Читать книгу My Heart Sutra - Frederik L. Schodt - Страница 15

The Heart Sutra mantra thus remains a sonic bridge among diverse languages and cultures, one that has survived nearly intact for over 1,400 years. And it has survived because it is a mantra. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a mantra as something originally Sanskrit, and

A sacred text or passage, esp. one from the Vedas used as a prayer or incantation; a word or phrase from a sacred text repeated this way. Also, a holy name, for inward meditation.¹³

In the Buddhist world, mantras closely resemble, even overlap, with what are called dhāraṇī, or summaries of a longer, important text. Both of them are in a way a mnemonic aid in invoking the longer text, even though their usage in English literature is often confusing. In the Heart Sutra what is referred to by scholars variously as the mantra (and sometimes even the dhāraṇī) is only the last couple of lines of the entire sutra (only 18 out of around 260 ideograms in the Chinese version), but it can also be seen as the focus and crystallization of the entire sutra, which in itself is a reference to the power of the entire Prajñāpāramitā body of sutras. As the 14th Dalai Lama argues in his book Essence of the Heart Sutra, the entire sutra—the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom, or the Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya, even the Perfection of Wisdom, presumably including the entire body of sutras—can be considered a type of mantra, and this is clearly spelled out with great force in the sutra itself.¹⁴ If this is all confusing, it is important to remember that in Tibet and in some eras in Southeast Asia (such as ancient Java and even Cambodia), “Prajñāpāramitā” itself has at times been personified in statues and worshiped as a female deity.

Mantras can also be a type of magical spell. And because of their sacred, sound-based quality the words themselves usually have no meaning and, even if they do, tend not to be translated. In fact, some argue that even if a mantra has meaning it should not be translated. Thus, in the commentary that accompanies one English translation of the Heart Sutra, the twentieth-century Chinese Master Tanxu (1875–1963) is quoted as saying,

“The Mantra belongs to the esoteric tradition and, accordingly, belongs to the five kinds of texts deemed primal, untranslatable, and inconceivable; when they are translated and explained, they will become conceivable Dharma, and their original meaning and merit will be lost.”¹⁵

Despite this, nearly all modern scholars and Buddhist luminaries who translate the Heart Sutra into English at least attempt a translation of the mantra portion. For reference, some diligent scholars even include the Sanskrit Devanagari script, which is often assumed to be the original language of the sutra. But we have no reason to believe that Buddha delivered sermons in Sanskrit (which even in his era was a classical written language understood by few ordinary people). Most transliterate, or attempt to reproduce the sound of—rather than translate the original meaning of—the Sanskrit mantra in the Heart Sutra into the Roman alphabet, perhaps because most other mantras do not have meaning. They thus render the mantra as gaté gaté pāragaté pārasaṃgaté bodhi svāhā. And then, either as part of an official translation or an explanation or in footnotes, they give a modern English translation. Only occasionally do translators leave out the Sanskrit version of the mantra entirely and just give the translation.

I am fascinated by translations of the Heart Sutra mantra because, as noted (and unusual for mantras), it is not just a magical sound; it does have meaning. But in East Asian countries where ideograms (instead of alphabets) are used, this gets a bit tricky—especially in greater China and Japan where the Heart Sutra is most popular. Most of the eighteen characters assigned to the sutra’s mantra portion are not individually used for their meaning but for an approximation of the assumed Sanskrit pronunciation. And given the nature of ideograms this becomes very difficult. A modern Chinese or Japanese person glancing casually at the mantra ideograms in isolation for the first time might see echoes of references to a castrated sheep, an ethnic group in China, some indication of truth, abandonment, a monk, or a Bodhisattva. The characters represent, in other words, a Chinese monk’s attempt around fourteen hundred years ago to represent what he thought was a sound uttered by Buddhists in northeastern India (in a completely different language) nearly two thousand five hundred years ago. And as we have already seen, given that written Chinese normally uses ideograms with a largely pictorial meaning (instead of a fixed phonetic sound), wildly divergent pronunciations can arise unless there is some sort of pronunciation key. Fairly early on, the Japanese (followed by the Koreans) developed phonetic scripts that helped improve literacy and could effectively lock-in pronunciations of Chinese characters—but not so the Chinese themselves, who had to deal with so many different dialects.

Assuming that in ancient Sanskrit the mantra really did sound something like gaté gaté pāragaté pārasaṃgaté bodhi svāhā, those who were first to translate it into English heard something very different, depending on where they first heard it. Samuel Beal (1824–89), a British scholar of Chinese who translated the Heart Sutra in 1863, was primarily familiar with Cantonese since he had spent time in the British Navy after it seized Hong Kong in the First Opium War of 1842. In China then, he noted, “It is found in every temple, and very frequently in the interior of the small ‘idols’ (Josses) that garnish the domestic altars.” To him, the mantra portion of the sutra that he heard in Chinese temples sounded like

Ki-tai, Ki-tai,

Po-lo, Ki-tai,

Po-lo-seng-Kitai,

Bo-tai-sah-po-ho.

