Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha

The Heart Sutra runs to a couple of hundred syllables and ends by declaring itself a mantra, the great mantra, the unequalled mantra, and then giving it. The words are forms of a verb of going: gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, awakening, and a closing exclamation.

The syllables are feminine in form, and the natural addressee is Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom personified as a goddess, who is the subject of the whole literature the sutra compresses. Read that way it is a vocative address, not a description of a journey, though the journey reading is the one almost every commentary and translation offers.

The sutra itself is the most recited text in East Asian Buddhism, chanted daily in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese monasteries. Its content is a systematic negation: it takes the standard Buddhist analytical categories, the five aggregates, the sense bases, the twelve links, the four noble truths, and denies each of them in turn, ending with no attainment and nothing to attain. That the denial extends to the four noble truths is what makes the text startling on first reading, and the Madhyamaka reading is that what is denied is inherent existence, not the truths.

Dharani is the older term for a formula of this kind, distinguished in Indian usage from mantra by its function as a mnemonic condensation of a teaching rather than an invocation. The closing formula of this sutra is dharani-shaped: it compresses the text it ends.

The most consequential modern argument about the text is where it was written, and it is genuinely unresolved.

Jan Nattier published a study in 1992 arguing that the Heart Sutra was composed in China rather than India. The core of the argument is textual: the sutra's central passage corresponds closely to a section of the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, but the correspondence is much tighter with Kumarajiva's Chinese translation of that text than with the surviving Sanskrit. Nattier argued that the Chinese Heart Sutra was extracted from Kumarajiva's Chinese, that the mantra and framing were added, and that the Sanskrit text we have is a back-translation from Chinese, pointing to places where the Sanskrit renders the Chinese in wording that differs from the Sanskrit the Chinese was translated from.

The proposal was and remains contested. Some scholars, including Japanese specialists in the field, have argued against it on the basis of the Sanskrit manuscript tradition and of parallels Nattier's account has to explain away. Others have accepted it. It has not been settled, and it should be described as an open question with a strong argument on one side rather than as a conclusion.

Nothing in it affects the text's standing in practice. A text composed in China in the seventh century is not thereby less Buddhist, and the Chinese Buddhist canon contains a great deal of material composed in China. But the question of whether the most-chanted text in East Asia originated in India bears directly on how the transmission of Buddhism eastward is understood, which is why the argument matters beyond philology.