The Heart Sutra

Textual Origins and Dating

Recent philological work by Jayarava Attwood (2023) has provided compelling evidence that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese in the mid-seventh century CE, likely by Xuánzàng, and subsequently back-translated into Sanskrit. This conclusion, building on Jan Nattier’s groundbreaking 1992 study, is supported by comparative analysis showing that the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya contains non-idiomatic expressions, calques of Chinese Buddhist terminology, and systematic divergences from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā from which portions were ostensibly copied. The traditional narrative of an Indian Sanskrit original translated into Chinese represents a reversal of the actual textual history and is no longer held to be probable.

The Phenomenological Reading vs. Ontological Misreadings

Attwood’s interpretive framework, following methodological approaches developed by Sue Hamilton for reading Pāli suttas, argues that Prajñāpāramitā literature is fundamentally concerned with the phenomenology of meditation experience rather than metaphysical assertions about reality. Specifically, the Heart Sutra describes the cessation (nirodha) of sensory experience in meditation and the subsequent state of “absence” (śūnyatā). In this reading, phrases like “form is emptiness” are not paradoxical ontological claims about how the world is but descriptions of what occurs when a practitioner ceases apprehending sensory phenomena through non-apprehension (anupalambhayoga).

This contrasts sharply with what Attwood terms “the Madhyamaka telos”—the widespread assumption that Prajñāpāramitā texts are proto-Madhyamaka metaphysics concerned with the ultimate non-existence of phenomena due to lack of svabhāva (inherent existence). Such readings, popularised by Edward Conze and continuing in much contemporary scholarship, impose later Madhyamaka categories onto earlier literature and generate apparent contradictions requiring “mystical identity of opposites” or repudiation of the principle of non-contradiction which is not the case when read as meditative awareness.

Nāgārjuna and Anti-Reification

It should be noted, however, that Nāgārjuna himself may not warrant the ontological reading often attributed to Madhyamaka. His project in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā can be understood as anti-reification through logical deconstruction—demonstrating that suffering, the self, and other dharmas are not reified entities but dependently originated processes. His famous statement “I have no thesis” (pratijñā) represents a genuine rejection of the ontological project itself, not a meta-ontological position.

Thus, both Prajñāpāramitā and Nāgārjuna may be read as complementary anti-reification projects: Prajñāpāramitā describes the experiential absence of reified phenomena in cessation states, whilst Nāgārjuna provides the logical framework showing why such phenomena were never inherently existent to begin with. The apparent tension dissolves when we recognise that one operates in phenomenological/meditative space and the other in analytical/logical space—different methods for the same therapeutic end.

The contradiction-embracing interpretations that dominated twentieth-century scholarship may represent a later systematisation that misread both traditions by converting their therapeutic methods into metaphysical positions.