Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra.

AuthorSHERBURNE, RICHARD
PositionReview

Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. By DONALD S. LOPEZ, JR. Princeton, N.J.: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xii + 265. $15.95 (paper).

In the early 1970s, Edward Conze, that prolific and revered scholar of the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) literature, reflected in his memoirs that the Tibetan commentaries on the Heart Sutra presented "a vast untended field waiting for younger scholars to cultivate." Let it be said that Professor Lopez has begun successfully to till that field, and is already reaping an abundant harvest.

In 1988 Lopez published Tile Heart Sutra Explained, which put him in the class of Conze, Snellgrove, and Wayman as scholars of Buddhism and commentators. This first book was a word-by-word exposition of the Sutra, excerpting and quoting from the seven Indian commentators of the Pala dynasty (750-1190), and, in that book, he added complete translations of two more recent commentators, the Mongolian monks bsTandar-Iha-ram-pa (b.1758) and the Tibetan Gung-thang (b.1762), both dGelugs-pa polymaths. The present work, eight years later, is a masterpiece of sensitive analysis, placing the Sutra and its commentaries thoroughly in an Asian and Western context.

One might say that Lopez meets admirably his own requirements for identifying and understanding the complex social, political, artistic, and philosophical influences at play in the production of a text: the chosen text should be examined in as broad a historical context as possible; the history of the study of the text must be examined, not only in Asia but the West to explain the reason for a particular interpretation; the scholar must critically examine his own position as scholarly agent, in order to contextualize the text's on-going significance. The commentator is "a deferred reviser, aiming at reworking and rewriting into meaningful context those textual traces that seem most resistant to incorporation."

The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra came into wide popularity during the centuries of the northern Indian Pala dynasty, whence it spread to Tibet, China, and Japan. Unique in its brevity, it is also unusual in its being the only sutra in the canon that includes a mantra, and is undoubtedly the most beloved of all Mahayana texts that explore Buddhist emptiness teaching and practice.

Lopez' present book presents eight Pala commentators, having discovered an eighth (Srisimha's) that was unknown to him at the time of his first...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT