Bad Free Will Philosophy.
Philosophy is an important activity. Ideally, philosophy helps us to make sense of the world, ourselves, and our place in the world. Unfortunately, philosophy at least on the level that I engage with...
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Notes on the History of the Dàmíngzhòujīng
My article on the Fangshan Stele as the oldest dated Heart Sutra text is about to appear in the Journal of Chinese Buddhism. And it got me thinking about one of the other Heart Sutra texts. I've...
View ArticleAnother Failed Attempt to Refute the Chinese Origins Thesis
In 2002, Japanese scholar Harada Waso published an annotated translation of the Heart Sutra which included many notes on why he did not believe the Chinese Origins thesis. The article was written in...
View ArticleHeart Sutra: Work, Text, Document
Some time ago I uploaded a draft of an eclectic edition of the Chinese Heart Sutra (Xīnjīng) for comment on academia.edu. Richard K. Payne responded with a terse, but ultimately very interesting...
View ArticleHeart Sutra: Author, Scribe, Editor, Translator, Reader
In this second essay on philology and the Heart Sutra I will once again take up Milikowsky's tripartite description of a text as consisting of Work, Text, and Document. The Work being the author's...
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Global Warming: Some Basic Facts and Some Thoughts
This is an edited version of an essay I wrote for the Triratna Order to try to clarify the issues surrounding climate change and related problems. I have some interest in the basic idea of global...
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Heart Sutra and Social Reality
This essay continues on from: Heart Sutra: Author, Scribe, Editor, Translator, Reader. (25 October 2019)In John Searle's account of social reality, the ontologically subjective can become epistemically...
View ArticleXuanzang and the Heart Sutra
I'm pleased to announce that my sixth article on the Heart Sutra has just been published and is now available online as an open access pdf.'Xuanzang’s Relationship to the Heart Sūtra in Light of the...
View ArticleRemoving All Suffering
The Heart Sutra is less than 300 words (in any language) and I have been studying it in detail for eight years now, though I first met it 25 years ago. And yet I still find new things in it. Yesterday,...
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Diamonds, Thunderbolts, and the Impossibility of Translation
Some time back, on my Facebook Heart Sutra group, I argued along the lines that vajra doesn't mean "diamond" and that Sanskrit compounds in the form X-ccheda always mean "that which cuts X". And...
View ArticleTexts and Historiography: The Case of Xuanzang
Following hot on the heels of my recent article about the historiography of Xuanzang, comes a new article by my longtime online friend, Dr Jeffrey Kotyk. His main subject these days is astrology in...
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Jingtai's Catalogue: Wu Zhao and Digest Texts
Carving Buddhist texts in stone was a very popular activity in China. The series, Buddhist Stone Sutras in China, is a set of large format books with images, transcriptions, and commentary on...
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On the Pronunciation of Jña
One of the pleasures of learning Sanskrit for an English speaker is that it is written almost exactly as it is pronounced. I say almost, because there are one or two irregularities. The most striking...
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Revisiting Avalokiteśvara in the Heart Sutra
In my 2019 article on Xuanzang and the Heart Sutra, I argued that is was implausible for Xuanzang to have been involved in any clandestine attempt to pass the Heart Sutra off as a genuine sūtra. By...
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Dhammaniyāmata and idappaccayatā
I was going over my notes on niyāma and comparing some Pāli and Chinese texts a couple of years ago and started writing this essay. I discussed it on the Sutta Central forums in 2018. I noticed it...
View ArticleMantra in the Prajñāpāramitā
One of the loose ends that need tying up in thinking about the context of the Heart Sutra is the reference to mantra in the Sanskrit text. Of course, I have shown that the word doesn't occur in...
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Against Karma: Suffering and Justice
The central issue of Buddhism is dukkha, variously translated as suffering, dissatisfaction, misery, stress, etc. Dukkha and its antonym (sukkha) are used in subtly different ways in different...
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Mantra in the Early Prajñāpāramitā Literature
One of the loose ends that needs tying up in thinking about the context of the Heart Sutra is the reference to mantra in the Sanskrit text. Of course, I have shown that the word doesn't occur in...
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Did The Heart Sutra Ever Go To India?
For the longest time it was assumed that the Heart Sutra was composed in India, a product of the larger Prajñāpāramitā movement. The conventional wisdom was that Buddhism flowed in only one direction...
View ArticleThe Extended Heart Sutra: Sources
Very little critical or comparative work has been done on the extended Heart Sutra. I've tended to ignore it because there has been so much to do on the standard text. I've been interested in the...
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