Emptiness and the Heart Sutra – Vajraloka

The Heart Sutra is one of the most well-known and loved of all Buddhist texts. Inevitably, there are innumerable takes on what it ‘means’. Early western commentators treated it as philosophy or even poetry. But what if it actually points us towards our own immediate experience as the way to “sunder the bonds that cause us suffering”?

Whatever could practising this involve?

First, there are questions that need to be addressed. What is ‘emptiness’? What does it mean to say that our psycho-physical constituents – the skandhas – are ‘empty’? And how can it be that ‘in emptiness’ there are no skandhas, no senses, even no conditioned arising?

Going deeper, we’ll open to our direct experience of the body, senses and skandhas. We’ll explore whether an intrinsic, substantial, separate ‘me’ can be found in “form, feeling, thought, choice and consciousness”, Does this “me” have any basis in experience? Or is experience ‘empty’ of such an entity?

In this way, we’ll begin to discover how the emptiness teaching of the Heart Sutra can compassionately awaken us to our deepest nature, Prajñāpāramitā, from which we are never truly apart.