Sentient Light wrote: ↑Tue Nov 06, 2018 11:38 pm
Dan Lusthaus argues pretty convincingly here that Wongchuk's commentary includes quotations from an unknown translation that allegedly predates Xuanzang's translation, which also doesn't bode well for Nattier's theory.
I don't find Lusthaus convincing at all. A close reading of his argument tells us that he accepts the traditional idea of a Sanskrit original as an article of faith and that pre-determines his conclusion. Nothing he says gets to the Heart of Nattier's argument about the Heart Sutra. I'm more and more convinced that people don't actually read Nattier's article. Which is a pity as it is one of the finest examples of scholarship in Buddhism Studies ever published.
What Lusthaus says is that Woncheuk refers to a three minor differences between in T251 and other texts. Woncheuk once refers to a "梵本" which at face value must mean "Sanskrit text" and twice refers ambiguously to the "other" text (which could refer to the Chinese variant he also has to hand). This tells us that Woncheuk had a Sanskrit text in which we know for certain he noticed one minor difference. He notices that a single character, 等, is missing in T251 but the Sanskrit text has something corresponding to it, presumable
ādi. A second occurrence of missing 等. And a third minor difference is noted where T251 has 遠離顛倒夢想 while the "other" text has 遠離一切顛倒夢想.
What of the
major differences between T251 and the Sanskrit Heart Sutra? This is the crucial question here. If Woncheuk had a Sanskrit text that is like the present text then why has he not noticed, for example the missing section of Para 1 and the completely different sentence construction in Para 6? We just don't know. But there seem to be two possibilities:
1. Woncheuk had a very different version of the Sanskrit text that is no longer extant.
2. Woncheuk had the received Sanskrit text, but he did not think the differences merited commenting on.
Arguments from absence are notoriously weak. There is very little that is clear here. But we don't have a great deal to go on.
Neither commentary by Kuījī (T1710) nor Woncheuk (T1711) is dated. Lusthaus
speculates about the dates, but he offers
no evidence. So we don't know the dates and it is entirely possible that Lusthaus is correct to say that they were composed after Xuanzang's death in 664 CE. In which case the existence of a Sanskrit text has no bearing on Nattier's thesis, since it predicts the early existence of such a text. On it's own Nattier's thesis predicts that a Sanskrit existed before Xuanzang died.
In the essay that prompted this thread, I went further and examined how the Chinese bibliographers had treated the Heart Sutra. I first showed that the text which some argue was catalogued in 374 by Dao'an could not have been the Heart Sutra since it was before Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation in 404 CE. The Heart Sutra cannot predate the text that it quotes from. Thus the first mention of the Heart Sutra in a Chinese bibliography is from 664 CE, the year of Xuanzang's death. And it is treated ambiguously - both treated as a chaojing with no translator and as a translation from Sanskrit by Xuanzang.
The situation is complicated by the Fangshan stele, which I
wrote about in June of this year. The Fangshang stele is dated 13 March 661. This is before Xuanzang died, though before he completed his Prajñāpāramitā translations. And the Xinjing is clearly attributed to Xuanzang as an officially sanctioned translation in this artefact. The Chinese have known about it since at least 1958, but it has never been discussed in the secondary literature of the Heart Sutra to the best of my knowledge. So it complicates the current picture and I'm still thinking about it.
It is unequivocally true that the Xinjing is a chaojing or digest text, composed in China, probably between the years 649 and 661 CE. It is largely drawn from Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation (T223). Or perhaps from the Upadeśa (T1509) though this issue seems unresolvable on present evidence. T251 has been lightly edited with a sprinkling of terms introduced by Xuanzang, but largely retains Kumārajīvas phrasing. There really is no doubt about this.
Also it is now unequivocally true that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a translation from the Chinese. Unfortunately my most recent peer-reviewed article is not quite in print - but it is all finished and signed off on. I will happily send copies to anyone who is interested as soon as possible. The abstract reads:
The phrase tryadhvavyavastithāḥ sarvabuddhāḥ “all the buddhas that appear in the three times” in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a hapax legomenon in Buddhist Sanskrit, but it is similar to the common Chinese idiom 三世諸佛 “buddhas of the three times”. In every case where this Chinese phrase is used in a Prajñāpāramitā text, other than the Heart Sutra, the corresponding extant Sanskrit texts have atītānāgatapratyutpannā buddhāḥ “past, future, and present buddhas” instead. Additionally, where one translator has used the phrase 三世諸佛 another frequently prefers 過去未來現在諸佛 “buddhas of the past, future, and present”, suggesting that their source texts also had this form with the three different times spelt out. The phrase tryadhvavyavastithāḥ sarvabuddhāḥ is unambiguously a Chinese idiom translated into Sanskrit in ignorance of Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā conventions. This proves that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese.
