Heart Sutra — Class One | Ango 2025 | Shuso Genpo Seth Myers

This is part one of a four-week class series on the Heart Sutra taught by Shuso Genpo Seth Myers during Ango 2025 at One River Zen

Just sitting here means a lot to me. I really appreciate it. And with that being said, this isn’t the first time you’ve let me teach something. Last time it was to people unfamiliar with practice. Today I’m in front of two Senseis, some friends, and some peers — so it’s different.

But I think everyone here will get something from what is going to be said.

The Heart Sutra — for those not familiar — is an ancient text in Eastern philosophy and is probably the most important text in all of Zen Buddhism. When Sensei Michael Brunner first asked me to teach this class, I actually wanted to do a trickier text. He recommended the Heart Sutra. And although I had some choice, it seemed basic to me.

I found out quickly that was far from true. I’ve read it for years. In the early 2000s I thought I understood it. I didn’t. Later I thought I understood it more. Then, when preparing to teach, I realized I understood nothing. That turned out to be good, because it forced me to penetrate it more deeply.

The more I tried to analyze the Heart Sutra — especially “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” — the more I was just chasing my own shadow. It wasn’t until directly experiencing what the teachings point to — and dropping the conditioned mind — that anything landed. I think that is exactly what the Heart Sutra instructs: stop grasping with the analytical mind and let things be as they are.

The Heart Sutra is Zen’s clearest look at non-duality. And non-duality is not a concept — it points to the nature of reality itself. Non-duality means “not two.” The world is not split between subject and object, self and other, sacred and ordinary. Those divisions exist only in the mind that names and grasps. In truth there is just this: one seamless field of being. Seer and seen, sound and hearing, breath and breather arise together — interdependent and inseparable. The Heart Sutra is the pure expression of this. It is not philosophy — it is a mirror.

Non-duality isn’t something to understand. It is what is here when understanding falls away. That was the trap: trying to understand.

So as we start this journey, I invite you not to try too hard to understand in the head. Let it land in the heart. Literally — the heart contains about 40,000 neurons. The heart is a kind of “little brain.” It senses, remembers, communicates. Buddhism has known this for a long time. In Japanese, the word shin means both “heart” and “mind.” They are not two.

When the Heart Sutra speaks of “wisdom beyond wisdom” (prajñā-pāramitā), it does not mean intellect. It means the knowing that comes from an open heart-mind — the heart that sees clearly without fear.

When shin rests deeply it settles into the hara — the center of gravity below the navel. In Zen, hara is not a belief — it is something to realize. When attention drops from the head into the hara, the boundary between “me” and the world softens. Breathing becomes effortless. The mind quiets. Insight does not come from thinking — it rises on its own, like still water reflecting the moon.

Physically, the hara corresponds to the lower abdomen and the enteric nervous system — about 100 million neurons, more than the spinal cord — which is why we “feel” truth in the gut before we can explain it. When we are calm, that gut network synchronizes with heart and brain rhythms. Heart-brain coherence is not woo-woo — it is measured. Here thought, feeling, and body are not separate.

So when we chant the Heart Sutra we do not recite philosophy. The sound vibrates through the heart, the hara, the whole body. The sutra is not meant to be understood but embodied — alive, breathing, empty and full at once.

This four-week journey is transformative if we meet it with beginner’s mind — not as people who have chanted it hundreds of times, but as if hearing it for the first time. This is the very heart of the Buddhist message. The sutra is short — barely a page — yet vast beyond words. It is not meant to be grasped by the mind but to land deeper, beyond the one trying to understand.

At its core the Heart Sutra is about emptiness. “Empty” does not mean bleak or void. It means nothing stands alone. No person, no thing, no thought exists by itself. Everything leans on everything else. The body is empty of being a fixed, separate self. Thoughts are empty of permanence. Even suffering is empty — it depends on causes and conditions.

And here is the paradox: emptiness cannot exist without form. You never “find” emptiness as an object. Emptiness is not what you find — it is what finds you when you stop looking.

