Week 7 Essay
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Chant the heart sutra at least once as part of your daily practice. If possible, chant it elsewhere–outside, for instance or before a difficult conversation.
If you have words for it, describe what it is like to practice the heart sutra. Delightful, frustrating, weird, joyful, all/none of the above?
Reading: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cUZK6kBLv_u3R6pBQJFibLYNd1f7pmUc/view
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The Heart Sutra is a bunch of words beyond words to me. I chant them every morning before my personal meditation practice and a second time in sangha with a meditation group of which I am a part. It is more personal when I do it on my own, but seems more powerful when I chant it as part of a group/sangha. I wonder why that is?😉. Chanting it in the morning seems to make my day flow better in some way, I know that much. It is both delightful and frustrating to chant it daily and that is probably due to its inscrutable nature. I don’t really think too much about it, I just let it BE. I will try chanting it outside of my practice though, it’s a good suggestion. However, I don’t think I will chant the whole 260-word version! Probably the one-syllable version A.
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My very first exposure to the Heart Sutra was in 2018, at a spring retreat in Colorado. The shrine room held about 90 people, there was a drum and gong, and we were given copies to follow. I had never chanted before, but had sung plainsong in religious settings. What I recall was that the steady drum beat seemed to pound the series of “no’s” into my head, and that I felt a sense of despair. When we got to the line, “Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear,” I burst into tears, feeling some inexpressible profound relief. The experience was so powerful that I shied away from the text for several months. In 2019, Karl Brunholtzel and Susan presented the Heart Sutra (he wrote the book, The Heart Attack Sutra), that took it apart line by line. I still have my copy, tattooed heavily with notes in the margins. Every once in a while the phrases about emptiness and form slip into my thoughts, mostly to allow a change in perspective from perseveration to openness.
So here I am today, having infrequently chanted the text, now adding it to my daily practice. My first thought was that it sounds like music when chanted, and I felt that I could hear a sustained cello note throughout. Interestingly, I can still hear that tone after meditation. Yesterday, I decided to try incorporating the Heart Sutra into my daily two mile walk, but I only used the mantra line, repeated over and over for the 40 minutes or so I walked. After a couple of repetitions, I found that I’d developed a cadence, like soldiers, with a held “Om,” the rest of the phrase falling into a brisk rhythm, with natural breaths. It felt playful, even though I had a twinge of conscience that perhaps I was making light of a profound teaching. But then I returned home, and the chanted mantra kept spinning in my head, with all of its energy. But why can’t there be playfulness and energy? After all, while the cushion is the setting for stillness and the nuance of breath, real life is not really still. And if the purpose of the mantra is to train “sons and daughters of noble families,” perhaps it has to be part of the energy of training.
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Dear Susan (or others),
would you be able to share the link to the text of the Heart Sutra that you used on Thursday? I watched the recording and so could not see the zoom chat box. The versions I found online all seemed a bit different.
Thanks very much,
Anna-
Hey Anna, How are you being? Here is the link, I’m not sure it ill be a hyperlink, but you can copy and paste it. I hope it works for you.
file:///C:/Users/student/Downloads/Heart-Sutra-for-website.pdf
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I read the Heart Sutra a few times, both along with the recording of Susan reading it in class and on my own.
The vibrations of this sustained drone are a physical pleasure. I’ve been droning since I was little — deep toning for long durations. There’s something powerful about the vibrations, for sure.
I read the Heart Sutra in the company of aged oaks and redwoods.
After the first couple of times, it struck me: These are the words of trees, spoken to the rooted ones and their companions! Not spoken to humans!
As if the Sutra were describing the high state of plants, fungi, moss, and other life forms.
Having this thought was very pleasurable.
I realize that’s who I most wish to hear from.
I like the Heart Sutra, the so-many beautiful words (Shariputra! Avalokiteshvara! etc.) and the description of everyone’s excitement. I don’t know whether it will become part of my path. I have found other mantras to be powerful along the way, getting me through various hard times. Those have been short, repeatable (108 times . . . ), and fathomable. -
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What does this (The Heart Sutra) mean to me?
I’ve chanted the Heart Sutra a few times this past week (as well as a few times in the past). At first, I heard the “words”. And, there was a sense of frustration for not comprehending them all. However, as I’ve listened to Susan and read her wonderful book “Inexplicable Joy On the Heart Sutra” I have come to understand many more.
