..续本文上一页ayana"--the lower vehicle--by its rivals.) In the centuries after Buddha”s death, the Hinayana followers, with the encyclopedic Abhidharma as their literature, had created categories of analysis to the point where it became, in the words of Heinrich Dumoulin, the Zen historian, "a dishearteningly lifeless product without metaphysical elan...." Mahayana sutras thunder again and again against philosophers (Abhidharmists) who are disposed to freeze reality into a categorical permanence and to discriminate between subject and object.

　　In the still-solidifying tradition of Mahayana, the Heart Sutra is a key document demolishing all these categories, and pointing out that all categories are ultimately dualistic and not leading to wisdom essential for enlightenment. In the earliest stages of the formation of Mahayana, there were schools of thought which proposed the doctrine of the "five words" of the Buddha; meditations on these words alone have transcendent significance and the power to bring liberation (which, they claimed, was not the case with the rest of his discourses.) These five words are: non-soul (anatta), impermanence (anicca), unhappiness (dukkha), extinction (nirvana) and emptiness (sunyata).

　　The first four of these words are shared by the early Mahayanists commonly with the Hinayanists; it is with the inclusion of sunyata (emptiness) as the last of these words that early Mahayana asserts its difference with the Hinayana schools. For the Hinayanists, "emptiness" may be synonymous with the first word--non-self or non-soul--but its use was restricted in describing a person. Mahayana invention was not only to postulate sunyata (emptiness) as the essential emptiness of the phenomenal world, including the world within a person”s mind; the thinkers of Mahayana took care to deny the existence of sunyata as yet another category. Thus we have the doctrine of sunyata-sunyata, the emptiness of emptiness. Sunyata is experienced as intuitive wisdom, and it is only through the intuitive wisdom of sunyata, the theme of Mahayana wisdom schools, that one is ferried across to the other shore of liberation.

　　The popularity of the Heart Sutra in

　　the Buddhist tradition lies not only in its brevity but also in the elusiveness of its meaning. Distinguished commentators over the ages have discovered in it widely pergent interpretations which have led Edward Conze to observe that, "they tell us more what the text meant to them within their own culture than what the Indian original intended to convey."[5]

　　If that be the case, the pergent interpretations seem somehow quite appropriate since the elusive meaning of sunyata demands that each generation of Buddhist thinkers and practitioners in each culture come to grips with it through the praxis of their own experience.

　　The Heart Sutra has two versions, the longer and the shorter. The longer version has a prologue in which the Buddha enters into samadhi and an epilogue in which he rises from samadhi and praises the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. The shorter version, used here, begins without the prologue and has Avalokitesvara contemplating the meaning of the profound perfection of wisdom.

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　　The Setting

　　The Heart Sutra is preached on Vulture Peak, east of the ancient Indian city of Rajagraha, the capital of the kingdom of Magadha. Rajagraha, along with Sravasti, was one of the two major cities of ancient India most frequently visited by the Buddha during his forty-five year teaching career. The Vulture Peak is said to have been a favorite site of the Buddha, and here he gave a number of sermons to assemblies of monks and laypeople.

　　The rather unique prologue (of the longer version) introduces us to the leading characters of the sutra: Shakyamuni Buddha, Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva and Sariputr…

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