The Heart Sutra Revisited Review of Five

BSRV 39.
2 (2022) 229–254 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897

http://www.doi.or.10.1558/bsrv.25433 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (online) 1747-9681
Review Article
The Heart Sūtra Revisited
Jayarava attwood
Independent researcher
jayarava@gmail.com
“The Heart Sūtra is indeed—in every sense of the word—a Chinese text.”
Jan Nattier
2021 was a bumper year for the study of the Heart Sutra, with a number of schol-
ars making contributions. Of particular note was the publication of a Heart Sutra
themed issue of Acta Asiatica (No. 121), titled “The Heart Sūtra Revisited: The
Frontier of Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Studies.”1 The editor, Saitō Akira (also a con-
tributor), tells us that “The present volume thus contains five articles based on
the very latest research and they all discuss characteristics of the Heart Sutra from
fresh angles” (Saitō 2021a, v). The five contributions are:
• Saitō, Akira. “Avalokiteśvara in the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.”
• Watanabe, Shōgo. “The Lineage of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: With a
Focus on Its Introduction and Expressions of Emptiness.”
• Horiuchi, Toshio. “Revisiting the ‘Indian’ Commentaries on the
Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: Vimalamitra’s Interpretation of the Eight
Aspects.”
• Ishii, Kōsei. “The Chinese Texts and Sanskrit Text of the
Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Seen by Wŏnch’ŭk 円測.”
• Silk, Jonathan A. “The Heart Sūtra as Dhāraṇī.”
These papers were presented at a conference in 2019 and thus all of the articles
were at least two years old at the time of printing (Saito 2021b, 2). I begin with
some general notes and observations before critiquing each article in turn and
1. I would like to thank the Tōhō Gakkai for generously supplying me with a review copy of Acta
Asiatica 121 as I did not have access to a research library while writing this review due to Covid
19. I also thank Jeffrey Kotyk and Eivind Kahrs for their comments on an earlier draft.
Keywords: Heart Sutra, Prajñāpāramitā, phenomenology, comparative
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023

Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX
230 The Heart Sūtra Revisited
then offering some concluding remarks. Along the way, I note some other recent
Heart Sutra publications such as Harimoto (2021) and Mattice (2021), as well as my
many contributions (notably the recently published Attwood 2021c).2
Several Sanskrit and Chinese source texts are discussed in the various articles.
In Sanskrit, we have the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya (Hṛd) which comes in two versions:
standard and extended. The standard text is known to us from a handful of East
Asian documents, notably the ninth or tenth-century Hōryūji manuscript discussed
in more detail by Silk below (Conze ms. Ja).3 The extended text is known mostly
through poorly-copied Nepalese manuscripts, so riddled with errors that they have
little philological value,4 and through the Eun manuscript, also from Japan (Conze
ms. Jb), which has fewer errors. In editing the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, scholars from
Müller and Nanjio (1884) onwards, have tended to privilege the Hōryūji and the
Eun manuscripts. The Sanskrit version of the Large Prajñāpāramitā Sutra is usually
known in Sanskrit as the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Pañc). The text sur-
vives in two recensions, the Gilgit manuscript5 which we can now access through
the facsimile edition of Karashima et al. (2016) and a collection of late Nepalese man-
uscripts edited by Kimura (1986-2009). I also occasionally refer to the Aṣṭasāhasrikā
Prajñāpāramitā (Aṣṭa).
In Chinese, we are mainly dealing with canonical texts: the classic Heart Sutra, the
Bānrěbōluómìduōxīnjīng «般若波羅蜜多心經»6 (T 251; Xīnjīng) and the version known as
Móhēbānrěbōluómìdàmíngzhòujīng «訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經» (T 250; Dàmíngzhòujīng).7
Finally, we have Chinese translations of the Large Sutra, of which we focus on
Móhēbānrěbōluómìjīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223) translated by Kumārajīva. I refer
to the Large Sutra in Chinese (as distinct from the versions in Sanskrit) generically
as Dàjīng 大經 “Large Sutra.” Horiuchi also discusses the Tibetan text of the Heart
Sutra as found in the Kanjur and the Indo-Tibetan commentaries.
2. Watanabe and Silk both cite some of my blog posts, at times in preference to published works.
Silk hints at flaws therein but gives no details. If unpublished essays are to be considered, then
I would draw attention to the following: Attwood (2017c) in response to Ishii (2015); Attwood
(2018c) in response to Ji (2017); Attwood (2019b) in response to Harada (2002); and Attwood
(2020e) in response to Harimoto (2021).
3. Conze’s (1948, 1967) list of sources is not wholly reliable. For example, his Nl and Nh are the same
manuscript. Nm and Cg also appear to refer to the same manuscript despite Conze assigning dif-
ferent dates to them.
4. My unpublished diplomatic edition of a previously unknown Heart Sutra manuscript, British
Library Manuscript (EAP676/2/5) of the extended Heart Sutra—completed in 2015—required 142
footnotes to account for errors, additions, and omissions. https://www.academia.edu/9889701/
Diplomatic_Edition_of_ārya_Pañcaviṃśatikā_Prajñāpāramitā_Mantranāma_Dhāraṇī_aka_
Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya_EAP676_2_5_Draft [accessed 16 May 2022]
5. While we typically refer to “the Gilgit manuscript” in the singular—meaning the text previously
published as a facsimile edition by Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra (1966) and republished by
Karashima et al. (2016)—there are in fact several such manuscripts which have yet to be edited or
published in any form. Karashima et al. (2016) notes that work on transcribing these has begun,
though with the untimely death of Karashima it is not clear whether or how this work will
proceed.
6. Note that bān 般 is alternatively pronounced as bō in Buddhist circles, see discussion in Zac-
chetti (2020).
7. 摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經 corresponds to *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-mahāvidyā-sūtra.
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2023

Jayarava Attwood 231
Before considering the individual contributions, we need to address the elephant

in the room. Natter (1992) makes a powerful argument for thinking that the Heart
Sutra was composed in China, in Chinese, and that the Sanskrit text is a back-trans-
lation from Chinese. For thirty years, in striking contravention of the norms of
scholarly discourse, Buddhist Studies academics have routinely mischaracterised
or simply ignored Jan Nattier’s (1992) superlative article on the Heart Sutra. The
Frontier refers to this issue as a “debate,” but it can hardly be called that when one
side refuses to acknowledge that the other side makes any salient points.
The Frontier articles continue the trend of largely ignoring Nattier (1992). Jonathan
Silk (2021, 102 n.15), explicitly says: “I have no desire to enter into the debate over
whether the Heart Sutra originates in China.” But Professor Silk is not on the fence
in this debate. For example, he uncritically uses phrases like “the Indian context
of the text” (2021, 99) and “the Sanskrit text itself” (2021, 100). In another rela-
tively recent publication, he more straightforwardly says, “the Heart Sūtra revered
in Japan is a Chinese translation from Sanskrit” (Silk 2015, 217. Emphasis added). Silk
has made his contribution to the origins debate by choosing to only talk in terms
of Indian origins. Saitō is more equivocal:
There are surprisingly many supporters of Nattier’s conclusion in Euro-America and
East Asia. The matter needs to be settled through a detailed and multifaceted exami-
nation of the issues. (2021b, 1 n.5)
Given that Nattier’s article is a tour de force of comparative philology, why would
it be “surprising” for scholars to take Nattier seriously? This is what we do. Saitō
does not say what he thinks is lacking from Nattier’s analysis. Watanabe opens his
article with the statement, “There continues to be much discussion about the ori-
gins of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, but there is still no definitive thesis” (23). In fact,
most scholars, including all of the Frontier authors, simply refuse to discuss the ori-
gins of the Heart Sutra. There is a definitive thesis, it is Nattier’s thesis; the Chinese
origins thesis.
While I was writing this review, Sarah Mattice (2021) published her multi-disci-
plinary exploration of the Heart Sutra.8 This is, of course, far too late for the Frontier
authors to have considered, but in Chapter One Mattice provides a masterclass in
assessing the argument of an academic colleague. Rather than the usual dismissive
footnote or single paragraph of straw man argument (as we see in Frontier), Mattice
spends fully sixteen pages (2021, 8–24) summarising the methods and evidence that
Nattier employs, evaluating the quality of her arguments, and considering the vari-
ous responses to Nattier. Mattice concludes:
8. To the best of my knowledge Sarah Mattice is the first woman scholar to tackle the Heart
Sutra since Nattier. Gender bias is not my area of expertise, but the absence of women from
Prajñāpāramitā Studies is noteworthy. Compare recent comments during an online event, “The
Step Forward,” which “features scholars of Buddhist Studies discussing the academic culture
of our field, focusing on problematic histories and practices of exclusion, elitism, harassment,
and other factors.” See particularly comments by Amy Paris Langenberg and Stephanie Balk-
will https://youtu.be/yMW9q7NRSoU [viewed 12 Ap 2022] and Sharon A. Suh https://youtu.
be/5ph-r4Fat3c [viewed 12 Ap 2022]. This suggests that the aggressive environment bemoaned
by Charles Prebish still exists at least to some extent (see Prebish cited in Attwood 2020b, 44-45).

