Form, Emptiness and Compassion – The Heart Sutra Revisited
by Tom
A while ago our teacher Geoff Dawson remarked that although the Heart Sutra begins by equating form and emptiness, from then on it focusses squarely on emptiness, with little subsequent attention to form. He also mentioned a Thich Nhat Hanh translation of the Sutra, which turns out to be something more than an updated version of his earlier translation.[1]
The Heart Sutra we usually recite says:
All these, by their very nature, are emptiness, being neither born nor dying, stained nor pure, waxing nor waning.
However, Thich Nhat Han’s translation states:
All phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Immaculacy, no Increasing no Decreasing
The key change made by Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) is to boldly insert the words “no Being no Non-Being”. A commentary on this by his community, Plum Village states,
Thay’s only regret is that the patriarch who recorded the Heart Sutra did not add the four words “no being, no non-being” immediately after the words “no birth, no death” because these four words would help us transcend the notion of being and non-being, and we would no longer get caught in such ideas as “no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue ….”
Thich Nhat Hahn cites the story of the novice monk, who when quizzed by his teacher about his understanding of the Heart Sutra, replies that there are no ‘eyes, ears, nose …’. The teacher suddenly reaches out, grabs and twists his nose, and the novice screams in pain.
The commentary goes on to say that describing the sense organs and other phenomena only as ‘empty’
… can lead to many damaging misunderstandings. It removes all phenomena from the category ‘being’ and places them into the category of ‘non-being’ along with “no form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations or consciousness …”. The view of ‘being’ is one extreme view and the view of ‘non-being’ is another extreme view.
Bearing in mind that the Sutra concerns the insight of the Boddhisattva of Compassion, an article in Lion’s Roar credited jointly to Thay and Norman Fischer[2] sums up this change as follows:
Prajñaparamita is the liberating insight that helps us to overcome all pairs of opposites, such as birth and death, being and non-being, defilement and immaculacy, increasing and decreasing, subject and object, and so on.
They also clarify the notion of ‘emptiness’ as not being something negative but simply “empty of separate self”. We, and all phenomena, are not separate entities but connected. We ‘inter-are’. Thus,
… emptiness and compassion go hand in hand. Compassion as transaction—me over here, being compassionate to you over there—is simply too clunky and difficult. If I am going to be responsible to receive your suffering and do something about it … I will soon be exhausted. But if I see the boundarylessness of me and you, and recognize that my suffering and your suffering are one suffering, and that that suffering is empty of any separation, weightiness, or ultimate tragedy, then I can do it.
[1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation
[2] https://dharmanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/A-New-Look-at-the-Heart-Sutra-from-Thich-Nhat-Hanh-and-Norman-Fischer-Lions-Roar.pdf),