Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [87]
Chant faster as you begin to ease into it. Feel the energy moving through your body, throat, lungs, diaphragm, navel chakra, mouth, tongue, and breath. Chanting is an engaging, totally involving, active form of meditation. It’s also a constructive way to get your energy moving. If you’re feeling depressed or sluggish, you can alter your mood and your inner emotional weather with mantra practice. In the car, instead of changing radio stations and driving your passengers nuts, carry your own chosen atmosphere with you by chanting, smiling, and entering the dimension of sacred sound. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, instead of counting sheep or popping pills, try counting your breaths or very gently chanting mantra to yourself as a relaxant and soporific. Count mantras instead of sheep. Join the sangha herd.
CHANTING THE HEART SUTRA
The teachings of sunyata about the true nature of reality are at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism, the Great Middle Way. These teachings are explained in one hundred thousand verses known as the Prajna Paramita Sutras, which translates as the Scriptures of Transcendental Wisdom. These sutras are also condensed into shorter forms. The shortest is known as the Heart Sutra—the Heart Essence of Wisdom Scripture. Many people say it is their favorite sutra. The Heart Sutra is chanted daily and studied and taught in almost every monastery and Buddhist center, be it in the East or West. I fondly call it the Not Sutra; you will see why.
According to legend, the Buddha entrusted the one hundred thousand verses of these Sutras of Transcendental Wisdom to the hands of semidivine, dragonlike sea dwellers, known as Nagas, who kept them safe until they were rediscovered by an Indian philosopher sage named Nagarjuna who lived in about the first century A.D. Because he brought these highly treasured teachings about emptiness back from the Nagas, his name became Nagarjuna, literally translated as “charioteer of the Nagas.” The original exponent of Madhyamika, the Great Middle Way doctrine of Buddhist logic and epistemology, Nagarjuna is considered the Buddhist philosopher of relativism: Madhyamika reveals how it is that nothing exists independently. Everything is conventionally, relatively real, arising through interdependent causes and effects. Thus it is said that nothing exists forever in any ultimate sense. This is true whether we are talking about a soul or a table. Things just appear to be real and substantial, without being exactly so. This is the mysterious, fertile intersection of the void of nothingness and everything we so vividly experience.
The Heart Sutra
Here is the Heart Sutra, the condensed essence of the Prajna Paramita Sutras:
Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, practicing deep prajna paramita
Clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty, transforming all suffering and distress.
Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form;
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form; sensation, thought, impulse, consciousness are also like this.
All things are marked by emptiness—not born, not destroyed;
not stained, not pure; without gain, without loss.
Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, thought, impulse, consciousness;
no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of thought;
no realm of sight to no realm of thought;
no ignorance and also no ending of ignorance
to no old age and death and also no ending of old age and death;
no suffering, also no source of suffering, no annihilation, no path;
no wisdom, also no attainment. Having nothing to attain, Bodhisattvas live prajna paramita with no hindrance in the