It is my view, given the arguments at play in present discourse, that the Heart Sutra
was likely compiled from sutra extracts and other sources, in China, sometime after
Kumārajīva’s translation of the [Large Sutra] and the [Dàzhìdù lùn (T 1509)], but prob-
ably before Xuánzàng’s time. (Mattice 2021, 23)
Mattice did not consider Huifeng (2014) or, for example, Attwood (2018b, 2020c),
which confirm Nattier’s thesis by applying the same comparative methods to other
parts of the Heart Sutra with the same results. Her conclusion is, therefore, based on
reading Nattier’s article in relative isolation. On the other hand, Mattice takes the
arguments on merit and acknowledges that even considered in isolation, Nattier
made a persuasive case thirty years ago.
There is no clear answer in any of the Frontier articles as to why Nattier (and any-
one who supports her conclusion) is sidelined. Fukui Fumimasa’s (1994) attempt to
refute Nattier’s thesis, cited approvingly by Saitō, was highly influential in shaping
the ongoing Japanese rejection of Nattier’s thesis. However, Fukui appears to have
struggled to comprehend Nattier’s English, let alone her thesis.9 Just as the gram-
matical mistakes in Conze’s Sanskrit editions and the hermeneutical mistakes in
his translations went uncommented on for seventy years, no one, not even Nattier
herself, saw fit to correct Fukui. His mistaken reading of Nattier (1992) appears to
be the foundation on which all subsequent Japanese scholarship on the Heart Sutra
is based (see especially Harada 2002 and Ishii 2015).
Watanabe (2021) and Ishii (2015) take aim at a straw man, that is, the idea that
Nattier’s principal conclusion is that Xuánzàng either composed the Heart Sutra or
translated the Heart Sutra from Chinese to Sanskrit. The title of Ishii (2015) is “Issues
Surrounding the Heart Sūtra: Skepticism of Jan Nattier’s Theory of its Composition by
Hsüan-tsang” (Ishii 2021, 85 n.5. Emphasis added). Nattier did think it likely that
Xuánzàng was involved in some way, but what she actually says is carefully hedged:
The role of [Xuánzàng] himself in the back-translation of the Heart Sūtra into Sanskrit
cannot, of course, be definitively proven. We have at our disposal only circumstantial
evidence, which is insufficient to decide the case with certainty. (Nattier 1992, 181)
In fact, Nattier’s principal conclusion was this:
To put it succinctly: there is no straightforward way to derive the Sanskrit Heart
Sūtra from the Sanskrit Large Sūtra, or vice versa” (167) … we must assume that the
core [section] of the [Heart Sutra]—as East Asian Buddhist scholars have long been
aware—is an excerpt from the [Large Sutra] (169) … the Sanskrit Heart Sūtra is a trans-
lation from Chinese (169).
Watanabe’s response to this seems emotive:
It is also an unnatural and groundless proposition to suppose that the many extant
Sanskrit manuscripts of the [Heart Sutra] all originated in the Sanskrit text produced
by [Xuánzàng]. Nattier’s idea is interesting, but to me it seems like quite a fanciful
notion. (Watanabe 2021, 23)
9. This comment is based on Nattier’s unpublished response to Fukui (1994), composed in 1995.
Nattier spends most of this essay explaining what English terms such as “core section” mean,
because it is apparent that Fukui has not understood them. I am grateful to Jan Nattier for giving
me a copy of this essay and I hope that she might still publish it, even if only informally on the
internet, as it adds to our understanding of the historiography of the Heart Sutra.

We can discount the idea that it is in any way “unnatural” or “fanciful” for all cop-
ies to originate from a single source or for that source to have been a Chinese text.
Nattier’s conclusion is no doubt a surprise to all those who presupposed the text
to be Indian (including me). But we are scholars, we don’t have a preferred answer,
we follow the evidence. Watanabe’s emotive language is not what we expect from
a disinterested party.
Matthew Orsborn (Huifeng 2014) already made a major contribution to this
“debate” by showing that three words from the Sanskrit Heart Sutra can only be
understood as misreadings and mistranslations of a Chinese source. Notably, in a
paradigm-changing result, Huifeng (2014) showed that where Kumārajīva used the
word yǐwúsuǒdégù 以無所得故 in his Large Sutra translation (T 223), it corresponds
to Sanskrit anupalambhayogena in the extant Sanskrit Large Sutra manuscripts. In
the Heart Sutra, we find instead the (plausible) misreading aprāptitvāt. This find-
ing has been discussed at length and confirmed in Attwood (2020a, 2021b). This
discovery that yǐwúsuǒdégù 以無所得故 translates anupalambhayogena changes eve-
rything since the mistake only makes sense as a translation mistake when going
from Chinese to Sanskrit. This has an even deeper significance, as Orsborn suggests:
It is our view that this shifts emphasis from an ontological negation of classical lists,
i.e. “there is no X,” to an epistemological stance. That is, when the bodhisattva is
“in emptiness,” i.e. the contemplative meditation on the emptiness of phenomena,
he is ‘engaged in the non-apprehension’ of these phenomena. (Huìfēng 2014, 103)
This exploration of the epistemology of the Heart Sutra is, in my opinion, a better
candidate for being the frontier of Heart Sutra research, especially as it resolves the
apparent contradictions in the text that led Conze to write: “Obviously the rules
of ordinary logic are abrogated in this sūtra” (1967, 155). We know that Conze was
already committed to this view on the applicability of logic before his encounter
with Prajñāpāramitā. The central thesis of his aborted 1932 Habilitationsschrift—Der
Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Theorie des Dialektischen Materialism—was a repudiation of
Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction, fourteen years before his first publication on
the Heart Sutra in 1946 (see Conze: 1946a, b and c; collated and reprinted in Conze
1958; compare comments in Attwood 2020b and 2021c).
Watanabe cites four of Attwood’s articles (and one blog post) that take up Nattier’s
method and considers that they “are grounded in solid evidential research.” Still,
he does not accept Attwood’s conclusions any more than he accepts Nattier’s. And
again, he rejects the ideas without giving any reasons. Rather Watanabe prevari-
cates, “a more detailed comparative examination of the differences between the
Chinese translations and the Sanskrit text is needed” (23-24). This attitude appears
to be based on the presupposition of Indian origins. A corollary of this view appears
to be that Chinese Buddhist texts are either translations or they are “spurious.”
Watanabe had access to Nattier (1992), Huifeng (2014), and Attwood (2015, 2017a,
2017b, 2018a, 2018b), how much more detailed would he like the analysis to be?
Evidence that supports Nattier’s conclusion is all treated the same by the Frontier
authors, either ignored entirely (for example, Huifeng 2014, Attwood 2017b etc.)

or bracketed out of their main text as footnotes (for example, Nattier 1992, Attwood
2015 etc.). There is no discussion, let alone a refutation, of the methods used or of
the reasoning that led to the conclusions.
That Nattier (1992) is still routinely ignored or dismissed on spurious grounds
represents a failure of objectivity and a breakdown of scholarly communication.
Her work deserves no privilege and should be taken on merit; it’s just that none of
the Frontier authors do this. Anecdotally, I gather that most Japanese scholars con-
sider this matter closed and that Fukui (1995) and Harada (2002) have “disproved”
Nattier’s thesis. I remain to be convinced that they understand what Nattier’s thesis
is since they appear to be incapable of stating it plainly. Watanabe gestures with
one hand towards studies “grounded in solid evidential research” (23) and with
the other dismisses them, saying “any other research [than focussing on Sanskrit
manuscripts] has little validity” (41). Surely being grounded in “solid evidential
research” is the benchmark for validity in our line of work? Moreover, where is
the solid evidential research to refute Nattier’s thirty-year-old conclusion? It is not
found here or in any other publication that I have access to.
The origin of the text has an immediate and decisive impact on all of the sub-
jects under discussion in the Frontier and is the most pressing issue in Heart Sutra
research. One cannot simply ignore it. But the authors do and seemingly not because
they have found some new counterfactual evidence or some flaw in the logic. This
raises the question, is there any evidence that would change their minds? If so,
what would that look like?
I will now move on to consider each article in turn, before making some conclud-
ing remarks.
Akira Saitō, “Avalokiteśvara in the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya”

As a contributor, Saitō Akira revisits his earlier work (2011, 2018) on the problem
of Avalokiteśvara in the Heart Sutra. Saitō (2011) had already proposed the idea that
Avalokiteśvara is a “reflex” of the Buddha drawn from the episode in which Brahmā
Sahaṃpati asks the Buddha to teach.10 The story occurs in early Buddhist texts such
as the Ariyapariyesana Sutta (MN 26). Saitō cites the more developed (and thus pre-
sumably later) versions of the story found in the Theravāda Vinaya, the Mahāvastu,
and the Lalitavistara, with a particular emphasis on the last. Saitō (2021) reasserts
the connection between Avalokiteśvara and the Buddha.
The correspondence that Saitō observes (2021b, 4) appears to be based on a sim-
ilarity between the name, Avalokiteśvara, and a passage in the Brahmā episode
which speaks of the Buddha as “observing the world” (Pāli: lokaṃ volokesi). Saitō
(2021, 8) notes that this link was first made by Giuseppe Tucci in the mid-twen-
tieth century. What ava √lok or loka means in this context is left unexamined.11
10. On this episode generally, see Jones 2009.

