Читать книгу My Heart Sutra - Frederik L. Schodt - Страница 13

To the best of my memory I first heard the Heart Sutra mantra being recited in 1974 when I attended a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg in Los Angeles. Why this should have been the first time is a bit of a mystery. I had even read a translation of the entire sutra two years previously, but it was the sound of the mantra that day that resonated in my mind.

There are few countries in the world where the Heart Sutra has become so woven into daily life as Japan. I lived there three times: in high school from 1965 to ’68, as a college student from 1970 to ’72. and finally from 1975 to ’78 as a postgraduate student and professional translator. Yet I have no memory of ever hearing or seeing anything related to the Heart Sutra the first two times. It is a classic example, I suspect, of the truism that the eyes cannot see, the ears cannot hear, and the mind cannot understand unless ready to do so. When I lived in Japan during high school I traveled several times around the main island on my old motorcycle and visited many temples, often collecting stamped calligraphic records of my visits and sometimes (with my roommate of the time) even staying overnight at them. Yet in those days I could not speak or read Japanese, so even if I had been surrounded by the Heart Sutra I would not have seen it; even if I had heard monks chanting it I would not have known it. The second time I lived in Japan, attending a Japanese university, I could read and speak Japanese, but my interests lay elsewhere. I was, again, not ready.

In a personal journal from 1974 I recently discovered the ticket I had pasted in for Ginsberg’s LA poetry reading, where I first heard, or recognized hearing, the mantra. The ticket shows that he appeared with the yogi-guru Bhagavan Das on May 10, 1974, at the old Embassy Auditorium on 843 South Grand Avenue.

I was twenty-four then, living in Los Angeles and working for a Japanese company as a tour guide and tour escort, taking tourists not only around sights in Los Angeles but sometimes as far away as Mexico and Canada. It was a fairly short job, lasting only about a year and a half, a comma in a larger coming-of-age paragraph. Before and after that I had been in Santa Barbara for a few years in a household of close friends, living an unanchored life doing odd jobs, taking multiple hitchhiking trips around America, and occasionally writing undeniably bad poetry. Perhaps because I had long lived overseas and in Japan, I for some time had had wild fantasies of walking around America writing haiku. Although a member of the “hippy” generation, at least in terms of age, I identified more with the older Beatniks who (to me at least) seemed to read and think and write more and even—discounting their often prodigious consumptions of alcohol and cigarettes—do fewer drugs. For me, it was period of learning about not only my confused “self” but my own country, about which I frankly knew little. And for me, and many others in my milieu, the Beat poets such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg formed a pantheon of heroes. I especially admired the way they often found beauty in the ordinary, and even in the downtrodden and dispossessed in American society. But I can’t say that I was a deep follower of any Beat poet in particular.

The ticket.

After attending the Ginsberg reading in LA I scrawled the mantra in my journal. As if to signal how important it seemed, shortly later I somehow incorporated it into the chorus of an amateurish rambling song I wrote, blending in references to the star-formation Pleiades and the Heart Sutra mantra. In the mountains behind Santa Barbara I sometimes also enjoyed chanting the mantra in the evening with friends as the red sun sank out of sight into the Pacific. Thereafter, references to it started to appear in my journal with increasing frequency. Early in 1975, after Nixon’s impeachment and near the end of the Vietnam War, after hitchhiking across country, there is an entry about circumambulating the White House with a pal and, in an act of Dada-esque youthful exuberance, chanting the Heart Sutra mantra in an attempt to exorcise it.

Of Ginsberg I knew little, except that he was a poet of considerable and complex genius in the tradition of the mid-nineteenth century Walt Whitman, highly eccentric and fearlessly honest about his own human and often deep flaws. Nearly seventeen years later, I would be briefly married to a Japanese woman whose college senior thesis had been “Zen Influence in American Literature.” She would later turn to fine arts photography and essays (before becoming a teacher of ancient hula in Tokyo) and photograph several legendary Beatniks. It was a failed marriage but through her I at least got to meet Ginsberg and understand his milieu far better.

Ginsberg was arguably at the peak of his public fame in 1974. He was forty-eight years old, and it had already been eighteen years since publication of his most famous poem—”Howl,” a visceral condemnation of 1950s conformity and materialism—which had scandalized conservative America. At the reading I attended in 1974, Ginsberg largely refrained from the homoerotic material that he often delighted in using as a sort of shock-therapy. Instead, he read mainly from a long, beautiful poem of a far more spiritual bent, called “Mind Breaths.” It described him meditating at a Tibetan Buddhist guru’s retreat in the Tetons, his exhaled breath traveling all around the world. At some point, while playing his beloved rectangular box harmonium (that always emitted a narcotic droning sound) he chanted the Heart Sutra. Whether he chanted the whole sutra or not, I don’t know. It is the mantra portion that I remember, which takes up only a small portion of its entirety.

