely, in my opinion, one of the best and most concise presentations and orientations to the Heart Sutra. Then we’re going to use a little bit from the Samyutta Nikaya, a piece of the Pali Canon, a sutra that the Buddha actually spoke, unlike this Heart Sutra which is probably around fifteen hundred years old.
 
Bringing us back to the fact that there is no "heap essence" or the epigraph to the chapter on the Heart Sutra in Hardcore Zen begins with a quote from Bart Simpson
 
C’mon, Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul. It’s just something they make up to scare kids, like the boogeyman or Michael Jackson.
 
Let me touch briefly on the word empitness. Other translations of emptiness include "zero," "boundlessness," "openness," "fluidity" and "empty/fullness." Emptiness and empty are just placeholders. What it is a placeholder for is part of what your practice will reveal for you. Don’t get too caught up on any ideas you have about what "empty" means but let me just state very clearly that it isn’t nihilism. Buddhist emptiness has nothing at all to do with the statement, “Everything is so empty, I feel so miserable and worthless.”  And the reality of emptiness doesn’t mean that there aren’t beings in the world.
 
Clearly seeing emptiness relieves all suffering. This is a really appealing hook. I invite you to be tantalized by that, pulled ahead by that, encouraged by that, to let that be a way of not becoming too self-satisfied, too complacent with any understanding of Buddhism. All of your understandings of Zen, of the Heart Sutra, all of them are in the service of relieving all suffering. I want to also point out a caveat of this is that relieving suffering might not precisely take the form that you were imagining. In fact, I’d bet that it probably won’t.
 
I want to also say this about emptiness. I should get one of these to bring in as a prop. Have you seen these books, they’re called the Magic Eye? They are these books that look like computer-generated snow, just random dot patterns, and if you look at them just right and hold your eyeballs a certain way, instead of looking on the surface of the page it’s like you’re looking four inches behind the page. Then you see that there’s this 3-D holographic image. That, for me, is a little bit like the relation between form and emptiness. There’s a way in which if you don’t know how to look at those magic eye things you say, “What are you talking about? Those are just dots on the page. I don’t see a dolphin. There’s no dolphin there. Obviously there’s no dolphin, look!” That’s the same as when we haven’t figured out how to do that internal eyeball adjustment that lets us look at forms in a different way. So we say, “No, no, what do you mean they’re empty? Of course there’s this. Of course there’s a me. Of course this is all.” But then it changes, and there are two different kinds of truths. There’s the truth of the dots on the page, the truth of form, and there’s the truth of the dolphin, the truth of emptiness.
 
"Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form"--this is really as clear as at gets, even though before you realize it, this phrase sounds utterly incomprehensible.
 
And here let me talk a little about Buddha and Mara. Mara, sometimes called Mara the Deceiver or Mara the Evil One,  is the personification of evil in Buddhism. In various places in the Pali Canon, Mara takes a form and addresses Buddha and tries to dissuade him from his insight and compassion, dissuade him from the Path. I’m going to read you a little bit here from Thich Nhat Hanh.
 
Buddha needs Mara to take the evil role so Buddha can be a Buddha. Buddha is as empty as a sheet of paper. Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements, just as paper is made of non-paper elements. If non-Buddha is like us and not here, how can a Buddha be? If the rightist is not here, how can we call someone a leftist?
 
I want to point to this brief quote in the Samyutta Nikaya.
 
Now, on one occasion the Blessed One was instructing, exhorting, inspiring, and gladdening the bikkhus…
 
(That's lovely usage, isn't it, “gladdening.”?  Practicing the dharma means gladdening the mind!).
 
… with the Dhamma talk concerning the five aggregates subject to clinging. Those bikkhus were listening to the Dhamma with eager ears, attending to it as a matter of vital concern, applying their whole minds to it. Then it occurred to Mara, the Evil One, “This ascetic Gotama is instructing, exhorting, inspiring, and gladdening the bikkhus. Let me approach the ascetic Gotama in order to confound them.”
 
And then he proceeds to try to confound them by taking the form of an ox and creating all kinds of destruction. In the stories about Mara, Buddha always causes Mara the Evil One to become "sad and disappointed" (as the Sutras always say) and disappear right there. The way He does it is by recognizing that Mara is Mara. “Ah, Mara, I see you.”
 
The Blessed One, having understood this is Mara the Evil One, addressed Mara in verse.
 
Form, feeling and perception,
Consciousness and formations,
I am not this.
This isn’t mine.
This one is detached from it.
 
“I am not this. This is not mine.” That’s what speaking from freedom sounds like. That’s what speaking from the ultimate reality of having penetrated emptiness comes from. This is the opposite of the way we normally talk. We talk about “my anger,” “I am angry.” Both of those constructions in our language reflect owning or identity. The other thing that our zazen teaches us, that our zazen embodies, whether or not we notice it, is that there’s a different perspective. I encourage you to look for the one in which anger is present. "Here is some anger now." "Angry thoughts are arising." Or look carefully, and explore the constellation of thoughts, believes, and bodily sensations that are present in that angry instant. What is it? All of this is different than mistaking yourself for that anger. Anger is just a mental phenomenon. It’s just something that’s arising in your mind. It’s just content. And prajna paramita is beyond all content. When we talk of "letting go" of thoughts (or more usefully, of "letting them be"), we don’t need to evaluate their content as mine or not mine, good or bad, insightful or deluded. We just return over and over to … this.
 
Buddha also talks about "I-making" and "mine-making." These are the paths towards suffering. That’s an activity that we engage in. Rather than a static condition of being, it’s something we do to create suffering. We engage in I-making, we engage in mine-making. If we cease doing that or change our relationship to doing that we begin to see what it means to be free from suffering.
 
Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness,
Emptiness does not differ from form.
Form itself is emptiness,
Emptiness itself form.
 
The version of this that I imprinted on at Zen Mountain Monastery is the one that, if my attention wanders while we’re chanting, I start chanting what I used to chant. In that version they say,
 
Form is exactly emptiness,
Emptiness exactly form.
 
This is, in my opinion, the heart of the Heart Sutra. Another way of using the Magic Eye example is that the dots are exactly the dolphin, and the dolphin is exactly dots, and yet not. Another image is to think that the wave is itself water, water itself the wave. It isn’t that wave and water are two things. It isn’t that when you are looking at the ocean sometimes you see the wave and sometimes you see the water. The form of the water is the wave. The form of emptiness is form. When we look at form, we are seeing emptiness.
 
Let me read you an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh again.
 
A wave in the ocean has a beginning and an end, a birth and a death, but Avalokiteshvara tells us that the wave is empty, the wave is full of water but it is empty of a separate self. A wave is a form which has been made possible thanks to the existence of wind and water. If a wave only sees its form with its beginning and end it may be afraid of birth and death, but if the wave sees that it is water, identifies itself with water, then it will be emancipated from birth and death. Each wave is born and is going to die, but the water is free from birth and death.
 
This sentiment, form is itself emptiness, emptiness itself form, is what we also chant and what the Third Chinese Ancestor, Sencan, tells us in Affirming Faith in Mind:
 
What is, is not.
What is not, is.
 
This is exactly the same as “Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.” Then the Third Ancestor goes on to say,
 
If this is not yet clear to you,
You’re still far from the inner truth.
 
Which can sound a little daunting. But there’s also this line, “Know this, and all is whole and complete.” And he might have added, "and you too will relieve all suffering"
 
Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness.
They neither arise nor cease,
Are neither defiled nor pure,
Neither increase nor decrease.
Therefore, given emptiness,
There is no form, no perception, no formation,
No consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue,
No body, no mind.
 
This isn’t a negation of the fact that there are eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. There are, of course. That’s half of it. The other half is that there are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. From one perspective, there is. From another perspective, there is not. This is the absolute and the relative, the conventional and the ultimate. The thing about Zen is that at no point are we forced to decide, this or that, one or the other. This is what we express in the gesture of gassho, this coming together of opposites, the many becoming one, form and emptiness meeting together--as they always do, right here. Sometimes we see form as form, sometimes we see form as emptiness, sometimes we see emptiness as emptiness. They are the same. No birth and no death.
 
I’m going to read two paragraphs from Thich Nhat Hanh.
 
We cannot conceive of the birth of anything. There is only continuation. Please look back even further and you will see that you not only exist in your father and mother, but you also exist in your grandparents and your great-grandparents. As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. This is not poetry, it is science. Why do I say that in a former life I was a cloud? Because I am still a cloud. Without the cloud, I cannot be here. I am the cloud, the river, and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air.
 
This is also Thich Nhat Hanh speaking directly to how to practice koan study, as some of you may recognize.
 
And I was a rock, with minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation.
 
I just want to emphasize that. Nothing in Buddhism is about reincarnation, especially in Zen. We speak of rebirth, which is something entirely different, and is what Thich Nhat Hanh is talking about here. Reincarnation only exists in Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition. The rest of us have rebirth.
 
Buddha said that in one of his former lives he was a tree, he was a fish, he was a deer. These are not superstitious things. Every one of us has been a cloud, a deer, a bird, a fish, and we continue to be these things, not just in former lives. Do you think that a cloud can die? To die means that from something you become nothing. Do you think that we can make something a nothing? Let us go back to the sheet of paper. We may have the illusion that to destroy it, all we have to do is light a match and burn it up. But if we burn a sheet of paper, some of it will become smoke, and the smoke will rise and continue to be. The heat that is caused by the burning paper will enter into the cosmos and penetrate into other things because the heat has been at one with the paper. The ash that has formed will become a part of the soil, and the sheet of paper, in his or her next life, might be a cloud and a rose at the same time. We have to be very careful and attentive in order to realize the sheet of paper has never been born and will never die. It can take on other forms of being but we are not capable of transforming a sheet of paper into nothingness.
 
Master Dogen, in Genjokoan, talks about this same thing from a slightly different perspective when he talks about wood and ash. The wood turns into ash and never becomes wood again, but we should not think that wood precedes ash and ash follows wood. Wood is a state full and complete unto itself. Ash is a state full and complete unto itself. That’s the other side of what Thich Nhat Hanh is pointing to here.
 
Krishnamurti points to this truth, saying, “The observer is the observed.” Meister Eckhart says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
 
Part of this is related to a cosmic, expansive conservation of energy, matter, karma, intention. It points to this beautifully closed system. For me it’s really freeing, in a way that I don’t know if I can express. It’s all right here. All of it is right here. Our past lives, our future lives, our dead relatives, our suffering planet, the Buddhas, the Ancestors, our deluded self, our enlightened self. All of those things also are mental content, they’re just content. All of those things are ideas. Birth and death, enlightenment and delusion, Buddha and Ancestors, all of those things are things right now that are arising in your mind. Prajna paramita sees beyond that, sees the larger empty fullness that holds all of them, all of those things that arise.
 
Thank you everyone.


Josh Bartok began his practice under the guidance of John Daido Loori, and lived for eighteen months as a monastic Zen practitiioner at Zen Mountain Monastery. He was James Ford's first shoken student in Boston, and also currently studies with Jan Chozen Bays at Great Vow Zen Monastery. He works as an editor at Wisdom Publications, and serves as practice leader (tanto) at the ZCB affliate Spring Hill Zen in Somerville.