Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra

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Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra

By Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Reviewed By David Loy

Philosophy East and West

Vol. 49, No. 4 (October 1999) pp. 520-524

Copyright 1999 by University of Hawaii Press

Hawaii, USA

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The Heart Sūtra is not only the best-known and most recited of Buddhist sūtras, it is also one of the strangest, although that strangeness is obscured by its familiarity.

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Prajñāpāramitā sūtras usually begin by explaining the ultimate nature of reality and then present the path to realize that reality, but in the Heart Sūtra the latter function is replaced by a Sanskrit mantra ("gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā"), itself probably the most famous and widely recited Buddhist mantra, whose meaning and function within the sūtra are nonetheless unclear. As is usual with Mahāyāna scriptures, we know very little about its origins. Conze dated this "sutra of sutras" to about 350 C.E. and Nakamura to two hundred years earlier, but more recently Jan Nattier has suggested that it may be a Chinese apocryphon translated into Sanskrit in the seventh century C.E. (see p. 241 n).

In an earlier work, The Heart Sūtra Explained (1988), Lopez used several commentaries preserved in the Tibetan canon to construct his own explanation. Elaborations on Emptiness provides a complete translation of these commentaries (plus one more), all of them written in India between the eighth and twelfth centuries (except for the last, from Tibet). His own commentaries on these commentaries do not involve detailed doctrinal comparison; instead, he is concerned with showing the very different ways the Heart Sūtra has been used. The odd-numbered chapters contain his wide-ranging reflections, the even-numbered ones the commentaries (by Vimalamitra, Atiśa, Kamalaśīla, Śrīhiṃha, Jñānamitra, Praśāstrasena, Mahājana, and Vajrapāṇi).

Chapter 1 is "Who Heard the Heart Sūtra?" The sūtra begins, as usual, with "Thus did I hear" [evaṃ mayā śrutam] -- but who does the "I" refer to? That question is not usually important for us, more interested as we are in extracting its doctrinal content, but it was very important for these Buddhist commentators, who still felt a need to defend Mahāyāna sūtras from the uncomfortable charge that they could not really have been spoken by the Buddha. This leads to a discussion of when and why Buddhist texts were first written down. Why did works composed in writing show a need to maintain the pretense of speech, of being records of something heard? Ultimately the issue boils down to questions of where authority is believed to lie: books came to function as a substitute for the absent founder, as fulfilling the desire for restored presence. Evidently the earliest Buddhists were afraid of writing, but "What has made books dangerous is what makes them appealing: they are dead." They can be placed in a stupa and revered; they become icons. Yet "in order for the supplement to function as a substitute, it must resemble what it replaces; the new sūtras must begin, evaṃ mayā śrutam."

Chapter 3, "The Heart Sūtra as Tantra," focuses on the difficulty of defining the tantra -- according to Guenther "probably one of the haziest notions and misconceptions the Western mind has evolved" (p. 103). Conceptually, the tantra is often opposed to the sūtra and considered a faster upāya or "supplement" to the sūtra. Given the central importance of the mantra, is the Heart Sūtra better understood as a tantra? The Peking edition of the Tibetan scriptures classifies it as a tantra, and the Derge edition has it both ways by also including it in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. Lopez summarizes the history of tantra interpretation in the West, showing how scholars have repeatedly tried to essentialize an earlier pristine Buddhism free from later tantric "corruptions"; then, perhaps the tantra, too, is in some way a product of the Western mind, "a floating signifier in India and Tibet, gathering to itself over many centuries a range of contradictory qualities" (p. 103).

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Chapter 5, "The Heart Sūtra as Sādhana," looks at the way it has been understood ritually, as providing elaborate rites for acquiring the powers promised by the tantra. Lopez includes Dārikapa's short sādhana on the Heart Sūtra, followed by a detailed and difficult-to-follow psychoanalytic interpretation of its main meditation, which involves Śākyamuni merging into Prajñāpāramitā depicted as a mother-figure. The visualizer "is a witness to and voyeur of the prohibited act of incest that is about to take place," but "for the child to move into position of unobstructed access to the mother, in order for him to see, he must have been castrated"; "his mother holds a vajra toward him, a vajra that at once represents the castrated phallus of Śāriputra, the nonexistent phallus of the mother, and all that remains of the now absent Śākyamuni," and so forth, all to show that Dārikapa's sādhana functions as a narcissistic fantasy involving various psychological defenses such as negation and projection. I find this reductionist approach quite astonishing, not only because it is inconsistent with the author's suspicion of comparative philosophy (see below), but because such a literalistic Freudianism is quite outdated within psychoanalysis itself, having been abandoned by all but the most faithful of the master's disciples (most in literature departments) in favor of more sophisticated understandings of the Oedipal complex as a general account of early childhood conditioning (see, for example, Ernest Becker's last three books). Is this another example of the fate awaiting those who dismiss philosophy as irrelevant: to become unwittingly ensnared in outmoded philosophical categories?