I believe that when we look at the culture of 7th Century Chinese Buddhism an alternative narrative emerges. It is partly inspired by more solidly historical events a few decades later connected with the Empress Wu Zetian. We know that Empress Wu had Buddhist monks compose a sutra commentary that predicted her rise to the throne; and we know that the translator Bodhiruci inserted something similar into a sutra translation. Buddhism in Changan was highly politicised. Buddhist monasteries were extremely wealthy and influential in the politics of the day. Buddhist monks and Wu Zetian formed an alliance against the opposing factions of the aristocracy and the Confucianist bureaucracy. Wu's involvement in palace intrigues overlaps with the story of the Heart Sutra, but I cannot see any direct link between them. Still it gives us a flavour of the times.
I can see means and opportunity to create the Heart Sutra, but not the exact motive.
As now, the question of authenticity was uppermost in Buddhist minds. When modern Buddhists want to discredit me, the first thing they do is argue that I am not an authentic expert or that I am not even a Buddhist. Plus ca change. In the early Tang there were 100s of fake Buddhist sutras circulating, some composed and some compiled from quotes. Some fake sutras escaped detection and continue to be considered authentic (e.g. the Śuraṅgama Sūtra). One of the things the bibliographers did was establish clear guidelines for considering a text to be authentic. Principally, It had to be connected to India, it had to be translated by a recognised expert. Of course it had to be free of obvious heterodoxy (many fake sutras conveyed Daoist ideas) and preferably it should take the standard form beginning with
evaṃ maya śrutam.... and so on.
Xuanzang is celebrated as a translator, but his translations were not celebrated. Indeed, one of the facts scholars cite when considering the Heart Sutra is that no translation of Xuanzang's ever displaced one of Kumārajīva's in Chinese Buddhism. This is why, in Chinese, we call the bodhisatva Avalokiteśvara 觀世音 or just 觀音 rather than 觀自在 as in the Heart Sutra. Chinese Buddhists considered Xuanzang's translations unappealing, turgid, and pedantic and they went on using Kumārajīva's translations. Except in the case of the Heart Sutra.
However, Xuanzang as a pilgrim with a very strong connection to India was a touchstone of authenticity. If you were faking a sutra ca 660 CE, then the obvious person to attribute it to for maximum authenticity was precisely Xuanzang. Woncheuk was every bit as good at Sanskrit and knew more about the history of Yogācāra, but he was a foreigner and he hadn't been to India. So when the two men disagreed, the Chinese simply pushed him to the margins of history and made up rude stories about him.
Someone pieced together the Heart Sutra from Kumārajīva's
Large Sutra. I've identified quotes from Chapter's 3, 19, and 33. But they edited it to be more like a Xuanzang text. Someone (else?) decided that they wanted it to be thought of as a real sutra. This involved creating a Sanskrit text and attributing the translation to Xuanzang. This person must have been a monk working in the capital, possibly one of Xuanzang's inner circle. Certainly not more than a few dozen people had the necessary Sanskrit skills to do this.
They knew Sanskrit, but they did not know the Prajñāpāramitā idioms in Sanskrit. So their text was mostly readable, but it was
not idiomatic. Indeed it contains some bizarre words that only make sense in the light of the Chinese text. None of the opposition to Nattier's thesis has, to my knowledge looked at the Sanskrit text of the Heart Sutra in relation to the Sanskrit text of the Large Sutra, especially in relation to the Gilgit manuscript (which has since be republished in a much easier to read format - I have
transcribed the relevant passages). Everyone tries to disprove the thesis only with reference to Chinese texts. But the whole point is that the idiom of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is not the idiom of the Prajñāpāramitā literature in Sanskrit, but the Chinese Heart Sutra is idiomatic Buddhist Chinese. It's only when you look at the
four texts side by side that you can really come to grips with the subject.
Over the few decades following the death of Xuanzang, Buddhists added to the story by providing details: e.g. the Biography (or hagiography) provided a backstory in 688 CE, a translation date was suggested in 730 CE. But this fits with my conjecture better than it fits with the traditional narrative.
My conjecture is just that, a conjecture. And of course what people are referring to are my notes typed up into a coherent form, not to a published version. This is on the way and I hope to finish it by the end of 2019 - there is usually a minimum of a two year gap between an idea appearing on my blog and it finding its way into print.
There are some straightforward ways to refute my conjecture, though I may say that minor spelling mistakes or misreadings are not going to do it.
1. Produce a Sanskrit manuscript of the Heart Sutra which can be securely dated before the 7th century.
2. Produce any evidence of the existence of the Heart Sutra before the 7th Century
3. Produce evidence that securely dates Woncheuk's commentary.
4. Especially, produce evidence of the Heart Sutra in an Indian context before the 7th Century (currently there is no Indian evidence from before the 8th Century.
5. Show that the Sanskrit idioms of the Heart Sutra can be explained in terms of Sanskrit usage in India.
6. Provide
credible evidence that Xuanzang knew about the Heart Sutra (sorry but his hagiography doesn't count).
7. Red Pine speculates that another Large Sutra recension existed that contained the idioms found in the Heart Sutra; produce any evidence for such a recension (presently there is none).
And I would personally welcome any of all of these. I'm not wedded to any particular outcome. I am simply trying to piece together all the evidence.
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