While preparing this, I tried to decipher emptiness-is-form on a hike. I stopped overlooking a lake, repeating the words. When I stopped trying, there was just seeing. Not “I see a lake.” Just seeing. I wrote a short poem:

No clouds. No lake. No birds.
No sound of cicada.
No “thing” at all.
Only the seen — just seeing.

Emptiness is not denial — it is the most intimate description of reality as it is: empty yet full, dependent yet complete; not “nothing,” but before the conditioned mind tells us what anything is.

The Heart Sutra is a pointing — not beliefs — pure reality.

Tonight is mostly about: Who is in the Heart Sutra? What is the title? And what are we entering into?

The full title is The Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra. Also Mahā Prajñā Pāramitā Hridaya Sutra. Mahā means great — boundless. Prajñā means wisdom before knowledge — clarity without identification. Pāramitā means “gone beyond.” Not to another place — the other shore was never separate. Heart means essence — shin, heart-mind. Sutra means thread — a weaving of form and formlessness.

Early translations called it a dharani — a mantra for practice — which is why it ends with a mantra.

It belongs to the Prajñāpāramitā literature — some texts 8,000, 25,000, even 100,000 lines. All circling the same truth: things are empty of inherent nature and interdependent.

Then something remarkable happened — the ocean of words condensed to a drop: this sutra. So short it fits in memory; so complete it carries the whole teaching.

Scholars note the oldest versions are Chinese, not Sanskrit — meaning it was likely compiled in China from longer texts. Unlike sutras that begin “Thus have I heard,” indicating direct Buddha speech, this one likely arose later — distilled from broader teachings — and preserved for its clarity.

Who wrote it? We do not know — and that reflects the Four Reliances: rely on Dharma, not the teacher; rely on meaning, not words; rely on truth, not convention; rely on direct wisdom, not second-hand knowledge. The Heart Sutra survives not because of who wrote it, but because it works. It dismantles what we cling to and leaves us face-to-face with what is.

Early Chan was shaped by two Mahayana streams: Madhyamika (radical emptiness — nothing has independent essence) and Yogācāra (mind-only — the world is inseparable from awareness). Zen inherits both: the cutting away of illusion and the direct presence of reality as awareness. When we chant the Heart Sutra we stand where two rivers become One River Zen.

In longer versions, the scene is Vulture Peak. The Buddha sits in deep samadhi. The great bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara abides in perfect wisdom. Śariputra — foremost in analytic wisdom — turns to the Buddha for guidance. The Buddha remains silent. Avalokiteśvara speaks instead. Wisdom addresses wisdom. Form speaks to form. Buddha’s silence is the stillness in which the sutra unfolds. From that silence comes the sound we chant — emptiness realizing itself.

Avalokiteśvara — the one who hears the cries of the world — is compassion. Not sentiment but compassion born of wisdom — when separation falls away, compassion is natural.

Śariputra represents the brilliant analytic mind — the mind that tries to understand. Avalokiteśvara represents direct seeing — compassion arising from wisdom.

This is the turning. The old way of knowing meets a new way of being. Wisdom calls to wisdom. Emptiness gives voice to itself.

Then the words that stop us cold: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. We will go deeper in weeks ahead. For now: this is not philosophy. It is a mirror. Let it in, and it unravels the idea of a separate self.

Mahayana expresses this as the Three Kāyas — Dharmakāya (reality: emptiness), Sambhogakāya (wisdom/compassion shining), Nirmāṇakāya (appearance in this world). The Heart Sutra moves in all three — not as separate realms but facets of one reality.

It ends in mantra: Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gone, gone, gone beyond, utterly gone beyond — awakening, so it is. Not a spell — a sigh of freedom. When we let go, we are free. That is liberation.

The Heart Sutra is not for study alone — but for practice. For chanting until words dissolve. For sitting until self and other blur. For living so fully that nothing stands apart. Meditation does not take you somewhere — it takes you nowhere. That is exactly where we want to be.

We do not chant to understand — we chant so the sutra can echo in the marrow, stripping away what we cling to:

Form is emptiness.
Emptiness is form.
Things as they are.
Nothing left to add.
Just this.