..续本文上一页ted to the Buddha) and sastras (commentaries on the sutras) of the Mahayana tradition whose composition and compilation took place over a period of a thousand years after the death of the Buddha, and

　　3) the Buddhist Religion,which includes a smorgasbord of bewildering and seemingly contradictory practices and beliefs ranging from the marathoning monks of Mt. Hiei in Japan to the devotees of Pure Land and Nichiren sects in East Asia to the laity supporting the forest-monks in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

　　The Heart Sutra, or the "Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra," to give it its proper Sanskrit name, belongs to the Buddhist tradition, and is probably the best known of the Mahayana sutras. It is chanted daily in the Buddhist monasteries of China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and in the West. This very short sutra (containing about fourteen verses in Sanskrit and 260 characters in Chinese) is a basic text of Zen tradition and is considered to contain the essence of all Mahayana wisdom schools.

　　Zen (Ch”an) began in China as a meditation school of Mahayana Buddhism and was partially shaped by its sutra literature. These sutras capture the dramatic fervor and religious aspirations of new movements in India that had broken away from the earliest forms of Buddhism (Hinayana), beginning, most likely, in the first century BCE. The Mahayana doctrine developed, religiously and philosophically, with the Bodhisattva ideal (which exhorted a practitioner to work for the liberation of all beings, however numberless, rather than striving just for one”s own liberation) at its center, and the teaching of sunyatya (Emptiness) as its inspiration. D.T. Suzuki, the great facilitator between Zen tradition and the West, finds, in the psychology of the Bodhisattva, "one of the greatest achievements in the life of the spirit."

　　Several of the schools of Mahayana Buddhism are based on a group of sutras known as Prajnaparamita Sutras or the Sutras of Transcendent Wisdom. The earliest portions of these sutras go back to the period 100 BCE. to 100 CE; the Heart Sutra itself has been dated by Edward Conze at 350 CE.

　　The great Mahayana sutras form the center of

　　Mahayana; in them the new religious inspiration is

　　crystallized. A massive and imposing body of

　　literature, the sutras differ greatly in content,

　　but each and every one of them breathes the spirit

　　of Mahayana. These widely scattered writings serve

　　many religious communities. While inpidual

　　sutras or groups of sutras take up particular

　　themes, they concur and overlap at many points.

　　Moreover, one and the same sutra can give rise to

　　different religious movements. They are often

　　accompanied by explanatory commentaries, or

　　sastras.[4]

　　When Buddhism first moved from India to China in its Mahyana forms, it was known not as Buddhism but as the "Religion of Prajnaparamita" or, since the sutras of the Prajnaparamita centered around the teaching of sunyata (somewhat loosely translated as emptiness or nothingness), as the "Religion of Nothingness."

　　The Heart Sutra is one of approximately 38 sutras in the Prajnaparamita group, and its shortest. In it, the dynamic vibrancy of sunyata and the cryptic delineation of its meaning have been captured with a radical economy of expression that has exercised a fascination over the minds of countless generations of Buddhist thinkers in India, China, Tibet and other lands where Mahayana Buddhism flourished. Some of the greatest thinkers in Buddhist history, among them Atisa, Fa-tsang, Kukai, and Hakuin have written commentaries on the Heart Sutra.

　　While it celebrates sunyata as a timeless truth, the Heart Sutra has also to be seen as a historical document, engaged in rivalry with the rationalist-schematic approach taken by earliest sects of Buddhism (designated as "Hin…

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