The Heart Sutra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?

Jan Nattier's The Heart Sutra, A Chinese Apocryphal Text, published in the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies in 1992, is the article that argued, against the traditional understanding of the Heart Sutra as translated from an Indian Sanskrit original, that the sutra was actually composed in China, likely by extracting and reworking passages from an earlier Chinese translation of a larger Perfection of Wisdom text, and only later translated back into Sanskrit. Nattier is a specialist in early Buddhist textual history working from close comparative philological analysis of the Chinese and Sanskrit versions against each other. Its strength is that direct textual comparison, tracing specific phrases across versions rather than arguing from general plausibility. Its limit is that Nattier's reverse-translation thesis, though influential, remains actively debated among specialists in the sutra's textual history, so a claim about the Heart Sutra's actual origin should be presented as her argued position within a live scholarly question, not as settled consensus.