..续本文上一页ience and mysticism, between Eastern thought and Western pragmatism, and the consequent emergence of a new paradigm in recent times, offers a renewed hope that we may yet be able to transform ourselves and the world around us. The dangers of failing to do so are readily apparent, mostly in the near-destruction of the ecological system of the planet. There are many tools of transformation but the only place where transformation really takes place is in the human heart. The ancient traditions of the East have always sought to understand the nature of reality within one”s own heart. It is not an accident that the Chinese word hsin stands for Heart-Mind. In the Eastern way of looking at things, the thinking-feeling process is a unified field, in contrast to the Cartesian dualism of the western scientific mind. Human experience has shown that the heart-mind, being deeply conditioned, is not an easy place for conflicts to be resolved. This was brought out most vividly in the intense emotional and even existential crisis which the pioneers of quantum physics (the post-Einsteinian branch of physics that deals with the molecular structure of organisms at the subatomic level) underwent before they could accept the intellectual findings of their own experiments.
The Heart Sutra, an ancient scripture from the Mahayana wisdom schools of Buddhism, is an insight into the nature of ultimate reality through intuitive wisdom. The spaciousness of this insight allows the heart to beat in its naturalness, beyond disputations and ideological arguments. Now that quantum physics has found some very interesting parallels to the basic insights of the Heart Sutra, perhaps the intellectual and the intuitive can meet in the new paradigm. At the same time, while this commentary offers to view the insights of Mahayana Buddhism in the light of quantum physics, it carries no suggestion that the two are complementary or interchangeable. They are, at best, two entirely different orders of reality, each reflecting completely different underlying processes that happen to converge. In his pioneering book, The Tao of Physics, Frithjof Capra has observed:
The conception of physical things and phenomena as
transient manifestations of an underlying
fundamental entity is not only a basic element of
quantum field theory, but also a basic element of
the Eastern world view ... the intuition behind
the physicist”s interpretation of the subatomic
world, in terms of the quantum field, is closely
paralleled by that of the Eastern mystic who
interprets his or her experience of the world in
terms of an ultimate underlying reality.
Buddhists express the same idea when they call the
ultimate reality Sunyata--"Emptiness" or "the
void"--and affirm that it is a living Void which
gives birth to all forms in the phenomenal world
.... Thus the Void of the Eastern mystic can
easily be compared to the quantum field of
subatomic physics. Like the quantum field, it
gives birth to an infinite variety of forms which
it sustains and, eventually, reabsorbs.[2]
The effort in this commentary is to see this convergence in a creative light, knowing fully well that after convergence the two orders of reality separate again and their underlying processes take a different turn. Above all, this commentary on the Heart Sutra is offered in the spirit of a Zen practitioner. This commentary arose out of my own need, and presumably the need of like-minded Zen students, to understand the historical and doctrinal background of this seminal document. At the same time, I wanted to be careful not to get caught in the minutiae of academic analysis and turn this commentary into yet another doctrinal point of view. In the present approach, the focus is not on doctrinal orthodoxy…
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