Beyond the pair

Two hundred sixty characters

In the year 629 a Chinese monk named Xuanzang set out from the Tang empire’s capital, Chang’an, for India, to find Buddhist texts at their source. He returned in 645 with 657 Sanskrit texts, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 664, translating them: about seventy-five works. Among the texts that bear his name is one of the shortest and best-known Mahāyāna sutras, the Heart Sutra, traditionally dated 649. In the standard Chinese version, the one cataloged as number 251 in the Taishō canon, it is 260 characters long, not counting its title. It is chanted in Buddhist temples across East Asia.

Scholars disagree about where the text really came from. In 1992 the historian Jan Nattier argued that the Chinese Heart Sutra may have been put together in China, drawing on a long scripture, and only later rendered into Sanskrit, and not translated from Sanskrit by Xuanzang at all. Other scholars have replied, and the question is still open. Whatever its origin, the text’s message fits in two lines:

色不异空，空不异色；色即是空，空即是色。

Heart Sutra, Xuanzang’s Chinese: “Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

It sounds like a paradox, and in this lesson it is the conclusion of an argument. The argument starts with a doctor.

The physician

This course has said that every great religion offers a remedy, and Buddhism says so openly. Buddhist writers have long called the Buddha a physician and read the four noble truths as a doctor’s procedure: name the illness (suffering, duḥkha), find its cause (craving and ignorance), see that a cure exists (the end of suffering, nirvana), and prescribe the treatment (the eightfold path). The most famous image of this is a parable in the Cūḷamālunkya Sutta. A monk named Mālunkyāputta is troubled that the Buddha will not say whether the universe is eternal, or what happens to an awakened person after death. The Buddha answers with a story: a man is struck by a poisoned arrow, and refuses to let a surgeon take it out until he knows who shot it, what caste the archer was, and what the arrow was made of. He would die before he found out. The Buddha says he teaches only what is useful for the cure: suffering, its origin, its end, and the path.

Everything that follows turns on this point. The medicine is a way of seeing, and the thing to see is what the word emptiness names.

Emptiness is not nothing

The Sanskrit word is śūnyatā, from śūnya, “empty.” English translators have used “emptiness,” “void,” and “nothingness,” and the last of them is wrong. In Mahāyāna teaching, things are not nothing. They are empty of self-existence: nothing exists on its own, by its own nature, independent of everything else. The Sanskrit for that independent “own-nature” is svabhāva. The claim is that no such thing is ever found, and that what we find instead is a network.

The philosopher usually credited with building the argument is Nāgārjuna, who lived around 150–250 of our era, and his Middle Treatise (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) is its classic statement. In chapter 24, verse 18, he says in effect: whatever arises in dependence on conditions, that is what we call emptiness; it is a provisional name, and it is the middle way. In Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation, made in the early fifth century, the verse reads 众因缘生法，我说即是无，亦为是假名，亦是中道义. Notice the word 无 (wú, “without”) in the second line, where the commentary printed with the text says “empty.” A Chinese reader meeting the idea for the first time had to be told that wu here does not mean annihilation.

The Buddhist name for the network is dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda, Chinese 缘起): when this exists, that comes to be; when this ceases, that ceases. In this reading, things are like nodes in a net. Buddhist writers separate the main cause (因) from the many supporting conditions (缘), and both must come together for a thing to appear. The course illustrates it with a business: a firm that thinks of itself as a hundred-year shop that will stand forever is likely to be blindsided, while one that sees itself as a node in a moving network, and keeps tending its connections, has a better chance of lasting. A candle flame shows it more simply.

An analogy from space

This course also draws a comparison from the history of Western thought, and flags it as a comparison. In his Principia of 1687 Isaac Newton described an absolute space, a fixed stage that exists whether or not anything is in it. In 1715–16 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in a famous correspondence with Samuel Clarke, who spoke for Newton, argued that space is nothing over and above the relations among things. The exchange ended with Leibniz’s death in November 1716. In this reading, the Mahāyāna view of things is closer to Leibniz’s than to Newton’s: nothing is found by itself, only in a web of relations. And the course adds that today’s networks, from the internet to ecosystems, make the picture easier to see.

The parallel is suggestive, and no more than that. Leibniz’s argument is about space and time; the Buddhist one is about whether anything has an intrinsic nature. The physical question of whether space is “relational” has its own long history, and it is not settled by a metaphor.

Form is emptiness

Now the two lines of the Heart Sutra can be read. The Chinese character 色 (sè) translates the Sanskrit rūpa, “form” or material shape, which the Buddhist list of the five aggregates puts first: form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness. (The sutra goes on to list the other four, 受想行识, and say the same of each.) This course uses the word “form” more loosely for whatever shows itself to the senses and the mind. In this reading, a thing has a nature (性, xìng), which is its emptiness, its dependence on other things, and an appearance (相, xiàng), which is how it shows up. The two are one fact seen from two sides, like the faces of a coin.

Two kinds of clinging follow. Clinging to self (我执, wǒzhí) treats the person as a fixed thing. Clinging to things (法执, fǎzhí) treats the world’s contents as solid and lasting, as something to own and keep. Mahāyāna teaching says the first is a mistake and the second is too: both are held to be empty. That is why the sutra insists that emptiness is not a refusal of the world. Chinese Buddhist writers sometimes put it as 真空妙有 (zhēnkōng miàoyǒu), “true emptiness, wondrous being”: if things had an own-nature they could not change, and if they were nothing they could not appear. The course’s example is a friendship: it comes from causes and conditions and will change when they change, so it is better held lightly and tended well. In this reading, what the Buddhist remedy cures is attachment to a view of things that cannot be true to them.

This also gives a way to read the mirror verses of the last lesson. Shenxiu’s poem is about wiping the mirror, a gradual practice; Huineng’s reply says there is no dust and no mirror-stand, so that nothing needs wiping. In the Chan tradition Huineng became the patriarch of a “sudden” school and Shenxiu of a “gradual” one, a contrast that scholars treat as partly a later construction. The reply turns on the idea of the Heart Sutra: if there is nothing fixed to be found in the mirror or in the dust, wiping and not wiping are two ways of speaking about one thing.

What a gaze adds

This course is called “the religious gaze,” and we can now say what the phrase means. In this reading, to look at the world religiously is to add four things to ordinary looking. First, wholeness: a view from above that asks about everything at once. Second, humility: the sense, from the fear of the LORD, from Calvin’s double knowledge, from the Analects, from emptiness, that one’s own view is partial. Third, a remedy: the claim that the human predicament has a cure. Fourth, wisdom as the cure: a way of seeing that changes the seer. This course adds that to open one eye one has to close another. Franklin’s joke about shutting the eye of reason is the Christian-flavored version, and Buddhism’s is the loosening of clinging to what one sees.

The course makes one more claim, that all the great religions are variations on one structure: a transcendent, a remedy, and a way to wisdom, expressed through pairs. It is a bold claim, and a fair summary of a long tradition of comparison. It is also the claim to question most, because it makes the traditions look more alike than their own members find them.