At the end of his translation, he noted that in Sanskrit the same mantra would have been pronounced something like “Gati, Gati, Para gati, Parasangati, Bodhisatvah,” adding that they were “words I cannot attempt to explain.” In 1875, when he later published his translation in a book on Buddhism, however, he did include a translation in a footnote:

Gone! gone! gone-across! (or burnt out) gone across for ever!) Bodhisatwa.¹⁶

Six years later, in 1881, a German-born naturalized British citizen named F. Max Müller (1823–1900) added his take on the same mantra. Müller was a respected scholar of Sanskrit and (working from what was thought to be an ancient Sanskrit palm-leaf copy found in Japan’s Hōryū-ji temple) on a single page he reproduced the original Sanskrit mantra text in Devanagari script on one side with an English translation of it on the other, rendering the mantra as:

O wisdom, gone, gone, gone to the other shore, landed at the other shore, Svâhâ! ¹⁷

From that point on, translations of the mantra became more and more refined, with only a few words of difference between them. In 1935, when the aforementioned Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki translated the sutra into English for his 1935 Manual of Zen Buddhism, had he rendered the mantra in romanized Japanese its pronunciation would have sounded quite like Sanskrit, as gyatei gyatei haragyatei hara sōgyatei boji sowaka. Conscious of its etymology, perhaps, he rendered it in transliterated Sanskrit form and then (in parentheses) included an English translation with two Sanskrit words retained, perhaps for “authenticity” or “power.”

O Bodhi, gone, gone, gone to the other shore, landed at the other shore, Svaha!¹⁸

In 1958, in his popular book Buddhist Wisdom, the brilliant linguist and scholar of Mahayana Buddhism, Edward Conze, included a translation of the Heart Sutra. He based it on his studies of ancient texts in multiple languages (mainly Sanskrit, but also Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, and so on). He included not only transliterated Sanskrit but a completely English version to produce what has today become a classic English rendition of the sutra’s concluding mantra:

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail!¹⁹

Much more recently, in 2005, the 14th Dalai Lama, working with a translator from Tibetan, while allowing that the mantra can be metaphorically read as “go to the other shore,” rendered it on one page in transliterated Sanskrit and on an opposing page as:

Go, go, go beyond, go totally beyond, be rooted in the ground of enlightenment.²⁰

In 2014, the revered Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh issued a new translation of the Heart Sutra in his revised book The Other Shore. His English translation leaves the transliterated Sanskrit mantra but with a separate explanation elsewhere stating that it means:

Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svāhā!²¹

Among religious and secular scholars, and many non-tantric Buddhist practitioners, there has been a tendency to downplay the original magical component of the mantra, perhaps in an appeal to modern sensibilities. This has always puzzled me, since the sutra itself declares that the mantra is (as Conze translates it) “the great spell, the spell of great knowledge, the utmost spell, the unequalled spell, allayer of all suffering, in truth a supreme spell, the one and only spell.”²² In this regard, in his more recent rendition of the same section in the sutra, American translator Red Pine does us all a favor by using the phrase “mantra of great magic.”²³

In this vein, Donald S. Lopez Jr., professor of Buddhism and an expert on the sutra, wrote in a 1990 publication for the general public that the Sanskrit mantra itself occupies a special place in the sutra because it is

… in a language “entirely freed of the illusion of meaning.” Without translation, there is “only the letter, and it is the truth of pure language, the truth as pure language,” the pure language, called saṃskṛta. Untranslated, “language and revelation are one without any tension.”²⁴

So while most people around the world seem to enjoy chanting the sutra in their native language, through some innate wisdom many chant the short and concluding powerful mantra—the transcendent magical spell that crystallizes the entire sutra— in a way that evokes the Sanskrit pronunciation. On YouTube, one can hear the beloved Hong Kong–based pop-singer/actress/diva Faye Wong, with the international Philharmonia of the Nations orchestra (conducted by Justus Frantz), sing a beautiful rendition of the Heart Sutra in Mandarin, not Cantonese. But whether singing the sutra in Hong Kong or mainland China, when she gets to the final mantra portion she renders it as close as possible to the Sanskrit pronunciation.

After observing Westerners chanting the mantra in Sanskrit, Kazuaki Tanahashi—translator, calligrapher, lecturer, and author of the 2014 book The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mayahana Buddhism—put it this way: “… there is something magical about reciting without fully understanding the words. This may be similar to the experience of people who love praying in Latin at Roman Catholic churches.”²⁵

And what is my own humble opinion? The mantra has power because it has meaning to those who recite it. And it has meaning because it has power, and the power is derived from Buddha, his disciples, the ancients, and a tradition that survives to this day.