"Stop napping. This is important."

Charles Martin explains the Heart Sutra, perhaps the seminal text of Mahayana Buddhism.

I'm not saying you'll come away enlightened. But I'm not saying you won't, either.

It's interesting that in Buddhism, knowledge is seasoned by wisdom, whereas in Kabbalistic thought it's basically the reverse: chochmah (wisdom) is the flash of insight -- "the beginning of all form, yet still formless" -- whereas binah (understanding) is insight leavened by the disciplined intellect.

The early Kabbalists saw the intellect as the highest faculty, the one most imbued with Divine energy. Its primary task was the domestication of the imagination, the seat of the yetzer hara, or evil inclination, in the healing service of the Divine. The Kabbalists knew that the intellect is nothing without the imagination, but they felt the imaginative faculty, when left in charge, misapplies knowledge to horrible ends (see "Garden of Eden, Expulsion From").

The Heart Sutra's climactic thought, in Charlie's translation:

There is no wisdom, and no attainment. There is nothing to be attained.

To which I say (even as I prepare to deepen my study):

Amen.

--T.A.

Comments

[aineliva]

"There is no wisdom, and no attainment. There is nothing to be attained."

I like that. It kind of takes the pressure off, like saying, do things because I want to and love to, not because I hope for some reward. There's a truth there.