Finding the Heart Sutra; Guided by a Magician, an Art Collector and Buddhist Sages from Tibet to Japan
Alex Kerr
Allen Lane: 2020
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In search of meaning, matters of the heart have been a lodestar for philosophers, seekers, mystics, prophets and thinkers. The heart seekers long to embrace an enchanted world at a time when disenchantment has sawn the legs off the magic table. There is a tradition of taking refuge in esoteric spiritual practices, abandoning causality and embracing imagination. Storytelling is the saga of how the heart navigates a path through a number of circumstances. Jorge Luis Borges articulated those journeys in his essay ‘The Four Cycles’, which identified four universal and timeless stories: the story of war, the story of return, the story of quest and the story of sacrifice. Borges’ own writings reveal a deeper foundation for storytelling: the space where the heart and mind wrestle over the meaning of reality and sense-making. Philosophy, neuroscience, religion, myth and metaphysical explorations start with sentiment (David Hume’s word), emotion and feelings. Religions and cultures vary as to the roles accorded to shamans, prophets, magic, symbols and meditation.
Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra documents the author’s personal journey over nearly half a century to understand, explain, teach and embrace the meaning of the Heart Sutra, which is dated to 661 CE. The sutra was discovered carved in a stone stele at Yunju Temple, seventy kilometres southwest of Beijing.
The basic Tibetan teaching of the Heart Sutra is contained in the ‘Four Profundities’:
The material world does not differ from emptiness.
Emptiness does not differ from the material world.
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- Tags: China, Christopher G. Moore, Issue 22, Japan, Tibet