11. Peter Alan Roberts (2012, 236-7) points out that the word avalokita has a different meaning in
the Mahāvastu, which contains two sub-texts both called Avalokita Sutra: “In the Avalokita Sūtras,
avalokita does not refer to a being, but means that which has been seen by those who have
crossed over saṃsāra, and is therefore a synonym for enlightenment.”

For example, Jan Gonda (1966) long ago noted that loka refers principally to the vis-
ible or sensible world and is thus sometimes an epistemic term, even in Vedic. As
Sue Hamilton (2000) showed, in early Buddhist texts loka frequently refers to the
world of experience, not to the world of, or as, being. Saitō does note that sometimes
the skandhas are also equated with “the world”12 in Prajñāpāramitā, but he takes the
skandhas in their standard ontological sense as categories of being. When they talk
about the Buddha observing the world, the texts that Saitō cites say things like “he
saw beings” which is the polar opposite of the usual Prajñāpāramitā attitude. In Aṣṭa
and Pañc, for example, no beings are found, apprehended, or perceived. Saitō does
nothing to resolve this antinomy.
Drawing on a passing remark made by the commentator Kamalaśīla (ca. 740–795),
Saitō (2021b, 3) argues that Avalokiteśvara was a nirmāṇa[kāya] (Tib. sprul pa) form
of the Buddha. This doesn’t seem credible. Sarah Mattice (2021, 76) points out early
connections between Avalokiteśvara and Amitābha (Chinese: Āmítuófó 阿彌陀佛).
Mattice (2021, 76) sums up the bodhisatva in China:
In the context of Chinese and East Asian Buddhisms, Guanyin transforms from their
early role as a princely bodhisatva attendant of Amituofo (Amida Buddha), poised
to be the future Buddha of Amituofo’s Western Pure Land, to a figure of cultic devo-
tion who saves people...
This early role for Avalokiteśvara as attendant to Amitābha is found in the longer
Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, another highly influential Buddhist text in East Asia. The
more familiar active role which led to the cult of Avalokiteśvara is assigned to
him in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (Saddh). The Avalokiteśvara Chapter of Saddh
circulated independently in Chinese translation as the Guānshìyīn jīng «觀世音經»
(*Avalokiteśvara Sūtra). Even in the later Karaṇḍavyūha Sūtra, in which Avalokiteśvara
is the central figure of a cosmological fantasy, Avalokiteśvara obeys the orders of
Amitābha (Studholme 2002, 49).
Saitō’s (2021, 3) suggestion that “following his awakening, the Buddha… [taught]…
in his capacity as the transformation body Avalokiteśvara,” seems completely adrift
from Buddhist literary traditions about the bodhisatva. He also appears to overlook
scholarship on the evolution of the name Avalokiteśvara from Avalokitasvara, first
noticed by Nikolaĭ Dmitrievitch Mironov (1927). Two more recent articles—Nattier
(2007) and Karashima (2016)13—examine the name change.
Saitō argues that we can replace the Buddha with Avalokiteśvara (conceived
of as nirmāṇakāya), replace “world” with pañcaskandhāḥ, add in the practice of
prajñāpāramitā, and, hey presto, we arrive at the opening sentence of the Heart
Sutra. Something has gone profoundly wrong here. This is not an objective schol-
arly methodology, making logical inferences from evidence using clearly stated
methods; this is speculative theology. Saitō (2021, 5 n.13) notes that another scholar
envisages a wholly different bodhisatva emerging from the application of the same
12. Gethin (1986) and Hamilton (2002) already make this observation.
13. See also notes in Karashima 2015,113–114.

hermeneutic. A method that produces two completely different outcomes when

applied by two different scholars is flawed at best.
Saitō’s next move is away from the opening sentence of the standard Heart Sutra
to consider the opening of the extended Heart Sutra, in which the Buddha does
appear. If Avalokiteśvara replaces the Buddha in the standard Heart Sutra, some
explanation of the reappearance of the Buddha in the extended version needs to
be found. But, since Saitō does not mention this. Continuing along theological lines,
Saitō appears to take the figures in the text as real persons and the text as a verba-
tim record of a conversation between them. For example:
the story of Brahmā’s entreaty… served as the starting point of the Buddha’s preach-
ing of the Dharma in this world of Jambudvīpa, and it could perhaps be considered
appropriate to also seek the direct origins of Avalokiteśvara in this important episode
in the life of the Buddha (11).
As David Drewes (2017, 1) has recently pointed out:
On one hand, the Buddha is universally agreed to have lived; but, on the other, more
than two centuries of scholarship have failed to establish anything about him. We
are thus left with the rather strange proposition that Buddhism was founded by a
historical figure who has not been linked to any historical facts, an idea that would
seem decidedly unempirical, and only dubiously coherent.
It is methodologically dubious to write about the Buddha, Avalokiteśvara, and
Brahmā as real people of whom we have accurate historical knowledge; or to use
later doctrines as a hermeneutic for understanding earlier texts; or to uncritically
use relatively late Buddhist hagiographies as historical sources (Deeg 2007, 2012,
2016, 2020, Kotyk 2019). Saitō does all three.
Saitō seems unaware of the broad consensus that the extended version came
later, and that the chronology means that the extended text cannot shed any light
on how Avalokiteśvara came to be in the text in the first place. On the contrary,
the opening passage of the extended text (on which see Attwood 2021b) reflects a
post hoc rationalisation of the fact of Avalokiteśvara’s presence.
It is universally agreed that the Heart Sutra copies passages from the Large Sutra.
Such was also the opinion of Kuījī and Woncheuk already in the seventh century
CE (Nattier 1992, 206–207 n.33; Attwood 2020c). The context to which we should
be looking to explain the Heart Sutra is the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā literature. The
problem is that, while the name Avalokitasvara occurs in that literature, there is no
description of him. The bodhisatva does not play an active role in any Prajñāpāramitā
text until the Heart Sutra appears in seventh-century China. Evidence for the Heart
Sutra external to China—the earlier “Indo-Tibetan” commentaries—first occurs
with provisional dates around the late eighth century.
Saitō ends the body of his article by rehearsing one of the grammatical problems
in Conze’s edition first noted by Attwood (2015). A long appendix (Saitō 2021, 13-18)
follows that contains an edition of the standard Heart Sutra attributed to Nakamura
and Kino (1960) and a new edition of the extended text of Saitō’s own making based

on Fujita 1939,14 both accompanied by Saitō’s English translations. The grammatical

