The Heart Sutra

IBefore you read

The full name of the text is the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra 般若波羅蜜多心經, which Vietnamese Buddhists shorten to Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh or simply Tâm Kinh, the Heart Sutra. The words Bát Nhã Ba La Mật Đa are a transliteration of the Sanskrit prajnaparamita, the wisdom that carries a person across to the other shore. The word heart 心 in the title does not mean the physical heart or the feelings. It means the essence, the core, the heart of a much larger whole.

The sutra does not open in the usual way. There is no scene of the Buddha seated somewhere, and no one asks a question. It goes straight in, with the image of a Bodhisattva in deep contemplation, and from that seeing it states a chain of propositions that grow ever more decisive, closing at last with a mantra that is left untranslated.

This page presents the complete Chinese text, the Sino-Vietnamese transliteration as chanted in Vietnamese temples, a translation in plain words, and a commentary on each key line. The library sets this out for you to read and weigh for yourself. It does not pass judgment on your behalf.

IIThe full text in two hundred and sixty characters

IIILine by line commentary

The section below takes eleven key lines of the sutra and explains them more fully. They are kept in the same order as in the original, so that you can follow the flow of the text. Points that are easily misread are addressed directly within the commentary.

IVThe word emptiness in the Heart Sutra

If you read only one section of this page, please read this one. The word không 空, emptiness, is the word that holds up the entire sutra, and it is also the most misread word in Vietnamese, because in everyday speech không simply means nothing, or not.

Emptiness does not mean nothingness

The Chinese character 空 here translates the Sanskrit sunyata. The most important thing must be said at once: sunyata does not mean nothingness, does not mean non-existence, and does not mean that everything is an illusion.

The sutra does not say the cup does not exist. It does not tell you that tonight's dinner is unreal, that your loved ones are not real, or that working and not working amount to the same thing. A sutra that said such things could not open with độ nhất thiết khổ ách, passing beyond all suffering, because in nothingness there would be no one to carry across and no suffering to pass beyond.

The sutra itself guards against this misreading. Right after saying sắc tức thị không, form is emptiness, it immediately says the reverse, không tức thị sắc, emptiness is form. That second half only makes sense if emptiness is something that can turn back into a cup. Nothingness cannot do that.

Emptiness means having no separate self-nature

The true meaning of sunyata is the absence of self-nature, that is, the absence of a separate, fixed core that exists on its own, independently, without depending on anything else.

In short: everything exists, but nothing exists by itself. Whatever exists does so thanks to other things. That is the principle of dependent origination, the foundational teaching of Buddhism, and the word emptiness in the Heart Sutra is another way of stating that very principle. Emptiness and dependent origination are not two things. They are two faces of one thing.

Take an example you can hold. You have a pen in your hand. The pen is real. But try to find what in it is the pen. The plastic casing is not the pen, the ink cartridge is not the pen, the cap is not the pen. Take it all apart and lay the pieces on the table, and there is no pen left. Put them back together and the pen appears. So the pen exists, yet a core called pen-ness does not. That is emptiness.

A second example is closer to people. A person is a father because he has a child. A person is a director because there is a company and there are staff. Remove all those relationships and there is no father and no director left, though the person remains whole. Those titles are real in daily life, and they shape how we treat one another, but they are not solid blocks sitting inside the person.

Why this misreading matters

This misreading is not a matter of words. It leads to two real consequences.

First, many outsiders look in and conclude that Buddhism is a form of nihilism that teaches people to give up and disregard life. This reading has recurred many times in history, both in the nineteenth century West and in debates in East Asia. If emptiness meant nothingness, that conclusion would be reasonable. But it does not mean that.

Second, and more dangerous, is when people within the tradition misread the word and use emptiness as an excuse to avoid responsibility. They say that since everything is empty there is no need to keep the precepts, no need to treat others well, no need to do anything at all. The Buddhist tradition calls this falling into the view of annihilation, and regards it as a greater danger than ordinary clinging. That is exactly why the classical commentaries all lay such heavy stress on the phrase không tức thị sắc, emptiness is form.

Understood correctly, the result is the very opposite. Seeing that everything exists in dependence on everything else, one sees that one's actions truly affect others, and not merely as a moral platitude. Seeing emptiness makes responsibility clearer, not lighter.

VThe five aggregates and the eighteen realms

The sutra refers to several lists that experienced readers of scripture recognize at once, while newcomers see only a string of hard words. This section lays them out so that you can refer to them when rereading the full text.

The first list is the five aggregates, the five groups that together make up what we usually call a person. The word uẩn 蘊 originally means a heap, something piled up and gathered together. This classification says that the self is not a single solid block but five streams running at the same time.

The second list is the eighteen realms, made up of the six sense faculties, the six sense objects and the six consciousnesses. The six faculties are the six doors of contact, the six objects are the six kinds of thing met, and the six consciousnesses are the six corresponding streams of knowing. The three groups match up pair by pair, and the sutra abbreviates the whole set by naming its two ends, vô nhãn giới, nãi chí vô ý thức giới, meaning from the first realm up to the last.

