By Donna M. Wulff
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Brown University

The Heart Sutra and the larger body of wisdom texts of which it forms a part may be seen as an attempt to return to the clarity and straightforward nature of the early Buddhist sutras after a period of increasing abstraction and complexity. In the following brief essay I attempt to trace these developments.

The teachings attributed to the Buddha (c. fifth century B.C.E.) and enshrined in the Pali Canon, the earliest Buddhist corpus, have an elegance and linguistic simplicity. For example, all conditioned existence, i.e., the psycho-physiological beings we call humans and the surrounding phenomenal world, has three characteristics:

1. nothing in this realm satisfies us fully;
2. everything in the phenomenal world is impermanent; and
3. nothing in the phenomenal world, including humans, has a permanent, unchanging essence.

The four Aryan (“noble” or perhaps “exalted”) Truths, the best-known teachings of the Pali Canon, dovetail with these three characteristics. The first, that nothing satisfies us fully, is a restatement of the first characteristic. The second gives the reason for our constant disappointment: We crave (desire) both objects and states such as happiness and security. The third Truth, the way to end our recurrent experiences of disappointment, is to cease to crave. Finally, the fourth Truth spells out the way to bring this about: the eight-fold path, a set of goals or ideals that consists of right speech, right actions, right occupation, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration, right thoughts (i.e., true wisdom), and right intentions.

In the centuries after the Buddha, Indian Buddhist monks in various competing centers of learning began producing texts classified as Abhidharma, works that described the results of their elaborate analytical endeavors. Among other things, they reflected on the five “aggregates” of the early Buddhist teaching, the elements of a human person: form, sensations, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. This is one of the lists that we see systematically negated in the Heart Sutra.

The scholastic edifices these monks constructed were challenged by a newly emerging Buddhist community, the members of which appropriated for themselves the name “Mahayana,” literally “great way.” In a body of texts called Prajnaparamita (literally, the Perfection of Wisdom), in which the Heart Sutra has a prominent place, they systematically negated the categories put forward by the scholastic monks, whose teachings they disparagingly called “Hinayana,” literally, “small or diminished way.” It was primarily Mahayana teachings and practices that were conveyed from India to Central Asia, and from there, via the Silk Road, to China, Korea, and Japan.

The seeming negativity of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras has a positive purpose: to clear away all analytical conceptions so that the practitioner can experience a supra-rational Truth unmediated by the structures of language and discursive thought. It is this process of “clearing away” that we see in the Heart Sutra.

Although the Heart Sutra is in origin an Indian Sanskrit Mahayana text, it has been the Zen school in Japan that has especially cherished it and developed a practice based on its insights. It is likely that Lou Harrison encountered the Sutra in a Zen context. In an anthology titled The Wisdom of Buddhism (page 155), eminent Buddhist scholar C. Humphreys encapsulates the Zen interpretation of the Perfection of Wisdom teachings as follows: “This is the true stuff of Zen, exposition on a plane beyond the intellect.”