Borges' Library

The Heart Sutra Notes

 

 

This year, I discovered the Heart Sutra at long last--in Japan, our family was part of Pure Land Tradition, so the Heart Sutra was was never on my radar. I was very moved to read about it. My essay on Xuanzang in Kyoto Journal was shared here at 3 Quarks Daily.

And my book review of Alex Kerr and Frederik Schodt's beautiful memoirs on the Heart Sutra are here:  Download Heart Sutra reviews.  

Just prior to this --during the early days of the pandemic, I worked on an essay for Kyoto Journal about the Chinese monk and translator extraordinaire, Xuanzang.  It has been a very long time since I've thought about the Heart Sutra. And, I was really interested to discover that Thich Nhat Hanh, in order to promote a better understanding of the Sutra in the West, created a new English translation. He wanted to ensure that no one would ever again misunderstand the sutra in terms of the English word emptiness. For the “zero” or “emptiness” of sunyata is not a nihilistic teaching, he says.

He also has put out a new title: The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore.

We are all drowning in an ocean of samsara—of ego, of mis-understandings and mis-translations. If we commit to the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, "The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom," we can use this teaching as a lifeboat-or as Augustine said of Beauty, as “a plank amid the waves of the sea” to paddle toward the Other Shore of Nirvana.

I also had fun reading and comparing Red Pines version of Xuanzang's Heart Translation versus Karl Brunnholzl's translation and commentary on the Tibetan version in his cleverly titled, The Heart Attack Sutra.  

Hands-down the best book on the Sutra that I have seen or read is, The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism
by Kazuaki Tanahashi, Roshi Joan Halifax

Finally, I had fun buying some calligraphy books. I have not studied Japanese calligraphy since I was living in Tokyo in my twenties. And I have never practiced sutra copying. But this seemed like a really good time to give it a try. 

2) David Hinton's book, Existence; A Story was also a pleasure. This was my second book by him. I remain a fan! 

3) About the hero, Xuanzang, I re-read Richard Bernstein's Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment, which I disliked this time as much as I had the first time I read it ten years ago when we were working on the Silk Road special issue of Kyoto Journal. Ugh!! 

After the Bernstein debacle, I was delighted to discover that Mishi Saran had written her own book to trace the travels of the great Chinese translator and monk Xuanzang. This book was everything Bernstein's was not. She is fluent in the language and very respectful of the people she encounters along the way. A good sport and a free spirit, she leaves her life in Hong Kong and travels overland from Xian to India along the Silk Road. The book was published by Penguin India. Books from India always have a familar smell that I can't put my finger on but I like. It might remind me of books from my childhood--the paper and the fonts? Also hand sewn. So, my reading was really enjoyable on multiple levels. The maps were good and the storytelling fun and positive. Not to be missed!

If you are interested in the monk, don't miss Sally Hovey Wriggins very engaging and erudite book, The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang. Her treatment of the religions and translation issues is superb. She also is better on the influence of the heart sutra and the journey of the monk. Hers is the gold standard!

How about novels based on the Journey to the West, like Mark Salzman's The Laughing Sutra and Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey? 

Lauren reminded me of this one: Mother of the Buddhas: Meditations on the Prajnaparamita Sutra

Faye Wong Heart Sutra

Gary Snyder chants the Heart Sutra

Guitar Heart Sutra/Kanho Yakushiji Kissaquo

Picture of Great Goose Pagoda below by the Great Ted Taylor

Library of Exile --Venice

Venice is so full of surprises. We were there during the Biennale, but had no plans to visit any of the exhibitions. We were there for Titian, after all. So, I had no idea that Edmund de Waal had been invited. We stumbled on his exhibit, sharing campo space with the La Fenice. I am a huge fan--I have longed to see his pottery in person. And there it was, just through that door. 

Words by de Waal.

I have made a library. During the Biennale it will be housed in the Ateneo, the beautiful 16th-century building near the Fenice opera house which has acted as a meeting place for two centuries. I’m taking over the Aula Magna room on the ground floor. Working here in Venice I realised that this whole project was a reflection on the power of translation. That the ghetto was a place of voices, of language in flux and that this was, in itself, a manifestation of Venice as the powerhouse of printing in Renaissance Europe. This was the city where Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp, created the great edition of the Bablyonian Talmud in 1520-23. He worked with Jewish scholars and copyists to make books that hold the Hebrew text, an Aramaic translation and commentary within a single page. These beautiful books were ordered by distant Jewish communities from Aleppo to Frankfurt.

 

So this is a new library of exile, a place that contains 2,000 books written by those who have been forced to leave their own country, or exiled within it. This is a history from Ovid and Tacitus, through Dante to Voltaire and Victor Hugo. It is the history of the 20th century, the century of Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth, of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. It is dissidents. It is poets and novelists forced from their homes, Ai Qing in China and Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, Ismael Kadare in Albania. I think of the recent decades of extraordinary writers from Lebanon and Syria, the literature of exile of Iran, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey.