Chapter 7, "The Heart Sūtra as Mantra," inquires into the meaning and function of its mantra. The place accorded it within the sutra suggests that the mantra's meaning is important, but it "seems to be a text without context, injected as if from nowhere into the most compact of Buddhist scriptures" (p. 165). Normally mantras are spoken, not read, because they gain their power from a secret oral transmission that allows them to participate in a higher order of existence that unifies form and matter, retaining the pure origins of sacred speech; but of course such a representation is only a fantasy that cannot really escape the chain of signifiers that all discourse is subject to. Chapter 9, "The Heart Sūtra as Exorcism," discusses how it has been used in rites to "turn away" demons, using surrogate effigies of dough that are pacified with offerings and then abandoned.

Chapter 10, "Commentators Ancient and Modern," is the most interesting one for readers of this journal, and also the most problematic. "The most obvious problem with comparative philosophy as it has been practiced, in both Asia and the West, is its ahistorical nature, portraying the concern of certain types of Asian texts as manifestations of perennial philosophical forms. To the extent that history is invoked, it is a history of ideas, a transindividual, transcommunal, transcultural, and transtemporal movement, often toward a particular telos." According to Lopez, "later comparative philosophy ... subscribes to an evolutionary model of the history of philosophy" that carries with it "a pronounced triumphalism: ... one or another of those thinkers and his thoughts is declared to occupy the end-point, the telos, of that continuum" (pp. 246-248). Instead, Lopez urges us to "become familiar with what has become the common vocabulary of academic discourse in the humanities"

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and to "read Derrida and other theorists" who will direct us more to the contexts of the works we study, "not so much in the hope of arriving at a historical reconstruction, but in an effort to identify and understand the complex of influences -- social, political, artistic, philosophical -- at play in the production of a text" (p. 255).

To begin with, I can only conclude that Lopez hasn't been reading Philosophy East and West recently, although his critique is not unfair when applied to some earlier comparative approaches, such as that of Charles Moore; perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that the only PEW citation I could find was for 1963 (two articles by Conze). I agree that Derrida is often pertinent, although this way of recommending him tries to "naturalize" what is still a site of controversy. But the main problem here is deeper. To appreciate the oddity of his critique, you must remember that it comes at the end of a book that, in addition to citing Derrida, makes its points with reference to Freud, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Foucault, Benjamin, J. L. Austen, and Paul de Man, among many others. Time and again, they are brought in to reveal what is really going on in the Buddhist text or practice. If "the compulsion to evaluate the Asian text as somehow superior to its Western counterpart is difficult to resist" (p. 253), evidently the opposite can also be true. We are urged to use these Western thinkers to understand the Heart Sūtra, but not vice versa; the problem exists only one-way.

The irony, then, is that while Lopez accuses comparative philosophy of subscribing to an evolutionary telos, he takes for granted a different triumphalist telos, which privileges the "end-point" provided by (mostly) postmodern thinkers. This loses what is so interesting about comparative philosophy at its best: the dialectic between using modern thought to understand ancient thinkers from very different cultures and using ancient thought to understand our modern world in a fresh way. The challenge, I think, is to maintain a tension between an uncritical acceptance of, for example, the Buddhist tradition (which is gullibility) and the corrosive skepticism of modern scholarship (which tends toward a different gullibility, taking for granted contemporary understandings of human possibility). That Buddhism might have something important to say to us (post)moderns that might "shake us up" by disclosing other possibilities is eliminated at the start by Lopez' approach.

There is another way to make this point. The recommendation to "understand the complex of influences at play in the production of a text" by historicizing should itself be historicized by looking at the relationship between the increasingly hermetic academics who devote themselves to doing this and the society they depend upon for support. The growing alienation between them, the fact that such research seems less and less connected with anything happening in the rest of world, is certainly one factor in the collapse of public support for the humanities in the past decade. The problem with research that is satisfied to historicize all philosophical thought is that such a deconstruction tends to lose any relevance to anything outside itself -- which means, for philosophy in particular, to the individual and collective search for meaning in what has become a nihilistic world. In the end, Lopez' book shows us that we cannot avoid bringing our own intellectual presuppositions to our encounter with (for example) Buddhism; but neither can we avoid the problems of social, eco-

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nomic, and spiritual confusion at the end of the second millennium. In that sense the teachings of Buddhism and so forth must be ahistoricized and universalized, so that we may learn from them whatever still speaks to our human situation today.