Guest Post: Shane from Zenfant on The Heart Sutra

Nate, at Precious Metal, had the great idea of an article swap in which Buddhist bloggers exchange articles for a day. So today's post is by a very special guest, Shane from Zenfant, on a topic I suggested, while I appear over at 'Sweep the dust, Push the dirt' on a topic suggested there. So, with no further ado, let me hand over to Shane from Zenfant...

Hi all, several of us Blogisattvas have participated in an article swap and this is mine. It's kind of like a cookie swap but without the calories.

Marcus read my blog and asked me to put some thoughts down on my favorite sutra. Now I had a bit of attachment to doing it well because when I look at other folks, I tend to think that their practice looks like champagne in a fluted glass while mine is more like beer in a bottle. Then I realized that my favorite sutra advises that I let this go because there is nothing for me to actually be attached too.

So my favorite sutra is The Heart Sutra. It was the first sutra I was introduced to before I really knew what sutras were and it spoke to me on 2 major fronts. One was it had the word 'heart' in the title which made me think that it was going to tell me the 'heart of the matter' in regards to practice. This it certainly does many times over. The other thing that called to me were the lines 'forms is emptiness, emptiness is form'. That blew me away because it echoed a feeling that had grown in me over my many years as a spiritual vagabond. It had the gravitas of Truth and it resonated in me more strongly than anything that had come before. That's what caught me up in Buddhism in the first place… here were all these ideas and practices that made real something I had organically come to understand… and someone had been writing it all down for 2600 years.

Now I don't connect very well to Asian ideas and metaphors, so it takes me a lot of cushion time to grasp them and the help of commentaries. Of the ones I've read, Thich Nhat Hanh has been the most helpful for me as it tends to be the most simple and god knows I need simple. What he said that really anchored the sutra in my brain, though, was "Emptiness=water, Form=wave" and BAM it all came together for me in a way my pea brain could grasp. This idea and the rest of the sutra says to me…look, no matter what you think you know and have figured out in your years, life unfolds exactly as it is supposed to at all times and in all places. Just like an ivy, when it reaches a blockage, it does not cry that it cannot grow left, it just grows right or over or under or around the other way. It knows that all things are 'marked with emptiness, neither defiled nor immaculate', there is just Perfect Understanding that moves forward. The Understanding that does not cling inappropriately but continues to move forward responding appropriately to all it encounters. It does not shut down, but keeps moving forward into 'gate gate paragate parasamgate'. Do not bemoan what you cannot do, do not get mired down in stuckness, get up, pay attention, keep moving into the fullness of life even when it feels scary or uncertain or groundless.

The Heart Sutra is the essence of what I call Dirty Dharma… it's not prettied up or made lovely or spoon fed, it's the essence of the practice where the rubber meets the road and if you get lost or stuck you have only to read the mantra at the end again: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. To me this says: get up, start walking, engage life, keep practicing, there's no light at the end of the tunnel because there is no tunnel, just the bright light of all that is, so keep moving and you will wake up.

For me, this sutra, as with all sutras are best when I read them more as poetry and less as scripture. I was raised Catholic, so 'scripture' carries a heavy and negative feeling with it whereas poetry is easier for my mind to open to and embrace. Working from this perspective, I find that I see many modern day sutra writers if you just listen to their poetry. Here is one that hits on the prajnaparamita for me currently:

Let the crisis become a bridge, you’ll cross that bridge tomorrow,

And in the time that comes between, baby, why don’t you let go of the sorrow?

She says 'the sky is crying', he says 'no, the sky is blue'.

Juliet by Stevie Nicks

So I carry on being a wave studying the water.

Heart Sutra Links:

The Heart Sutra

Heart Sutra Resources

Blog Swap Links:

Precious Metal

Sweep the dust, Push the dirt

Shane's Blog: Zenfant