Heart Sutra – The Director’s Cut
Hi all, my Heart Sutra post for the article swap was toned down a bit. I called it the theatrical version. As promised, though, here is the Director’s Cut…and you don’t even have to pay extra to see it.
So my favorite sutra is The Heart Sutra. It was the first sutra I was introduced to before I really knew what sutras were and it spoke to me on 2 major fronts. One was it had the word ‘heart’ in the title which made me think that it was going to tell me the ‘heart of the matter’ in regards to practice. This it certainly does many times over. My Western mind got all excited because I thought right away I was going to get the benefit of cutting thru the bullshit early. This in itself attracted me because my introduction to Zen (and I’m grateful for it) was thru the no bullshit writing of Brad Warner.
The other thing that called to me were the lines ‘forms is emptiness, emptiness is form’. That blew me away because it echoed a feeling that had grown in me over my many years as a spiritual vagabond. It had the gravitas of Truth and it resonated in me more strongly than anything that had come before. I read it and I thought “oh fuck yeah, Avalotketishvara really knew his shit!” That’s what caught me up in Buddhism in the first place…here were all these ideas and practices that made real something I had organically come to understand…and someone had been writing it all down for 2600 years.
Now I don’t connect very well to Asian ideas and metaphors, so it takes me a lot of cushion time to grasp them and the help of commentaries. Of the ones I’ve read, Thich Nhat Hanh has been the most helpful for me as it tends to be the most simple and god knows I need simple. What he said that really anchored the sutra in my brain, though, was “Emptiness=water, Form=wave” and BAM it all came together for me in a way my pea brain could grasp…I guess Shariputra got it right away, but I’m a bit ofa thick headed hick so I needed it spelled out. This idea and the rest of the sutra says to me…look, no matter what you think you know and have figured out in your years, life unfolds exactly as it is supposed to at all times and in all places. Just like an ivy, when it reaches a blockage, it does not cry that it cannot grow left, it just grows right or over or under or around the other way. It knows that all things are ‘marked with emptiness, neither defiled nor immaculate’, there is just Perfect Understanding that moves forward. The Understanding that does not cling inappropriately but continues to move forward responding appropriately to all it encounters. It does not shut down, but keeps moving forward into ‘gate gate paragate parasamgate’. Do not bemoan what you cannot do, do not get mired down in stuckness, get up, pay attention, keep moving into the fullness of life even when it feels scary or uncertain or groundless.
The Heart Sutra is the essence of what I call Dirty Dharma…it’s not prettied up or made lovely or spoon fed, it’s the essence of the practice where the rubber meets the road and if you get lost or stuck you have only to read the mantra at the end again: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. To me this says:
Gate: pull your head out of your ass
Gate: pull your head out of your ass (I’m pretty sure Avoloketishvara knew we had our heads up our collective asses pretty deep so we needed to hear it more than once)
Paragate: engage life, keep practicing getting your head out of your ass
Parasamgate: there’s no light at the end of your ass now pull your head out and keep practicing whether it’s good, bad, or neutral
Bodhi: wake up!
Svaha: Fuck yeah!
For me, this sutra, as with all sutras are best when I read them more as poetry and less as scripture. I was raised Catholic, so ‘scripture’ carries a heavy and negative feeling with it whereas poetry is easier for my mind to open to and embrace and be creative with. By being creative with, I mean interacting with and having fun with like I did with my humorous translation above.
Working from this perspective, I find that I see many modern day sutra writers if you just listen to their poetry. Here is one that hits on the prajnaparamita for me currently:
Let the crisis become a bridge, you’ll cross that bridge tomorrow,
And in the time that comes between, baby, why don’t you let go of the sorrow?
She says ‘the sky is crying’, he says ‘no, the sky is blue’.
- Juliet by Stevie Nicks
So I carry on being a wave studying the water.