Another time I felt the history, the lineage, the amazing time of the Buddha and his most intimate followers. I felt in “awe” with the beauty and the confidence of the Buddha to allow the teachings to flow from Avalokiteshvara. It felt like BEAUTY!
Another time, the rhythm was predominant for me. Many years ago when I first heard the Heart Sutra chanted it was accompanied by a large drum keeping the beat. So now when I chant I still hear that powerful drum and feel the power of the message (though without understanding).
Lastly, I’d like to lighten up a bit with it when I chant it next. I think it can be playful and full of delight.
I’d like to reflect also in the reading: “Intimacy is predicated on just such a personal approach and Lady Prajnaparamita seems to respond more readily to the warmth of the inner world than anything academic.” This seems to offer the notion that each time the Heart Sutra is chanted, our inner world has changed and thus it’s as if I’m chanting it for the first time. This also reminds me a bit of what I’m understanding in “On Becoming an Alchemist”.
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I have to add this bit to my previous posting. I find that the Heart Sutra continues to burble up in my consciousness throughout the day. Interesting that we call it the “Heart” Sutra – the word “heart” is nowhere in the text (at least in this translation). If the title read, “The Sutra of the Pith of Transcendent Knowledge,” would we call it the “Pith” Sutra? Probably not. So the heart, the most inner, life sustaining, vital organ is key. The word brings the inexplicable and vast concepts the sutra explicates into the most intimate space. I know I need to contemplate this more, but it struck me that the wording is interesting.
Second thought, yesterday I found myself mentally spiraling about an online error my dear but somewhat cognitively challenged husband made, that cost us $150. I am trying mightily to undo the charges, but there are several vendors involved which makes it a bit complicated. I realized that my mind could not stop picking at the problem, it was like (as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described) stabbing myself with the second arrow, and no matter what I tried, couldn’t seem to stop fretting. I was frustrated and very sad. And then, the phrase, “The mantra that calms all suffering” popped into my mind – really, like a bubble popping. So I repeated the mantra, attending to the tone, the words and the synchrony with my breath that seems to naturally occur. And it shifted my mind, just a step back at first, but with increasing space from the problem knot. What a relief! Real life lesson learned.
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Hi Sue Ellen, Your insights are moving; thank you.
When you repeated “the mantra that calms all suffering” were you using the words “OÎ GATE GATE PÅRAGATE PÅRASAÎGATE BODHI SVÅHÅ”? [Pardon the odd cut-and-paste.] How wonderful that you found relief!
I will try this when a period of not being able to stop fretting arises. So many opportunities . . .
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I missed this class live unfortunately but enjoyed watching the recording. I’d already read Susan’s wonderful little book about the heart sutra. I was always attracted to paradox. I LOVE the opening line – “Thus have I heard”.. puts me right in the .. ahem … heart of sangha. All the great works have arresting opening lines.
In the previous class, I think, Susan happened to mention that the heart sutra is often chanted in a monotone, which led me to wonder how it sounds in Japanese. (I lived in Japan for seven years and speak the language quite well). Japanese is said to be a monotone language – this is not true at all really, but compared to Chinese dialects it might be considered so. I quickly found an album of various versions of the heart sutra in Japanese and have been listening and chanting daily. So much fun. Then I noticed a version in Vietnamese, chanted or rather sung by Thich Nhat Hanh. Very different and utterly captivating and beautiful. I’ll get around to English at some point, I suppose, and perhaps some other languages, too!
I was reminded of the day I went to the Art Institute in Chicago to look at the extensive collection of Asian art while listening to the Emerald podcast. A lovely experience. There’s a Buddha statue from Myanmar, glittering gold, enlivened by a recording of a student from Myanmar who attended the School of the Art Institute and said she would come and sit by the statue when she was feeling cold, miserable and homesick. (I could relate!) So touching. She pointed out that sitting below the statue and looking up made it seem to smile, whereas looking head on, as most visitors do, made the face seem rather severe. She noted her sadness that the figure in question was sadly dead now, because it was not regularly given offerings of flowers, food and candles as it would be ‘back home’ in its original context. My studies came alive for me that afternoon. At the end of my visit I turned a corner and came upon a modern Korean piece of ceramic art featuring the heart sutra in Chinese characters – so beautiful and intriguing.
Chanting makes me feel a part of something bigger and deeper. I hope to make it a regular practice.
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Hello, fellow friends on the path;)
There is no way for me to play catch up so I have completely surrendered, and will start here writing to you. I write letters in my mind to answer the homework essay prompts regularly but don’t write anything down. I have felt resistance to coming to the forum, not sure why, because I don’t know where to begin or end probably but I have been consistently practicing the sitting practice and the prompts and readings and somehow truly benefitted from being connected to you, feeling supported, thank you.
