Emptiness and the Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra is one of the most familiar of all Buddhist texts and, inevitably, there are innumerable takes on ‘what it means’. How do we square the opening statement that the skandhas (our psycho–physical constituents) are ‘empty’ with the following one that ‘in emptiness’ there are no skandhas, no senses, no conditioned–arising? Early western commentators saw the sutra as full of paradox – but what if it is not an attempt to bamboozle our minds, but a hands–on method of practice and realisation?

These are some of the questions that we’ll be exploring on this retreat. We’ll see how our belief in an intrinsic, substantial ‘me’, separate from the rest of the world, has no basis in actual experience and is the underlying cause of suffering. We’ll see how and why the wisdom of emptiness is, precisely, compassion. And we’ll approach emptiness not as a topic of ‘Buddhist philosophy’, but as a direct way of realising our deepest nature, from which we are never apart.