Nor is there pain or cause of pain
or cease in pain or
noble path to lead from pain,
not even wisdom to attain,
attainment too is emptiness.
As Red Pine points out in his superb translation and commentary on The Heart Sutra, these lines were penned to directly refute the Four Noble Truths. The author, he speculates, was probably a monk of the Sarvastividian order, the forerunner of the Mahayana.
It requires sakkaya ditthi, the wrong view of self, to own pain. To believe that pain has a cause and can end implies that pain has entered into the life of a self. To believe that Buddhism provides a path that leads from pain is a mortal thought, i.e., pure sakkaya ditthi. To think that wisdom can be attained creates a separation that was never there.
If there are no two things, there can’t be attainment on one hand and non-attainment on the other. Samsara and nirvana cannot be divided into two things. Therefore, there can be no path that leads from samsara to nirvana.
When we sit, we are not following a path that leads from pain so that we can put an end to pain. We just sit, and drop everything. We drop philosophy and we drop belief systems, including Buddhism. That is how we drop the self on the one hand and the outer world on the other.
The Buddha taught no-self because the Brahmans of his day were teaching that there was a mighty god out there somewhere whom they called the atman. The atman was eternal and unchangeable and the goal of meditation was to merge with that atman. The Buddha merely pointed out that nothing is eternal, permanent, and unchangeable. So he said that we people, just like the imaginary atman, also lack permanence and are subject to change. “No-self” just means that no one has a permanent, unchanging self. Nothing can be found that is a permanent, unchanging self.
The concept of no-self doesn’t mean that we have no eyes, no ears, no tongue, body, mind. It means that those things are not us. Nothing that can be defined is us. To believe otherwise, as all of us do, is sakkaya ditthi. So we sit. But we sit not to escape from pain or to attain wisdom. We drop the idea that we are practicing Zen. We drop everything! That is the message of The Heart Sutra – drop The Four Noble Truths, drop the eightfold path, drop all learning. Just practice, just cultivate, and do so free of belief systems. That’s Zen.
