Gone Beyond and Back – Perfect Wisdom

THE HEART OF THE HEART SUTRA IS THE LINE: “Here, Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form …” (Red Pine, trans., 2004). Concise and apparently simple, yet surprisingly profound, this line distills the essence of the tradition Mahayana Buddhists call the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita), the path of the bodhisattva.

In this context, “form” represents life and the world and reality as we know and experience them every day. “Emptiness” is the Buddhist insight that all our experiences are only as real as our dreams, because in the end, both our experiences and our dreams are mental images.

According to the Buddhists then, form is “empty of self-existence.” It lacks any ultimate or metaphysical reality beyond the psychological phenomenology of experiencing it. (So much for  Platonic idealism.)

In just about every other religious tradition known to us, this nugget of perfect wisdom is hinted at by the archetypal belief that life and the world and reality were created by a Creator. Buddhists push the belief in creation and creator to its logically paradoxical conclusion, recognizing that even our belief that there is a creator must itself be a creation.

With this paradox, we reach the point “where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead” (to borrow a line from Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit”). This is the point of mystical transcendence: form is emptiness.

The Heart Sutra, however, says this insight is not yet the perfection of wisdom. Perfect wisdom lies in realizing not only that form is emptiness, but also that emptiness is form. So now, we’re wresting with a Zen koan—or maybe, like Jacob, we’re wrestling with the angel who won’t give its name (Gen. 32:24-29).

Recognizing that form is emptiness leads us into transcendence. Realizing that emptiness is form brings us back to earth, where a bodhisattva manifests wisdom in compassion. It’s as if Jesus had said the kingdom of God is this world, not heaven. Oh, wait, he did say something like that: “For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (or within you, Lk. 17:21b). And let’s not forget his parables, so many of which point to a similar understanding.

The curious thing about the Heart Sutra is the way it wraps its perfection of wisdom teachings inside a very mundane fame. The sutra opens with the image of a transcendent being, Lord Avalokita, a bodhisattva absorbed in deep practice, looking down on the world, seeing its emptiness, and imparting the perfection of wisdom to Shariputra, a very human disciple of Gautama Buddha who probably also is absorbed in deep practice. In an equally mundane fashion, the sutra closes with a mantra, which it calls a magic spell of great power able to bring one into perfect wisdom.

In other words, the sutra begins with a concrete archetypal image and ends with a concrete archetypal practice, both of which belong to the world of name and form. Thus, the Heart Sutra itself embodies emptiness in form. Being, not-being, perfect as is.