If no one listens to it, the sutra goes alone. Even if someone is not interested in knowing the truth, and even if they do not know what is truth, where is truth, how truth is, truth is always with them, even when they do not pay any attention to it. This sutra is the sound of truth, so unless you are ready to listen to it, the sutra is not understood.
The voice is very important when we chant because the sound of our voice is the sound of our mind. So when you hear the voice of sutra chanting, you understand what kind of mind makes this sound. The important thing is that chanting is not for showing it to others, it is just the doing and expressing of your momentary life. Each word basically has no meaning but what is expressed is your whole life in each word and sound. Sutra chanting is the full expression of samadhi - the samadhi of sutra chanting!
Many times, instead of making various sounds, you make just one sound, and lengthen it for a couple of minutes. It goes high and low, strong and weak. You are familiar with the practice of repeating a mantram, one form of sutra. The word, the sound, “mu,” has the same nature as a mantram. And our breath, the sound of breathing which you hear sometimes, is also a sutra. Then there is the soundless sound of all existence, completely telling us what truth is.
In the Maha Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, hridya is “shingyo” in Japanese. “Shin” means “mind, heart, essence, soul.”
When we chant the sutra, we make a voice from everywhere, from the very center of our body it appears. No one needs to hear our chanting. It is like the wind, everywhere. The very important thing is to listen to it without clinging to the words. Its original message is beyond sound. When we chant, we make the sutra alive, make all the words alive. It is like comparing a scenario with the actual drama, a musical note with the actual performance. We try to play music depending on the notes, to perform a drama depending on the scenario, to cook food depending on the recipe. These are efforts to approach the original form, where the original experience exists. To share this original experience of pleasure, or joy, is the purpose.
We often try to understand what is the meaning of the sutra, what the sutra is teaching us, to interpret what the sound means, how the sounds are asking us to understand their meaning. When we study the sutra we very often forget the space which holds the characters, so naturally, in communicating with each word, we completely lose ourselves in each character of the sutra and the sutra becomes a dictionary.
Instead, we can see the space between the characters as an opportunity to complete the situation. So when I begin to chant this sutra, the air and each of you are part of that space. And then you begin to chant. A little sound becomes a very big sound. It’s like thunder! We don’t know how many beings have understood this sutra, because it has a very strange, difficult arrangement of words. Naturally, at first, our intellect sticks to the strangeness, but after one thousand times of chanting, the natural habit of trying to understand words disappears or goes to sleep. Each word of the sutra is ordinary, but the order and the musical arrangement of the words have become very well polished by many voices. Thus each of your voices becomes a very, very important element of the sutra. Each person becomes a very fine musical instrument. No effort is needed. Maybe the key to understanding this is to think about when you have a bad stomach ache, you might begin to moan. You do not make an effort to make a nice moan! It just happens. So when I hear good chanting, I forget the man who is chanting, because sounds appear from everywhere. One monk from Japan chanted very well. When he stood up his voice came from his mouth, but I felt his voice came from his toe!
This is a sutra of joy! When people are very joyful, their joy has sound. It’s in the way words of this sutra appear for a dying person’s family; for relatives and friends these words appear as the words of a will. Even if you chant this sutra in a funeral ceremony, there is very peaceful satisfaction, even after the person’s death. It is in the sound. Waves of the ocean have sound, storm-like sound, and also calm waves have sound, too. When you pay deep attention, sunshine has sound, moonlight has sound. The emphasis in this sutra is naturally on the sound of words. So for us what is important is to feel that the words of this sutra were given only for us. If I breathe, this sutra is for me. How we inhale it and exhale it is very important. When you chant the sutra alone, it is important where your voice comes from.
The Hridaya is part of the Maha Prajna Paramita Sutra, which is six hundred volumes! When you go to a Japanese temple there are big boxes right behind Buddha’s shrine. Every New Year, all the monks in the temple come to the main hall and let this sutra appear in the air. They open it. They just flip the pages… It smells like a very old library. It was my job to set out the boxes and as I went through the 600 volumes, checking the order, I would see the same character, in the next volume, and the next volume, and when I looked at the meaning, it would be explained in a different way in each volume. It was like the tide of the ocean, the same kind of question, over and over, just like in daily life. So these 600 volumes are expressing our daily life, still going on and on.
There are many sutras, but this Hridaya has probably been chanted most often. Through the ages there have been various translations and when each translation appears, there appears the original sutra! There is a story about a Chinese man who translated this sutra in the middle of a battle! So when a living man, a soldier, began to tell that there was something in this hard, terrible life, something beneath it, he began to relate to this sutra. And maybe in translating this sutra, he began to feel the living sutra in his life. The sutra was later found in the early 19th Century, in the cave along the Silk Road, called Tun-huang.