problem in question is that vyavalokayati sma is a transitive verb with no object, and
because pañca skandhāḥ is in the nominative plural it does not relate to the rest of
the sentence. This in turn means that the colon after vyavalokayati sma (a feature
of Conze 1948, 1967, and of Nakamura and Kino 1960) breaks the sentence in the
wrong place.15 As Attwood (2015) notes, the first sentence of the Heart Sutra as it
occurs in Conze (1948, 1967) cannot be parsed as Sanskrit. That Saitō simply repeats
this mistake is curious, to say the least.
Saitō (2021b, 13) points out that Attwood’s (2015) solution of putting pañcaskandha
in the accusative plural is not seen in standard Sanskrit manuscripts, which is true
enough. However, as Conze (1967, 150) showed, some Nepalese manuscripts of the
extended text—Nb and Ne—read pañca skandhān (the accusative plural).16 Moreover,
the Chinese text confirms that the missing object of the verb vyava √lok must be the
skandhas: Avalokiteśvara examines (zhàojiàn 照見) the five skandhas (wǔ yùn 五蘊)
and he sees them “all empty” (jiē kōng 皆空) or “all absent.” In this case, we expect
the word skandha to be declined in the accusative. Saitō (2021b, 13) attempts to
problematise the word order, but there is nothing unusual about a sentence like
bodhisattvaḥ… vyavalokayati sma pañca skandhān “the bodhisattva… examines the five
skandhas.”
There is no sign that Saitō (2021b, 14) has noticed the other grammatical error
shared by his edition and those of Conze (1948, 1967) and Nakamura and Kino (1960),
by which I mean the erroneous full stop after acittāvaraṇaḥ (Attwood 2018a, 2020a).
The full stop leaves us with an unparsable fragment: Cittāvaraṇanāstitvād atrasto
viparyāsātikrānto niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ. This “sentence” consists only of a conjunction
(cittavaraṇanastitvāt) and three adjectives (atrasto viparyāsātikrānto niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ);
it lacks a verb or an agent (noun or pronoun in the nominative case). This is very
obviously not a properly formed Sanskrit sentence. Given that the older Sanskrit
manuscripts do not use punctuation at all, the parsimonious solution is simply to
remove the modern full stop (Attwood 2018a). Now bodhisatvaḥ is the subject of
the combined whole and all the grammatical problems are resolved in one stroke.
The resulting long sentence is not beautiful but it is at least a properly-formed
Sanskrit sentence.
Note that Saitō (like Conze) still manages to translate this unparsable fragment
but only by tacitly supplying the missing verb and agent, “he is” (14);17 where “he” is
14. I have not been able to locate this Japanese language work. Watanabe (2016) has a different cita-
tion: Shiraishi Shindō 白石真道, “Kōhon hannya shingyō no kenkyū” 広本般若心経の研究, Mikkyō
Kenkyū 密教研究 70, 1939, pp. 516–538. I cannot tell which is correct.
15. Müller and Nanjio’s (1884) edition has a daṇḍa at this point, but the Hōryūji ms., on which all of
their editions is based, does not use punctuation.
16. Nb is Cambridge Add 1485, Ne is Cambridge Add 1553. I have personally transcribed both manu-
scripts from the originals held in the Cambridge University Library, thanks in part to Vincenzo
Vergiani and his team who were cataloguing the CUL Sanskrit manuscript collection when I
audited Sanskrit classes there in 2012. Unfortunately, neither manuscript was selected for digi-
tisation, but I do have readable photographs that I took at the time.
17. This part of the Chinese text uses very different vocabulary and syntax to the Sanskrit (c.f. Hui-
feng 2014, Attwood 2020a) making it almost impossible to compare them let alone to reconcile

precisely the bodhisatva from the previous “sentence.” Saitō simply repeats Conze’s
two main errors in his “edition.” We may feel it worth enquiring why, seventy years
after Conze’s first botched attempt, we are still seeing “critical editions” of the Heart
Sutra with garbled and/or incomplete Sanskrit sentences.
The overall impression of this article is of an exercise in hand waving theology.
The author ignores chronology, overlooks numerous errors in Sanskrit, and largely
repeats circumstantial points already made in, for example, Saitō (2011) and (2018).
The wordplay that Saitō borrows from Tucci to explain Avalokiteśvara is entertain-
ing, but it is not consistent with such facts as we have. For example, Saitō cites no
traditional sources that feature Avalokiteśvara as a “reflex” of the Buddha, because
no such Buddhist text exists. In Buddhist sources, Avalokiteśvara begins life as a
princely attendant of Amitābha and derives his power from the nāmānusmṛti prac-
tices described in Karaṇḍavyūha Sūtra (discussed in Studholme 2002). Saitō’s thesis
appears to serve the requirements of a Buddhist religious narrative, rather than
an objective exploration of the history of the Heart Sutra. Even if we were to stipu-
late that Avalokiteśvara is a “reflex” of the Buddha, how does this help explain the
author’s choice to give him Elder Subhūti’s speaking part? It does not.
A far more grounded, coherent, and methodologically sound exploration of this
issue can be found in Mattice’s “Chapter Three: Guanyin” (2021, 75–120).
Shōgo Watanabe, “The Lineage of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: With a

Focus on Its Introduction and Expressions of Emptiness”
Watanabe Shōgo’s stated goals are to identify the source of passages that com-
prise the Heart Sutra and to elucidate the origins and development of the text (24).
However, throughout his article Watanabe presupposes that the text was composed
in Sanskrit (in India) and all the Chinese versions are translations from Sanskrit. This
presupposition is never examined. Watanabe, writing in 2019, has yet to see some
recent contributions to the origins debate (Attwood 2020a, 2020c, 2021c). Still, he
should have had access to Attwood (2018b) and Huifeng (2014) both of which pro-
vide strong independent confirmation of Nattier’s approach.
The first part of Watanabe’s article is a useful overview of his thesis about the his-
tory of the Dàmíngzhòujīng (T 250), previously only published in Japanese, but sum-
marised in Nattier (1992, 184–189). Watanabe plausibly argues that Dàmíngzhòujīng
was constructed by compiling excerpts of Kumārajīva’s Large Sutra translation
(T 223).18 As he says, Dàmíngzhòujīng “derives directly from the Large Prajñāpāramitā”
(2021, 30). But Dàmíngzhòujīng was not a translation by Kumārajīva, rather it is, in
Watanabe’s words, a gikyō 偽経. The character gi 偽 means “false, fake, counter-
feit, deception, fabrication, etc.” and 経 is a modern version of jīng 經, which, in
one as the translation of the other. Attwood (2020a) concludes that on balance the Sanskrit text
is a translation of the Chinese, but that it reflects the limits of the translator.
18. Charles Willemen (2021) recently argued that Kumārajīva’s associate Zhú Dàoshēng 竺道生 might
have “composed” T 250. However, the evidence he gives for this amounts to no more than the fact
that Zhú Dàoshēng appears to be an historical person who was associated with Kumārajīva. Wille-
men uncritically accepts the traditional narratives for the origins of T 250 and T 251.

a Buddhist context, means “text, sutra.” Dàmíngzhòujīng is thus “a fake sutra”—by

the criteria for authenticity that applied at the time—though in Buddhist Studies
publications “fake” is usually cloaked in some euphemism such as “spurious” or
“apocryphal.” It would be more straightforward to abandon the value judgements
and call it something descriptive like a “Chinese Buddhist text” (see also remarks
below on chāo jīng 抄經 with reference to Silk 2021). Understanding emic Buddhist
anxieties over authenticity is very much part of the remit of Buddhist Studies but,
as scholars, we should avoid taking on that anxiety and amplifying it.
Watanabe makes heavy weather of showing that Dàmíngzhòujīng has two addi-
tional lines that are found in the Dàjīng but not in the Xīnjīng. In the Large Sutra (in
both Sanskrit and Chinese) the lines are part of a block of text in Chapter Three.
The passage is continuous but if we break it into segments we can easily see what
is included in each of the Chinese Heart Sutra texts.
Dàjīng Xīnjīng Dàmíngzhòujīng

舍利弗色空故無惱壞相受空故無受相想空故無知相 missing present
行空故無作相識空故無覺相何以故
舍利弗色不異空空不異色色即是空空即是色受想行 present present
識亦如是
舍利弗是諸法空相不生不滅不垢不淨不增不減 present present
是空法非過去非未來非現在 missing present
是故空中無色無受想行識無眼耳鼻舌身意無色聲香 present present
味觸法無眼界乃至無意識界亦無無明亦無無明盡乃
至亦無老死亦無老死盡無苦集滅道亦無智亦無得
Both Xīnjīng and Dàmíngzhòujīng copied the same passage from the
Móhēbānrěbōluómì jīng (T 223), but the redactor of Xīnjīng started a line later and
missed out a line in the middle. Following Watanabe (1991), Attwood (2020c) argued
that since Dàmíngzhòujīng is later than, and clearly inspired by, Xīnjīng, whoever
redacted the text must have known where to look for the missing lines since they
recognised the ultimate source as T 223. Nattier noted that, in Xīnjīng and Dàjīng, the
parallel passages are identical, or nearly identical, but that in Hṛd and Pañc the pas-
sages are substantially different in ways that are consistent with Hṛd being a back-
translation. Watanabe takes a different approach but does not address the different
conclusions and how they arise from different starting assumptions (particularly
his unwavering assumption that the Heart Sutra comes from India). This makes it
difficult for the reader to assess the relative merit of his approach versus Nattier’s.
Watanabe incorrectly identifies parallels between the Sanskrit and Chinese texts.
Of the Sanskrit phrases:
S1. rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ
S2. rūpan na pṛthak śūnyatā śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ
S3. yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatā yā śūnyatā tad rūpaṃ