Ginsberg was speaking then on what was sometimes referred to as the “hippy circuit.” It was the tail end of a boom, almost a rush hour, in religious gurus in America. It had not only brought a long string of charismatic figures from the exotic East but also created a space for adventurous Americans to go there to study and then return (perhaps overconfidently, with new Indian names) to impart a new type of knowledge to their compatriots. Oddly, I have no memory at all of the other speaker at the event—Bhagavan Das (né Kermit Michael Riggs). Also puzzling is how I wound up going and even got there, since it was quite a ways from where I lived at the time in sprawling Los Angeles, I have never owned a car, and it was the sort of thing I would never have gone to on my own.

Today I marvel at Ginsberg’s connection to the Heart Sutra and especially its mantra. He was eclectic, almost promiscuous, in his religiosity; like many Beat Generation poets, he was attracted to a variety of Eastern religions in a quest for a different view of reality. While described as a practicing Buddhist, he crossed many sectarian lines, dabbling in Japanese and Chinese Mahayana thought, ultimately settling (mainly) on Tibetan or Tantric/esoteric Buddhism. But Ginsberg dabbled in Jewish mysticism and Hinduism as well, often incorporating Hindu chants into his poetry readings and performances, reading OM and Hare Krishna mantras.

Nearly every thought has a lineage. In 1974, the Heart Sutra was still relatively unknown in the West, but Ginsberg had already been chanting it—and especially the mantra—for many years. He had become fascinated by Buddhism in the early 1950s, when he read Daisetsu Teitarō (“D. T.”) Suzuki’s books, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and its companion, Manual of Zen Buddhism (first published in 1934 and 1935, respectively). The latter volume had a full translation of the Heart Sutra.²

Perhaps even more than these books, Ginsberg’s early interest in Buddhism was amplified by his friendship with the writer Jack Kerouac and especially the poet Gary Snyder.

Kerouac, better known as a Catholic, became famous for his jazz-infused best-selling novels such as On the Road, but at the beginning of the 1950s he was also a serious student of Buddhism, particularly the Diamond Sutra. His writings on it and about Buddhism in general would later be published as a 420-page book under the title Some of the Dharma, written between 1953 and 1956. He, too, also read early books containing translations of the Heart Sutra, such as D. T. Suzuki’s works and Dwight Goddard’s 1932 The Buddhist Bible.³ Not coincidentally, the co-protagonist of his other best-selling 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, was a Buddhism-infused character named Japhy Ryder, based on the real character of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s mutual friend, the poet Gary Snyder.

Snyder’s fascination with Buddhism had started even earlier, also from reading works by D. T. Suzuki. As Snyder recalls it, in 1951 he had been hitchhiking from the West Coast to Indiana:

In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40, there was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through a chapter of Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on some phrases that turned my mind totally around.⁴

Suzuki’s Essays made no mention of the Heart Sutra specifically, but Snyder also read his 1935 Manual of Zen Buddhism, a book that did contain a translation, and he began to pursue Buddhism even more seriously. Between 1953 and 1955 he studied Chinese and Japanese at the Department of East Asian Languages in Berkeley, California, and while there he met both Kerouac and Ginsberg. In 1956 he went to Japan for the first of several sojourns, formally studying Zen in Kyoto at what was called the “First Zen Institute of America in Japan,” on the grounds of the famous Rinzai sect temple Daitoku-ji and also at nearby Shōkoku-ji temple, under Zen abbot Miura Isshū. As part of his studies he was required by Miura to memorize the Heart Sutra, and chanting became an integral part of his life, part of his daily practice—so much so that back in California much later, in 1973, a poem titled “One Should Not Talk to a Skilled Hunter about What Is Forbidden by the Buddha” reveals that he was still in the habit of chanting it when, for example, skinning a road-kill fox for its pelt.⁵ Yet even for Snyder, when he started studying in Japan, understanding the sutra intellectually was difficult. According to a friend in America, Alex Wayman, Snyder wrote asking if he could find out what it meant, complaining that he couldn’t find anyone around him in Japan who could explain it to him.⁶

Intellectual comprehension aside, the Heart Sutra has often had a practical, talismanic component for those who have memorized it, and this aspect of it soon came in handy for Snyder. Early on, he fell in with some yamabushi, or shamanistic mountain ascetics in Japan. These positively medieval-looking nature worshipers carry metal staves and conch shells and wear straw sandals and sometimes a hemp cloth over-robe with the Heart Sutra written on it. They follow a mixture of esoteric or tantric Buddhism mixed with Shinto, the native animistic religion of Japan. As Snyder described his initiation much later,