 

The external wall of the library is covered in porcelain, painted in liquid form over sheets of gold on which I have written a new text, a listing of the lost and erased libraries of the world, from Nineveh and Alexandria to the recent destruction of Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Inside this library is a quartet of new vitrines whose structure echoes Bomberg’s great Talmudic page.

This new library will be open for all readers from early May. There are books in 32 languages. There will be readings and conversations about literature, about history and translation, a new dance work, storytelling for children, and music. It will celebrate the idea that all languages are diasporic, that we need other people’s words, self-definitions and re-definitions in translation.

 

It honours the words of André Aciman, himself an exile from Alexandria, that he understands himself “not as a person from a place, but as a person from a place across from that place. You are – and always are – from somewhere else.”

 

Everything is plural here, one history reaching out to another, a palimpsest of voices. And this is where this project finds its core. I thought of how the psalms work as songs of exile from the city, the ever-present absence of Jerusalem. Of how much the psalms work as songs that move between the singular and the plural, the solitary voice and the tribal, anger and despair, lament and joy. And how the psalms are cornerstones of all three Abrahamic traditions.

This place is embedded in metaphor. It is on the edge of the world, it is a place of concentration, a place of powerlessness.

There is another history, other metaphors. Sitting here I think of the great sweep of languages of this place, the mingling of high and low argot and slang, of the dialects and cultures of the German, Flemish, Persian, Ottoman, Spanish and Portuguese Jews alongside Italians, an almost unimaginable array of clothing, food and music. It was a place of constant translation, a testing ground for comprehension and nuance. It was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music, liturgy and exegesis, with Hebrew as the only common denominator. I think of the great 17th-century Rabbi Leon da Modena, who wrote in his autobiography that he had practised 26 professions in his life, from teacher to cantor to judge, to composing poetry for gravestones, translating, printing and arranging marriages.

The place was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music … Hebrew the only common denominator

 

 

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A Broken World: Japan's Triple Disaster NOTES

To Read:

Hojoki, by Kamo-no-Chomei, translated by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins

(Also, about Hojoki: William LaFleur's Karma of Words)

Alison Watts' beautifully written essay in Words Without Boarders:
Literary Journeys: Living Through Art in the Wake of Disaster 

Ghosts of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Parry:

It's easy to send thoughts and prayers and move on if you're not among those whose lives were altered by the storms. But natural disasters continue to destroy lives long after the damage is done. In his new book Ghosts of the Tsunami, author Richard Lloyd Parry considers the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami, which took thousands of lives, and which haunts its survivors to this day. It's a wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible.

He takes his readers deep into Tohoku, "a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory." Many in the region practice ancestor worship, treating the dead and the objects that represent them with veneration; the tsunami destroyed their altars and photographs, leaving families spiritually battered and doing "appalling violence to the religion of ancestors,"

Parry writes."A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes," he writes. "And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy and fell out of love."

(NPR Review)

March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown 
by Elmer Luke (Editor), David Karashima (Editor) And Yoko Tawada's Emissary (?)

Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima
by Hideo Furukawa, Doug Slaymaker

Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan's Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
by Lucy Birmingham (Goodreads Author), David McNeill

Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
by Gretel Ehrlich

Station Blackout, by Charles Castro

Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
by David Lochbaum and Union of Concerned Scientists

Also:

Adam Higginbotham's dazzling Midnight in Chernobyl

Eric Schlosser's (it will keep you up at night) Command and Control

Want to read:

James Mahaffey's Atomic Accidents

Brian P Hanley Radiation--Exposure and its Treatment

On the Brink: The Inside Story of Fukushima Daiichi 
by Ryusho Kadota (MOVIE coming out Fukushima 50)

Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge: Two Novellas of Japan's 3/11 Disaster
by Yusuke Kimura 

And don't forget: 

George Monbiot's Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan Times article: Culture of safety can make or break nuclear power plants
BY AIRI RYU AND NAJMEDIN MESHKATI

To See:

The Atlantic: Great East Japan Earthquake in pictures

 

To Watch:

Fukushima: A Nuclear Story

Frontline: Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdowns

Footage of Sendai Airport During Earthquake and Tsunami

HBO Chernobyl

 

To Think About:

Lucy Jones at Caltech has repeatedly warned us to prepare for the big one in California. She thinks, and I agree, that our connections and ability to work with our neighbors is one of the single highest determiners of survival. The Japanese worked together in a way unthinkable in Los Angeles. She has been urging people to form neighborhood preparedness groups. My friend Beatrice told me about this. She is a leader for such a group in Santa Monica.  

 

Animals

 Ostrich Defies Containment: A selection from thirty-three ostrich cadenzas by John Gohorry in Kyoto Journal

Science Alert: Animals are Flourishing in Fukushima Exclusion Zone

Fukushima Pictures in the Guardian

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Vodka