Watanabe incorrectly identifies S2 and S3 as corresponding to the Chinese:19

C1. Sè bù yì kōng, kōng bù yì sè 色不異空空不異色
C2. Sè jí shì kōng, kōng jí shì sè 色即是空空即是色
As Nattier (1992, 204 n.19) pointed out, comparing Hṛd with the versions of Pañc and
Dàjīng tells us that S3 is a later interpolation. Moreover, T 25620 adds an extra pair of
phrases—shì sè bǐ kōng shì kōng bǐ sè是色彼空是空彼色—which can only correspond
to S3.21 Nattier (1992, 204 n.19) leaves the interpolated line out of her translation.
Attwood (2020a) argues that the interpolation should be left out of any revised
edition of Hṛd.
The problem here is that the lines have been inverted so that S1 corresponds to
C2 and S2 to C1. Attwood (2017a) pointed out that the inversion of the lines only
occurs in Kumārajīva’s Large Sutra translation (T 223). This means that these pas-
sages are uniquely diagnostic. Had the phrase been copied in Sanskrit, we would
expect the order in extant Sanskrit Pañc manuscripts (S1, S2) to have been retained.
Yet, Hṛd follows the order in T 223 (S2, S1), not the order in Pañc.
Attwood (2017a) showed that the idiom na pṛthak is not used in Prajñāpāramitā
literature prior to the Heart Sutra, rather this syntax is used: nānyad rūpaṃ anyā
śūnyatā. The two ways of phrasing this mean the same thing, but only the latter is
idiomatic in this context. Such features are characteristic of, and diagnostic for,
back-translations found in other languages (Nattier 1992, 169-173). In addition,
Hṛd contains many Chinese idioms. Nattier (1992) already showed that there was a
pattern of this kind of difference. Huifeng (2014) and Attwood (2017a, 2017b, 2018b)
extend this to other parts of the text showing the pattern to be pervasive. Watanabe
acknowledges some of the differences between Hṛd and Pañc but he glosses over
them without any attempt at an explanation.
Attwood (2021c) points to twenty such idiomatic and stylistic substitutions in
Hṛd compared to Pañc. A few substitutions do occur between the Chinese texts,
where Xuánzàng’s preferred translation replaces Kumārajīva’s: Guānzìzài 觀自在
for Guānshìyīn 觀世音, Shèlìzi 舍利子 for Shèlìfú 舍利弗, yùn 蘊 for yīn 陰, and zhòu
咒 for míngzhòu 明呪. In the final analysis, Hṛd and Pañc are far too dissimilar to
conclude that Hṛd copied from Pañc, whereas Xīnjīng and Dàjīng are too similar for
the former not to have copied the latter.
Watanabe classifies the extended text into two recensions, grouping “the
Sanskrit,” T 252 and T 254 together. However, as Attwood (2021b) shows, the exten-
sions in T 252 are dramatically different from the Sanskrit versions and from other
Heart Sutra texts in Chinese or Tibetan. Contra Watanabe, T 252 simply cannot form
a group with any other Heart Sutra text, in any language, because it is substantially
19. Tanahashi (2014, 159-163), being wholly reliant on third parties for his Sanskrit knowledge,
repeats this error in his analysis of this passage.
20. This text was long attributed to Xuánzàng, but is now more plausibly associated with
Amoghavajra.
21. Note that in Red Pine’s (2004) popular translation, he correctly aligns the relevant passages and
supplies this phrase from T 256 as the “translation” of S3. He does not cite the source of it, poten-
tially allowing the reader to come to the false conclusion that it is part of the standard Heart Sutra.

different from them. Moreover, there is no evidence that T 252 ever existed in
Sanskrit or Tibetan as none of the extant manuscripts or canonical versions resem-
bles it. There are indeed two recensions of the extended Heart Sutra text: Recension
One is T 252, while Recension Two is all the other versions, which are virtually identi-
cal to each other when scribal and editorial errors are accounted for. See Attwood
(2021b) for notes on a provisional stemma of the entire family of texts.
Watanabe’s final comment is, “In my view the most pressing task in research
on the [Heart Sutra] is the collection and analysis of Sanskrit manuscripts, and any
other research has little validity.” By “any other research” Watanabe appears to
have Nattier and Attwood in mind. Ironically, Nattier, Huifeng, and Attwood have
already disproved much of what Watanabe argues for in this article, precisely
because they have analyzed the Sanskrit manuscripts.
Toshio Horiuchi, “Revisiting the ‘Indian’ Commentaries on the

Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: Vimalamitra’s Interpretation of the
‘Eight Aspects’”
Horiuchi’s contribution refers mainly to texts in Tibetan and, since I do not read
Tibetan, I cannot approach this critique with anything like the same rigour as the
other contributions. He addresses an important issue, that is whether the so-called
“Indian” or better Indo-Tibetan commentaries preserved in Tibetan were com-
posed in Tibetan or an Indic language. Horiuchi aims to show that commentaries
by Śrīsiṃha (or Vairocana) and Jñānamitra were composed in Tibetan. One thing
to keep in mind is that the Indo-Tibetan commentaries do not include a complete
Heart Sutra text.22 This means that there is limited scope for comparing the Indo-
Tibetan commentaries with each other, let alone with extant Heart Sutra manu-
scripts. Horiuchi is able to get around this by ingeniously identifying and focusing
in on small, but important, details.
The first part of Horiuchi’s article examines how the Indo-Tibetan commentaries
translate the Sanskrit word bhagavat. Here Horiuchi relies on a passage from sGra
sbyor bam po gnyis pa (abbreviated as “SB”). Unfortunately, he gives no bibliographic
details for this text but a critical edition exists and the editor refers to it as “An old
and basic commentary on the Mahāvyutpatti” (Ishikawa 1990). The Mahāvyutpatti
is a Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary. While the dates of the Mahāvyutpatti are doubtful,
the sGra sbyor bam po gnyis pa was compiled during the reign of the Tibetan King,
Khri srong lde btsan, and can be provisionally dated to the early ninth century
(Giebel and Bue 1994).
Horiuchi (58) notes that “According to SB, bcom ldan ’das is an old translation [of
bhagavat]” and, notably, “’das is an addition unique to the Tibetan translation when
translating bhagavān [and] has no correspondence in Sanskrit.” Vairocana’s com-
mentary glosses the word ’das which means he was commenting on a Tibetan text
22. I asked Donald Lopez about this and he replied “In the tradition of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, the
commentators typically quote just a short phrase, with much of the sūtra not mentioned at all.”
Personal communication 23 April 2021.

(Horiuchi 60). Similarly, “Jñānamitra is interpreting the Tibetan words bcom, ldan,
’das, and ma rather than the Sanskrit word bhagavatī ” (62).
The case of Vimalamitra’s commentary, which some suspect of being com-
posed in Tibetan, is more complex because the absence of comment on ′das does
not prove that the commentator (or any of the others) was not commenting on a
Tibetan text. Here, Horiuchi shifts to a new strategy. Concerning the Sanskrit phrase
anuttarasamyaksaṃbodhi, the sam in samyak is interpreted as sama “equal” and Horiuchi
(63) argues that this meaning cannot be extracted from the Tibetan rdzogs “complete;
end; finish; perfect; fulfil; terminate.” That said, interpreting the sam- in samyak as
sama is not very plausible in Sanskrit either. This makes me wonder if Vimalamitra
was commenting on a Chinese text or a Tibetan translation from Chinese. According
to the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism,23 samyak is typically transcribed as sān miǎo 三藐
but translated as zhèng děng 正等, and zhèng 正 is sometimes used to translate sama.
Horiuchi also looks at how the phrase tasmāt tarhi was interpreted by Vimalamitra.
The canonical Tibetan translations of the Heart Sutra have de lta bas na which only
translates tasmāt. Vimalamitra is commenting on a text that has both words.
Horiuchi appears to assume here that the text available to Vimalamitra was the
canonical text. This assumption is never examined. And we know from Nourse
(2010) that other Tibetan texts existed before canonisation since variants, includ-
ing a Tibetan translation of the standard text, were found at Dunhuang.
Concerning Vimalamitra’s commentary, Horiuchi concludes “there is no evidence
that this text was written in Tibetan” (64). However, given that the commentaries
only include partial texts, and that he has compared just three words in the text,
this can at best be considered indicative. It seems likely on the very limited evidence
presented that Vimalamitra did not compose his commentary in Tibetan, although
no definitive evidence is presented. If it was not Tibetan, we still do not know what
language Vimalamitra used, but the idea that he was commenting on a translation
from Chinese cannot be ruled out.
The remainder of Horiuchi’s article focuses on the substance of Vimalamitra’s
commentary on the Heart Sutra, and in particular on his interpretation of the so-
called eight aspects, that is the four pairs of properties attributed in the Hṛdaya to
“all dharmas” and in Pañc to śūnyatā (Nattier 1992, 172). Attwood (2020c) extends
Nattier’s argument about these texts in a way that invalidates Horiuchi’s reading.
We have at least four versions of the passage:
Hṛd: iha Śāriputra sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣaṇā, anutpannā aniruddhā, amalā
avimalā, anūnā aparipūrṇāḥ.
Xīn: 是諸法空相不生不滅不垢不淨不增不減。
Dàjīng: 是諸法空相不生不滅不垢不淨不增不減。
Pañc: ya Śāradvatīputra śūnyatā na sā utpadyate, no nirudhyate, na saṃkliśyate,
na vyavadāyate, na hīyate, no vardhate.
Attwood (2020c) notes, “The list of terms from Pañc is used repeatedly, both in whole
and in part. The list in Hṛd is found nowhere else across the whole Prajñāpāramitā
23. http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?q=正 [Accessed 23 May 2022].

