My Grandmother’s Riddle
At 6 a.m., one ring of the shrine bell would wake me up. Breathing in energetically, Grandma would sing:
Bussetsu ma-ka han-nya-ha-ra mi-ta-shingyo
As she sang the Heart Sutra in a strange, monotone voice, I
would slowly get out of my warm futon next to hers. When she was done
chanting at our home Buddhist shrine in our room, we’d move to the
kitchen where our Shinto shrine sat up high and pray for a good day
ahead. This was my daily routine until I was about six years old.
...fu-zo-fu- ghenze- ko-. Ku-chu mu-shikimu-. Ju-so-gyo-shiki, mu-ghen, ni-ji-bi-de- shin, i-…
To me this was a riddle:
...wind elephant, wind, child tax-break. Dreaming mid-air of being
colour blind. Baking soda, morale, no-limit, ni-ji-bi-de- [mysterious
word], new frowning face…
It was an absolute shock when I first heard the English version: “No
increasing, no decreasing... no eyes, no ears, no nose...” What?!
I had no idea, and I wonder how much Grandma knew as well. She’d insert
word breaks whenever her breath ran out. The sutra is written and
recited in the antiquated Japanese — she would have memorized it purely
by the sound. The only word I got right was “air/sky/empty,” which
appeared many times in the song.
My late Grandma, Chiyoko, would have learnt this chant through her
diligent pilgrimages to many temples, regular visits to Mount Koya where
many of our family members rest, and her encounters with the local
Shingon temple priest. She recited the sutra every morning and every
evening. This was her practice and way of life.
I’m grateful for the mysterious dharma seed she planted in me. It led me
to the wonderful sangha at Lion’s Roar. It led me to meet the teachings
of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön (both of whom remind me of my
grandma), and many others — teachings like the three below, which each
explore the wisdom of the Heart Sutra.
Gya-te-gya-te haragya-te hara-san-gya-te bowaji- sowaka- han-nya-shin-gyo-
I’ll always remember how she used to sing and smile.
—Megumi Yoshida, art director, Lion’s Roar magazine
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The Heart Sutra is a pithy, powerful text. If you understand it, says Ven. Guan Cheng, you understand the Buddha’s teachings.
When
you’re seeing someone with hatred and anger, then that rewitnessing
portion can stand back and say, “I’m discriminating against this person
and seeing them with anger. Could I see them with love?” The
rewitnessing portion can also work in harmful ways. For example, your
ego consciousness, the mind manager, can assess with your eyes and say,
“Hey, here comes John and that guy is bad! He ripped me off, so I’m
going to do the same thing to him!” In this case, you’re standing back
as a third person, and you’re influencing your subject, yourself, to do
negative things. The rewitnessing portion after this interaction is
protecting your ego.
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Emptiness is not something to be afraid of, says Thich Nhat Hanh. The
Heart Sutra teaches us that form may be empty of self but it’s full of
everything else.
If
you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in
this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without
rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.
The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here,
the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and
the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the
dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to
be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.”
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Penetrate
the true meaning of the Heart Sutra, says Karl Brunnhölzl, and nothing
will be the same again. The secret is making it personal.
There is no doubt that the Heart Sutra is the most frequently used and recited text in the entire Mahayana Buddhist
tradition, which still flourishes in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet,
Mongolia, Bhutan, China, parts of India and Nepal, and, more recently,
also in the Americas and Europe. Many people have said many different
things about what the Heart Sutra is and what it is not, such
as being the heart of wisdom, a statement of how things truly are, the
key teaching of the Mahayana, a condensation of all the Prajnaparamita Sutras (the Buddha’s second turning of the wheel of dharma), or an explanation of emptiness in a nutshell. In order to understand the actual words of the Heart Sutra,
it’s helpful to first explore its background within the Buddhist
tradition as well as the meanings of “prajnaparamita” and “emptiness.”
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