Why the sutra recites a string of negations

Now the hardest passage of the text can be understood. After listing the five aggregates, the sutra says vô nhãn nhĩ tỵ thiệt thân ý, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, then vô sắc thanh hương vị xúc pháp, no sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind, then sweeps on through the twelve links of dependent origination with vô vô minh, no ignorance, up to vô lão tử, no old age and death, then the Four Noble Truths with vô khổ tập diệt đạo, and finally vô trí diệc vô đắc, no knowing and nothing attained.

Please notice the list of what is negated. Not one item is an object from ordinary life. The sutra does not say there is no table, no mountain, no dinner. Everything that has the word no placed in front of it is a category of the classical Buddhist system of teaching itself. The five aggregates, the eighteen realms, the twelve links, the Four Noble Truths. These are the four most important analytical frameworks used in the early period.

So what is the sutra doing? It is negating each layer of that conceptual framework in turn, to say that the very concepts used for analysis also have no separate self-nature, and also must not be turned into possessions. It does not deny the existence of the world. It takes down the scaffolding once the house is built.

Think of someone learning an instrument. At first one must remember the name of each note, count each beat, watch each finger. That framework is necessary. Without it there is no learning. But the fine player is the one who no longer has to think of the names of the notes while playing. The framework is not wrong and is not thrown away. It simply stops standing between the player and the music.

This is also why the sutra belongs to the Prajnaparamita family. The word prajna refers to direct wisdom, as distinct from knowledge gathered through concepts. The sutra negates concepts not to leave a void, but to make room for that direct seeing.

VIThe mantra at the end of the sutra

The sutra closes with a mantra. The Chinese text reads 揭諦揭諦，波羅揭諦，波羅僧揭諦，菩提薩婆訶, chanted in Vietnamese temples in the Sino-Vietnamese reading Yết đế yết đế, ba la yết đế, ba la tăng yết đế, bồ đề tát bà ha. The Sanskrit original is gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

It should be made clear that the Chinese here is not a translation. Xuanzang transliterated it, that is, he used Chinese characters to record the Sanskrit sounds, not to convey the meaning. So reading each Chinese character of the mantra by its Chinese meaning yields nothing.

Word by word

Why most traditions do not translate the mantra

The mantra can be translated, and it has just been translated above. But in temples almost nowhere chants the translation. The original sounds are kept. Commentators have long given several reasons.

The first is Xuanzang's own principle of translation. He set out five cases in which the sound should be kept rather than the meaning translated, and mantras are the first of the five. The reason is that a mantra's function is bound to its very sequence of sounds. Once the meaning is translated, the sound is lost, and that loss cannot be recovered through meaning.

The second is the mantra's role in the structure of the sutra. Through the two hundred and some characters before it, the sutra uses reasoning to dismantle one concept after another, to the point of negating both wisdom and attainment. If the ending then offered one more meaningful proposition for the reader to cling to, the whole flow would collapse. A mantra kept in its original sound does exactly what is needed at that point: it gives the mind no new thing to grasp.

The third is the practical matter of chanting together. A fixed sequence of sounds can be chanted by hundreds of people at once, and the same sounds carry from one generation to the next, whereas translations differ from region to region. This mantra has been kept almost intact across the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan and Vietnamese traditions, though the pronunciation differs in each place.

It should also be made clear that keeping the sound does not mean the mantra is meaningless, nor that its meaning is hidden. Its meaning is recorded in every commentary, and teachers explain it as a matter of course.

VIIWhere and when it is chanted

In practice, this is the most widely chanted sutra in Mahayana temples. Part of the reason is its length: two hundred and sixty characters fit at the end of a service without lengthening it much, so it finds a place in almost every ceremony.

The Vietnamese versions

Newcomers to temples often wonder why the same sutra sounds different at two different temples. That is normal, and there are several layers of reasons.

The first layer is the choice between transliteration and translation. Most Vietnamese temples chant the Sino-Vietnamese transliteration, that is, exactly the text given in the full text section above, read in Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation. This is the oldest practice. Some places chant a Vietnamese translation, and some chant both, the transliteration first and then the meaning.

The second layer is which translation. Many Vietnamese translations are in circulation, and the most frequently mentioned are associated with the Venerable Thích Trí Thủ, the Venerable Thích Thanh Từ, the Venerable Thích Nhất Hạnh and several others. They differ in their choice of words. Some keep many Sino-Vietnamese terms to stay close to the original, some use plain Vietnamese for ease of understanding, and some are set in verse for ease of chanting.

The third layer is small differences in the transliteration itself. Even among the Sino-Vietnamese versions there are variant spellings, mostly due to regional dialect: tỵ or tỷ for the character 鼻, bất sinh or bất sanh, độ nhất thiết or độ nhứt thiết. These do not change the meaning.

One more detail is worth knowing. Xuanzang's version is the short version, which goes straight into the main text. The Chinese canon also holds longer versions, which open with the Buddha on Vulture Peak and close with the assembly rejoicing and taking up the teaching, in the full format of a sutra. The Tibetan tradition chants the long version. Vietnamese temples chant the short one.

The library describes these matters so that you understand what you hear. It does not give ritual instructions. Which version to chant, when and how, is a matter for each temple and each lineage, and you should ask at the place you attend.

VIIICommon misunderstandings

Because the sutra is short and widely chanted, it is also the text most often quoted out of context. The six points below are the ones the library meets most frequently, recorded here for you to read and compare.

?Quick Questions

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