literature.” Nattier (1992, 172-3) concludes her discussion of this passage by saying:
“Such a striking similarity in content, combined with an equally striking difference
in vocabulary, can only be explained as the result of a back-translation.” Horiuchi
does not offer a refutation of this or a credible alternative.
His introduction claims that “by reading this as an Indian text… this part can be
read slightly differently.” How it is read differently is discussed in copious notes,
but I cannot tell whether or not this part of the article is a plausible revision or not
since it relies on comprehension of the Tibetan language. At times, Horiuchi (2021,
70) arrives at a very different reading to that found in Lopez 1996. For example,
compare these two translations of the same Tibetan passage:
Horiuchi (2021, 70): “The state (nyid, *-tva) of being ‘(2) without characteristics’ and so
on is established/proven without effort by denial of one’s ‘own nature’ (i.e., by (1)
svabhāva-śūnyatā).”
Lopez (cited in Horiuchi 2021, 70 n.47): “The very fact that they are without charac-
teristics also refutes that they [have] their own entity. Therefore, it is not necessary
to dwell on it [further].”
For reasons that are not explained Horiuchi adopts the reading asaṃpūrnā for
aparipūrṇā. Conze (1967, 151) notes na saṃpūrṇā as a minority reading in Cc Cg, and
asaṃpūrṇāḥ in Cabe Jb. Note that Saitō’s (2021b) “edition” gives two different read-
ings: in the standard text na paripūrṇāḥ (13) and in the extended text asaṃpūrṇāḥ
(15) with no discussion of the difference. Could this also be a back translation issue?
By showing that they were commenting on a Tibetan grammatical particle,
Horiuchi has effectively cast doubt on the Indian origin of at least two of the so-
called “Indian commentaries.” This method seems very useful and it would be good
to see it applied more widely and systematically across the Indo-Tibetan commen-
taries, especially in the complete absence of any other evidence of the Heart Sutra
in India. We must hope that Horiuchi continues in this vein and makes his findings
available in English.
Kosei Ishii, “The Chinese Texts and Sanskrit Text of the

Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Seen by Wŏnch’ŭk 円測”
Ishii Kōsei’s contribution tackles two minor discrepancies in some of the older Heart
Sutra documents:
1. a version of the Xīnjīng has long existed with an extraneous character děng
等 meaning “et cetera” and corresponding to Sanskrit ādi, twice inserted
into the text; and
2. Woncheuk mentions a version with the interpolation of yīqiè一切 “all” into
the phrase yuǎnlí diāndǎo mèngxiǎng 遠離[一切]顛倒夢想 “far-removed from
[all] illusion and delusion”.
However, Ishii is not the first to write about this issue. He has overlooked the chron-
ological priority of Dan Lusthaus’s 2003 article and he makes no critical assessment

of it.24 Despite writing in English, Ishii cites no English language sources and appears
to suffer much more than the other Frontier authors from the language barrier.
Curiously, he does not cite any Sanskrit sources either.
In his n-gram analysis of Chinese versions, Ishii overlooks the oldest dated Heart
Sutra, the text found on the Fangshan stele, dated 13 March 661 CE (Attwood 2019a).
The Fangshan inscription has a text that is in every respect—except for one or two
inconsequential character substitutions common in inscriptions of the period—the
canonical text of T 251. Ishii refers to T 251 as an “isolate” and attempts to charac-
terise it as “quite unusual,” but his evidence simply does not support this conclu-
sion. All of the documents of the standard Heart Sutra texts are very similar and T
251 is the same text as the Fangshan stele. Attwood (2019a) may have appeared too
late for Ishii, but there are numerous Chinese-language publications on this inscrip-
tion, so it is surprising that Ishii appears to be unaware of it. Having introduced the
n-gram analysis, Ishii does not refer to it again. It is not clear what purpose it served.
Ishii’s suggestion that Woncheuk’s embedded text constitutes a “critical edition”
is, frankly, far-fetched, even though Woncheuk offers an opinion on a preferred
reading concerning these two minor discrepancies. “Critical edition” is a misnomer
because we get no glimpse of Woncheuk’s reasoning. While Woncheuk asserts that
one reading is preferred over another, he never says why it is and we cannot guess
from the remaining evidence. Nor do we really know which versions of the text
Woncheuk had access to because he only mentions versions obliquely and never
says anything about provenance.
Ishii promises “An examination of these texts should also be helpful for demon-
strating that Jan Nattier’s thesis that the Sanskrit text of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya
is a back-translation based on [Xuánzàng’s] Chinese translation is mistaken.” Of the
five authors, Ishii is probably the least misleading when it comes to his description
of Nattier’s thesis.25 That said, Ishii is apparently completely convinced that Xīnjīng
(T 251) is a “translation.” So much so that he feels no need to explain his position or
to justify it. Like the other authors, he studiously avoids discussing Nattier’s meth-
ods and their relevance to the questions at hand.
Ishii appears to ignore the fact that the Heart Sutra largely consists of a series of
passages copied verbatim from the Large Sutra, and that these passages cannot have
been copied in Sanskrit because the Sanskrit texts of Hṛd and Pañc are too differ-
ent. A good example of this was cited above when considering Watanabe (2021),
that is that the Hṛd has rūpan na pṛthak śūnyatā śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ but this
syntax never occurs in any other Prajñāpāramitā text. The Gilgit and Nepalese Pañc
manuscripts, by contrast, use the idiom: nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā nānyā śūnyatā
anyad rūpaṃ (also found in Aṣṭa). Ishii does not even try to explain such differences.
As Nattier (1992, 170) says, “An unmatched but synonymous equivalent of a
Sanskrit term, then, is one of the leading indicators of a back-translation.” Another
24. Due to space considerations, I won’t repeat them, but the criticisms of Lusthaus’s assertions in
Attwood (2020c) all apply here.
25. However, in another article, Ishii (2015) erroneously suggests that Nattier’s principal conclusion
is that Xuánzàng translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit.

striking example of this phenomenon is the Hṛd term avidyākṣaya. No other Buddhist
text of any type uses -kṣaya in the context of the nidānas. The standard Buddhist
idiom, across all Indic Buddhist texts, is avidyānirodha, etc. No amount of argumen-
tation based solely on Chinese sources can explain such differences between Hṛd
and Pañc. Ishii apparently believes his method could refute Nattier without ever
opening a Sanskrit text. It cannot.
If we also consider how the various texts use the phrase “all the buddhas of the
three times” we can see that the Hṛd—tryadhvavyavasthitāḥ sarvabuddhāḥ (with a
redundant vyavasthita)—is a calque of Kumārajīva’s text, sān shì zhū fó 三世諸佛 “bud-
dhas of the three times”; while Pañc always prefers atītānāgatapratyutpannā buddhāḥ
“buddhas of the past, future, and present.” The shortening of atītānāgatapratyutpanna
to sān shì 三世, in this context, is distinctively Chinese (see Attwood 2021b).
Woncheuk could have raised these issues but he did not. He is bothered by two
occurrences of děng 等 and one yīqiè一切, which have no impact at all on our under-
standing of the text.
Ishii does not deliver on his promise to address Nattier’s thesis. Indeed, as with his
n-gram analysis, having mentioned it once, he simply drops the subject. His article
certainly does not “demonstrate” anything like a refutation of the Chinese origins
thesis. As with Lusthaus’s (2003) comments, I cannot see that this article has any rel-
evance to the Chinese origins of the Heart Sutra. It does however have some bearing
on the later development of the text, which is an interesting topic in its own right.
What this article trivially demonstrates is that variant texts of the Heart Sutra
existed by the end of the seventh century, before Woncheuk (d. 696 CE) wrote his
undated commentary. A Sanskrit version may also have existed at this time. In
Ishii’s version of history, Xuánzàng supposedly translated a Sanskrit Heart Sutra
in 649 CE, so contra his conclusion it would be noteworthy in his worldview if no
Sanskrit text were known in China some 50 years later. It appears that Woncheuk’s
“Sanskrit text” is notable only for twice having *ādi and once *sarva in places where
the interpolation does not change the meaning of the text. Still, no such Sanskrit
text is extant and no other Tang commentator (notably including Kuījī) men-
tions these alternative readings. The additions are not found in Pañc or Dàjīng. So
Woncheuk is something of an outlier. How any of this relates to the Chinese origins
thesis is not clear to me.
Jonathan A. Silk, “The Heart Sūtra as Dhāraṇī”

