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Summary: Zen Master Hakuin's commentary on the Heart Sutra
Review: The page-long Heart Sutra is one of the most popular Buddhist texts and is chanted every day in Zen monasteries. This small book is a commentary on the Heart Sutra by the Japanese Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768). Hakuin goes through the Heart Sutra a word or phrase or line at a time, commenting usually with a paragraph of prose followed by a verse. Translator Norman Waddell adds helpful notes about the Buddhist doctrines, Chinese folktales, and so forth, that Hakuin refers to. And the book is illustrated with Hakuin's own calligraphy and paintings.Hakuin writes in the incisive, poetic, paradoxical style that I think of as "Zen-speak" when it gets imitated poorly, but this is the real thing. Hakuin's writing is lively, funny, often sarcastic or scatalogical. Here are a couple of bits that I especially liked, to give you a sense of Hakuin's style: Commenting on the line "Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form," Hakuin says, "A nice hot kettle of stew. He ruins it by dropping a couple of rat turds in. It's no good pushing delicacies at a man with a full belly. Striking aside waves to look for water when the waves _are_ water." Commenting on the phrase "is delivered from all distress and suffering," Hakuin offers this verse: "The ogre outside shoves the door, / The ogre inside holds it fast. / Dripping sweat from head to tail / Battling for their very lives, / They keep it up throughout the night / Until at last when the dawn appears / Their laughter fills the early light-- / They were friends from the first." (If you'd prefer a commentary in a more ordinary, explanatory style, try Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Heart of Understanding" or Albert Low's "Zen and the Sutras," which includes a chapter on the Heart Sutra. Donald Lopez's "The Heart Sutra Explained" is a dense, scholarly examination of seven Indian commentaries and two Tibetan commentaries on the Heart Sutra.)
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