So I’m last minute, but last minute to what really? It takes me time to process. Hopefully, I will now engage with the forum from this point onward. Forgive me; it’s going to be messy. This week I wrote about the cumulative effect in a pile of random notes in my notebook which made the task more surmountable and intimate to corall them here.
So here goes a little sharing and possibly some over-sharing. Warning, this may be non-sensical, but hopefully somewhat entertaining and not too self-centred. I am aware I have not yet participated in reading and responding either but hope to do this tomorrow afternoon before class and look very much forward to it.
The Heart Sutra: Is it possible to learn something and remember you have learned it many times because you forgot as many times as you practiced it because the experience is similar to not being able to see the bottom of the ocean? The Heart Sutra is like that for me, if that made any sense. Always starting at square one. It is ungettable. Somehow unfathomable. Yet everything shifts. And it is unforgettable on some level I don’t even understand how it operates, escaping me all the time over the years. The droning is a little weird but I give in and it gets me.
Two weeks ago, Susan’s casual statement: as we approach practice the supposition is we are worthy and whole, floats through me as I approach everything since, haunted by it like a wise ghost. Like a loving ancestor reminding: you are loved, there’s nowhere to go, just stay here. Haunted because it echoed out to a part of me that knows and forgets my own wholeness.
This, coupled with the question Susan posed: How do I connect with the space between me and what I seek? and how these were twin guidelines for me book ending for my experience of blowing open spaciousness around limiting views I hold without realizing; perceiving myself as an open-minded person, that too, relatively humbling.
To move with the transcendent paramita of patience, including generosity and discipline so that I explore both container and spaciousness and how they are the same? Not fixing anything, not trying, trusting in the breeze of change. Relaxing my will and ambition. What if I could want nothing? Eek. to ally myself to an underlying willfulness in nature, in a tree.So much more is operating and interconnected than I can see, and the Heart Sutra has had the effect on me of making space and fixing (as in both reparation and stultifying)break open. I have also been feeling like I am falling and quite shaky. I notice when I am anxious what my anxiety does to the space. I sort of claw it in like a cat falling off the slipping tablecloth. Trying not to hit the ground. I remembered this week what the controversial and wise Trogyam Trumpa was quoted once saying, about there being no problem with falling because there is fundamentally no ground!
I should start at the beginning again so I don’t lose you, dear reader, and risk you thinking I am completely insane. I don’t know where the beginning or end is so I am writing passing through and hope that’s ok. I’d like to give you the sun and some shade to go with it but I’ll have to just unfold first.
Ok a simple observation, I love cookies. Connecting again to the space idea between myself and what I seek; I notice the space between the cookie and what in me wants to be satisfied by the cookie. If form is emptiness and emptiness is form then the craving and the cookie are both empty and have real pull. The cookie in question, by the way, is a perfect biscotti. The texture, not too sweet, doesn’t dissolve when you dip it; has chocolate and a good bite; hard and receptive which helps me understand my dog and his bone–and the itch the bone and the biscotti eclipse momentarily. But the itch goes on. Spaciousness helps me feel into my absurd pursuits.But the weird magic, and so here’s a little woo-woo, was last week when I taught Qigong (an energetic practice similar to Tai Chi). Everything shifted in the room in our group: One student said she felt no separation between the space inside her body and outside her body.
Another, a dancer, mentioned the reference points of her sternum bone, hip bones, sacrum etc were not there as reference points as per usual but rather energy was moving her body from the inside like a creature. Another practitioner said that momentarily–and she specified she wasn’t sure if it qualified as a good or bad experience–she disappeared into space. But When she felt her form defined again she felt freer in it. We did not practice the Heart Sutra together. But it felt like the energy of the Heart Sutra came in by contagion or influence from my practicing on the cushion during the week every day. I know it’s easy to assume oh oh spacey and so perhaps the oddest thing of all that might sound like such a contradiction is how earth-bound and grounded everyone was as though their legs were pillars when they walked out of class. Not spacy but having touched space and very present.
It was oddly ordinary and extraordinary and so this seems like the place where it might be ok to share this as I haven’t shared it anywhere else and leave off. And nothing yet about the five families because I am still digesting reviewing them. As an aside, I always thought of Susan as Vajra. Sharp and precise and clear but warm.Thank you so much!
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