Jonathan Silk’s contribution “The Heart Sūtra as dhāraṇī” seeks to show that the
Heart Sutra was used as a dhāraṇī. Part of his aim is to introduce English-speaking
readers to some of the research published in Japanese, so as with the other Frontier
authors, Silk mainly cites Japanese sources. However, Silk’s jumping-off point is
Watanabe (2016), an article published in English, in which Watanabe equivocates
on the status of the Heart Sutra vis-à-vis dhāraṇī texts.
Silk’s article contains useful information about the earliest known Sanskrit man-
uscript of the Heart Sutra, the Hōryūji manuscript traditionally dated to 806 CE.
Natter (1992, 208–209, n.39) comments at length on why the traditional date is

highly implausible. Georg Bühler (1884) dated it to the eighth century “on pal-
aeographical grounds.” Samuel Beal (1885) had already questioned not only the
traditional date but also Bühler’s remarks about it. Silk reports on research by
Matsuda Kazunobu that dates the manuscript to the ninth or tenth centuries. This
is later than has been assumed in English language scholarship, such as it is. Saitō
notes Matsuda’s assertion that the Hōryūji manuscript was not written by an Indian
scribe, and interestingly that it “might well be based on a Chinese transcription”
(2021, 103). Thus, the best evidence for an early Sanskrit Heart Sutra text appears to
be a reconstruction based on a text like T 256 that attempted to convey the Sanskrit
phonetically using Chinese characters. Silk notes that Chinese character transcrip-
tions of Sanskrit texts are rare; the only other known example is a Vajracchedikā
Prajñāpāramitā (105). Both transcriptions are associated with Amoghavajra (705-774
CE). This means that the Hōryūji manuscript is much less important in the origins
debate than previously thought.
This leads Silk into a long digression on the Uṣṇīṣavijayā Dhāraṇī, with which the
Heart Sutra is frequently linked, not least in the Hōryūji manuscript itself. I do not
think this digression adds much to our knowledge of the Heart Sutra except to show
the substantial differences between it and the more commonly used dhāraṇī texts.
As Silk (2021, 113) says, the Heart Sutra “seems different in almost every way” from
self-consciously dhāraṇī texts. It is nonetheless treated as a dhāraṇī, according to
Silk, since “once having recognised that the Heart Sūtra not only contains a dhāraṇī
but is a dhāraṇī, those familiar with other texts belonging to the same category made
the assumption that the Heart Sutra should be treated in the same way” (113). Except
that Silk has just told us that the Heart Sutra is not a dhāraṇī and “seems different in
almost every way” from a dhāraṇī. Saitō (as editor), comments on this: “[the Heart
Sutra] differs in character from other dhāraṇī sutras in that it was not taught by
the Buddha himself, makes no mention of any spiritual practice or instructions for
handling the sūtra, and does not describe in detail the benefits of upholding this
sūtra” (2021a, v). Incidentally, we can add that the Heart Sutra is not a sutra either,
at least by the accepted criteria of Xuánzàng’s day (Attwood 2020c).
The idea that the text is a dhāraṇī is supported by the Nepalese manuscripts which
frequently append nāma dhāraṇī “the spell named…” to the title. Conze (1967, 153) gives
a list of these variants in a note.26 Notably, Fukui (1994) argued that the Heart Sutra
is a dhāraṇī and that the xīn 心 of the title should be interpreted as meaning dhāraṇī.
This suggestion is discussed and broadly accepted by Nattier (1992, 175–176). The
traditional Chinese Buddhist histories and hagiographies, while not reliable histori-
cal sources (Kotyk 2019),27 also treat the text as a dhāraṇī, as in the story of Xuánzàng
chanting the text when the ultimate Buddhist magic of his day—calling the name of
Avalokiteśvara—had failed to protect him from demons (see Attwood 2020c). There is
a better explanation, but before getting to it, we need to look more at what Silk says.
26. Here, Silk inexplicably cites a blog post as a source of such variants reading rather than one of
the published sources, the most obvious being Conze 1948, 1967.
27. Another rich vein of scholarship on the historicity of Chinese Buddhist historiography, overlooked
by the Frontier authors, can be found in ongoing work by Max Deeg (2007, 2012, 2016, and 2020).

As well as avoiding the issue of the origins of the text, Silk also ducks the issue
of the distinction between a mantra and a dhāraṇī. But this distinction is vitally
important to the history of the text since mantra did not come into general use
in Buddhist texts until the advent of Tantric Buddhism. Although the dates of this
advent are difficult to pin down, we can say that finding a mantra qua Buddhist
practice in a Prajñāpāramitā text before about the mid-seventh century would be
an anomaly and require some explanation. No such explanation is forthcoming.
Moreover, Silk casually switches between calling the Heart Sutra spell a dhāraṇī and
a mantra as though the terms are interchangeable. In the context of Prajñāpāramitā
literature up to the Tang Dynasty, they are not yet interchangeable, although, of
course, they become so. As Attwood (2017b) notes, chanting mantras is seen as a
non-Buddhist practice in both Aṣṭa and Pañc.
Silk notes that the Sanskrit text refers to the closing spell as a “mantra.” What he
does not say is that the Chinese text does not refer to a “mantra” at all. We can refer
here to Samuel Beal’s late-nineteenth-century translation of the text, which pre-
dates the modern interest in the Sanskrit text and is uncontaminated by conclusions
drawn by those who later focussed on the Sanskrit believing it to be “the original.”
Beal, following a Tang dynasty commentary, reads zhòu 咒 as dhāraṇī, translating for
example: “Therefore we repeat (or let us repeat) the Prajnā Pāramitā Dhāraṇī” (1865,
28).28 Concerning the epithets passage, we see that Kumārajīva regularly translates
vidyā as míngzhòu 明呪 (Attwood 2017b). By contrast, in the commentaries by Kuījī
and Woncheuk (Attwood 2020c) and in Beal’s (1865) translation, the two characters
are read as two words. Even without knowing Chinese, we can see the change if we
compare the passage from the Large Sutra (T 223) with Xuánzàng’s Heart Sutra (NB:
呪 and 咒 are simply graphical variants with no phonetic or semantic distinction)
T 223: 故知般若波羅蜜是大明呪無上明呪無等等明呪
Gù zhī bōrěbōluómì shì dà míngzhòu wú shàng míngzhòu wú děngděng míngzhòu
T 251: 故知般若波羅蜜多是大神咒是大明咒是無上咒是無等等咒
Gù zhī bōrěbōluómìduō shì dà shén zhòu shì dà míngzhòu shì wú shàng zhòu shì wú děngděng
zhòu.
Apart from the addition of dà shén zhòu 大神咒,29 the two passages are the same
except míngzhòu 明呪 in T 223 has become zhòu 咒 in T 251. Beal translates dà
míngzhòu 大明咒 as three words, “Great Light-giving Dhāraṇī”. To be clear, what
Kumārajīva meant by míngzhòu 明呪, and what we find in the extant versions of
Pañc, is vidyā, not mantra or dhāraṇī. According to Aṣṭa and Pañc, Prajñāpāramitā is
a vidyā, which can be likened to Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) “know how” and contrasted
with “know that” (jñā). It seems that Kumārajīva distinguishes vidyā from dhāraṇī,
but Xuánzàng does not.
28. Gù shuō bōrěbōluómìduō zhòu jí shuō zhòu yuē 故說般若波羅蜜多咒即說咒曰.
29. Attwood (2017b) argues that dà shén zhòu 大神咒 also represents mahāvidyā. It is not clear why
Xuánzàng repeated this epithet of Prajñāpāramitā, but his compendium of Prajñāpāramitā trans-
lations (T 220) gives five epithets where we expect three based on extant Sanskrit sources of Aṣṭa
and Pañc.