They said, “O.K., we’re going to see if you are one of us.” They told me to climb up a five-hundred-foot vertical rock pitch while chanting the Heart Sutra. Luckily, I knew the Heart Sutra, so that was O.K. Then they said, “Now we’re going to initiate you.” They tied a rope around my ankles and hung me over a cliff and said, “We’ll drop you if you don’t tell the truth,” and they started asking me questions.⁷

Snyder soon also set a direct example for Allen Ginsberg on how to incorporate the Heart Sutra into his life. In an expansive interview much later, titled “The Vomit of a Mad Tyger,” Ginsberg mentions going on a pilgrimage to India in 1962 where he joined up with Snyder and Snyder’s then-wife, Joan Kyger, who had come from Kyoto.

In a cave at Ellora, Gary sat himself down and chanted the Prajnaparamita Sutra in Sino-Japanese, with echoes of the cave around, and that blew my mind. It was such an extended, long, and obviously spiritual breath, vocalized, that I got really interested and asked him about what it meant, and why he was doing it in Japanese, and what was the history of it.⁸

“Prajnaparamita Sutra” was Ginsberg’s way of referring to the very short Heart Sutra, or the Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya Sūtra, which is only one sutra in a larger body of Prajñāpāramitā texts, many of which are of such a length that no one would actually chant them. And what he refers to as “Sino-Japanese” is really Snyder’s Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese translation or compilation. Ginsberg had obviously seen or read the sutra before in translation in English texts, but his choice of words seems to indicate that he had at least never heard it chanted. In a different translated English version, this sutra and especially its mantra would thereafter become one of Ginsberg’s favorite chants, done in all sorts of public forums, including demonstrations and poetry readings, often accompanied with his harmonium or at the minimum his equally beloved finger-cymbals.

In the same article, Ginsberg mentions a 1972 Buddhist-themed poetry retreat in Boulder, Colorado, where he again read the “Prajnaparamita Sutra” with Gary Snyder, the “desert rat-Japanese-Zen-lunatic poet-meditator” Sakaki Nanao, and Ginsberg’s Tibetan guru-teacher Chogyam Trungpa.

I was going to do some singing GATE GATE, and we each chanted our own version of Prajnaparamita: Gary, the regular Japanese, “Kanji Zai Bo Satsu Gyogin Han Nya Ha Ra Mi Ta Ji …” and then Nanao a long KAAANNJJII using an extended breath, a beautiful hollow voice, and Trungpa Rinpoche almost in pedestrian offhand Tibetan. I did a version that I had worked out from Suzuki Roshi’s English telegraphese translation.⁹

In this case, “singing GATE GATE” (gaté gaté) refers to the Heart Sutra mantra, sometimes romanized from Japanese as gyatei gyatei. The “Suzuki” to which Ginsberg refers is not the Rinzai Zen sect’s Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki, author of the early books containing a popular translation of the Heart Sutra, but Shunryū Suzuki, the Sōtō Zen–sect priest who came to America in 1959, served as the first head of the San Francisco Zen Center, and greatly helped propagate Zen among late-twentieth-century Americans. In Shunryū Suzuki’s translation of the Heart Sutra, rendered in rather charming and somewhat broken English—or what Ginsberg calls “telegraphese”—the first line of the sutra began with “Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva practice deep prajna paramita when …” The mantra itself was also translated into English as “Gone, gone, to the other shore gone, reach (go) enlightenment-accomplish.” Ginsberg had met Shunryū Suzuki after returning from his trip to India, and in the mid- to late sixties had received permission to use and later adapt this translation (with the help of the Tibetan llama Gelek Rinpoche) to his own lyrical, poetic style. Thereafter he would sing/chant it widely in public at poetry readings and also political demonstrations (slightly off-key and with a self-deprecating sense of humor), but he usually sang the short mantra, or what he calls the “GATE GATE” portion, in its original Sanskrit transliteration, following it with his very loose English interpretation: “All gone, all gone, all over gone, all gone sky high now old mind soul, ah …” And this is presumably similar to what he would have done in Los Angeles on May 10, 1974, when I first remember hearing the mantra.¹⁰

“Gaté gaté pāragaté pārasaṃgaté bodhi svāhā!” The mantra in its most popular rendition, in Sino-Japanese (read right to left, vertically). In the earliest surviving renditions (see pp. 15 and p. 136), the character 般 was often used instead of 波 to approximate the Sanskrit sound of “pa.”

Ever the performer, years later, in 1982, Ginsberg would also collaborate with the punk rock group The Clash on their CD of that year, Combat Rock. At the end on a track called “Ghetto Defendant,” where he provided a droning background denunciation of the evils of ideology and repression, he can be heard chanting this same version of the Heart Sutra mantra.¹¹