If the Heart Sutra is not a dhāraṇī, then what genre is it? Robert Buswell floated
the idea that the Heart Sutra is a chāo jīng 抄經, a “digest text” or “condensed sutra”
(Nattier 210, n.48). Buswell made his suggestion shortly after he edited Chinese
Buddhist Apocrypha (1990), which contained a discussion of chāo jīng by Tokuno
Kyoko (1990). Another goldmine of information about the place of chāo jīng in
Chinese Buddhist literature is Storch (2014). The digest text is a Chinese genre of
Buddhist text that, to the best of my knowledge, has no counterpart in India. Such
texts circulated in China in their hundreds and were initially used by the literati as
crib sheets for the contents of longer sutras. The practice of making sutra extracts
(chāo jīng 抄經) has to be seen in the broader context of the traditional Chinese
practice of chāo 抄 “extracting”, on which see Alexander Hsu’s (2018) doctoral dis-
sertation.
The Heart Sutra was apparently conceived as a digest text (a summary of doctrine)
and mainly used either as a doctrinal summary or as apotropaic magic (as a dhāraṇī
might also be, hence perhaps the confusion). As Silk and Saitō both emphasise, the
Heart Sutra is not a dhāraṇī text. It does not resemble other dhāraṇī texts, although
it does contain a concluding spell that looks like other dhāraṇī spells.
Silk’s apparent fence-sitting on the issue of origins, thirty years after it was first
raised, cannot obscure the fact that he proceeds as though the Indian origins thesis
is the default despite the complete absence of any evidence of the text from India.
The genre of the Heart Sutra is certainly an issue, but that genre is neither sutra nor
dhāraṇī, it is chāo jīng 抄經. And the origins debate is crucial here because the chāo
jīng is a distinctly Chinese genre, with no parallels in Indian Buddhist literature.
By refusing to countenance Chinese origins, Silk has overlooked the best solution
to the problem of the Heart Sutra with respect to dhāraṇī.
Conclusion
My overall impression of Frontier is that the authors are committed to a hermeneu-
tic dictated by the Buddhist religion itself, that the Heart Sutra is an Indian text,
composed in Sanskrit. The articles in Frontier seem to suggest that no counterfac-
tual evidence exists, or could exist, that would change this conclusion. But they
never really give Nattier the credit that is due to her. As such, their approach does
not meet the exacting standards of objectivity and academic rigour that I expect
to see in an academic journal. This lapse seems to be correlated with writing about
the Heart Sutra more generally. For example, Harimoto Kengo is a fine Sanskritist
who has done excellent work in other areas. However, in his recent article on the
Heart Sutra, Harimoto (2021) relies on straw man arguments, struggles with faulty
logic, and seems to lack the necessary familiarity with the primary and secondary
literature to draw sound conclusions. He appears to approach the text as a reli-
gious apologist (Attwood 2021a. c.f. comments in Attwood 2020d). I am genuinely
perplexed by this phenomenon.
As well as the general aversion to Nattier’s work, none of the authors of the
Frontiers cites Huifeng (2014) the second most important article in the history of
Heart Sutra scholarship, after Nattier (1992); a paradigm-changing article in its own

right. My contributions, which repeatedly show that Nattier’s conclusions are accu-
rate, are given short shrift. My corrections to Conze’s edition are similarly over-
looked or dismissed without argumentation. Even Mattice (2021), which does give
Nattier a fair hearing, does not look at work by Huifeng or Attwood.
There are some useful aspects to this collection of articles, for example,
Watanabe’s outline of his work on the provenance of Dàmíngzhòujìng, Horiuchi’s
ingenious discovery that some of the Indo-Tibetan commentaries were comment-
ing on a Tibetan text, and Silk’s remarks about the provenance of Hōryūji manu-
script. However, these are obscured by more general failures of methodology and
the problems caused by this.
I am reminded of the story of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), the physician who
invented washing your hands. We remember him chiefly through the idea of the
Semmelweis reflex, a term characterising the irrational knee-jerk response of doc-
tors to Semmelweis’s suggestion that hand washing reduced cases of “childbed
fever” dramatically. This is the nineteenth-century euphemism for “puerperal sep-
sis due to streptococcal infection introduced into the vagina by a woman’s birth
attendants.”30 As male doctors took over this arena from midwives in Europe, puer-
peral sepsis had become a leading cause of death in childbirth. Despite the strong
evidence, physicians did not want to admit that their hands might be “dirty” or
an instrument for spreading disease and long refused to wash their hands on this
basis. Though Semmelweis did not live to see it, hand washing and other sanitary
measures have virtually eliminated childbed fever. And as we know all too well in
2022, hand washing is now an important public health measure. I also think of the
cranky remark attributed to Max Planck:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new gen-
eration grows up that is familiar with it.
This is sometimes paraphrased as “science progresses one funeral at a time.” To be
historically accurate, unlike Semmelweis, Planck lived to see his contributions to
science widely adopted and his work helped to establish an entirely new paradigm
in physics. Planck’s name is attached to many important ideas in physics: Planck’s
constant, the Planck length, etc. The moral is that although progress may seem
slow, a new idea may take hold if one is persistent.
It seems fair to say that some academics, particularly in Japan, feel repugnance
or even disgust at the very idea of the Heart Sutra as a Chinese text. This Semmelweis
reflex has distorted the field in which we (ostensibly) objectively consider the phi-
lology, history, and philosophy of the Heart Sutra. We see this when, for example,
emotive terms like “unnatural” or “fanciful” creep into our discourse. We can also
see it in the informal thirty-year embargo on engaging in a meaningful way with
Nattier’s methods and evidence. Thirty years is time enough to come to terms with
this. Objectively, the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese using passages copied
30. https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/11/1-11/childbed-fever-major-cause-maternal-mortality/
(viewed 8 March 2022).

from Kumārajīva’s Móhēbānrěbōluómìjīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223). Nattier (1992)

made this seem overwhelmingly likely. Huifeng (2014) and Attwood (2018b) made
it certain.
Apart from the simple question of objectivity—the Heart Sutra is a Chinese text—
there are several reasons why coming to terms with the Chinese origins of the Heart
Sutra is important. Seeing the Heart Sutra as a Chinese text highlights the impor-
tance of indigenous Chinese Buddhist textual practices. Chinese Buddhist literature
is too often simply ignored in Indo-centric Buddhist Studies. Chinese Buddhists
began composing Buddhist texts almost as soon as they were exposed to Buddhism
and this dynamic forms part of the context in which we locate the Heart Sutra. The
idea that Chinese Buddhists made and used précis of texts is virtually unknown
amongst Buddhologists who work primarily with non-Chinese texts leaving them
unable to accurately identify the genre of the text or to see it in the context of a
widespread cultural practice.
The assumption that the Heart Sutra is Indian has led to the Sanskrit translation
being privileged over the Chinese source, with a consequent over-emphasis on the
Madhyamaka influenced reading found there. Notably without close attention to
the Chinese context we (collectively) did not see the most important discovery in
Huifeng (2014), that the Chinese expression yǐwúsuǒdégù 以無所得故 is a transla-
tion of anupalambhayogena or tac cānupalambhayogena. It was this discovery that
led Huifeng to propose an epistemic reading of the negations in the Heart Sutra, an
idea I have taken up, but which the academic field of Buddhist Studies has simply
ignored. The Sanskrit text is so privileged that the mistakes in Conze’s edition were
not noticed for almost 70 years.
When we think critically about a text, we have to look at all the information. We
have to consider both primary and secondary sources. The entire issue of Frontier
adopts a hermeneutic that excludes or dismisses information that challenges the
present paradigm. The failure to see the Heart Sutra as it is has led to it being mis-
characterised as to its philology, history, and philosophy. Worse, we see active
resistance to correcting these errors.
The Heart Sutra is a Chinese Buddhist digest text, composed (probably by
Xuánzàng) in the mid-seventh century (likely in the period 654-656 CE). The alter-
native view, that the Heart Sutra was composed in Sanskrit, has been solidly refuted
for thirty years. It is time to accept this and move on to consider the implications.
The real story is even more fascinating than the traditional one and provides us
with unique windows on Buddhism in the early Tang. And the work on it is far
from complete.
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BSRV 39.

2 (2022) 229–254 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897

The Heart Sūtra Revisited

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Before considering the individual contributions, we need to address the elephant

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Akira Saitō, “Avalokiteśvara in the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya”

10. On this episode generally, see Jones 2009.

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hermeneutic. A method that produces two completely different outcomes when

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on Fujita 1939,14 both accompanied by Saitō’s English translations. The grammatical

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Shōgo Watanabe, “The Lineage of the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya: With a

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a Buddhist context, means “text, sutra.” Dàmíngzhòujīng is thus “a fake sutra”—by

Dàjīng Xīnjīng Dàmíngzhòujīng

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Watanabe incorrectly identifies S2 and S3 as corresponding to the Chinese:19

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Toshio Horiuchi, “Revisiting the ‘Indian’ Commentaries on the

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Kosei Ishii, “The Chinese Texts and Sanskrit Text of the

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Jonathan A. Silk, “The Heart Sūtra as Dhāraṇī”

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from Kumārajīva’s Móhēbānrěbōluómìjīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223). Nattier (1992)

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