Heart Sutra Summary – What is the Heart Sutra about?

Foundational Philosophy

Heart Sutra belongs to the entry part of bodhisattva level. It’s the foundation to develop to the highest.

Buddhism is unlimited deep, describes unlimited meaning, function and essence of life. So the Heart Sutra makes it as short as possible to talk about that unlimited view of life.

Your Heart

The Heart Sutra talks about your heart. 

Heart is defined in Buddhism as awareness ability. We are being our heart. Buddhism concentrates to teach you what heart is.

If you can’t even control your own heart then what can you control? It talks about the heart’s relationship with illusion being and talks about how illusion being and your heart affect each other.

Your Heart’s Direction

It talks about which way we control our heart in the wrong direction. Or blindly follow our heart to create wrong karma or wrong effect which bring suffering to ourselves and others.

It also talks about the opposite way – to make our heart understand the whole system of life so we have no more feeling of fear, unsure, suffering and hopelessness.

It will change and become wise, sure, unlimited joy, unlimited compassion and wisdom to be open heart and have no fear. Ready to be aware every second for every situation and want to enjoy every challenge and develop awareness into the wisest way into most free unlimited potential to enjoy all this amazing illusion being for a meaningful purpose.

What is a Meaningful Purpose? 

Life should be sharing in a non-ego way. Sharing in a way you’re not lost by your own ego and lost by always concentrating on I and mine, start to concentrate to create good intention, not think about you but how to create joy for other life and discover wisdom for you and for every other life.

When you change your awareness power to this new direction then life becomes meaningful because you do not feel alone anymore. You feel united, you are aware every life is important and you feel life is that unlimited potential of feeling grateful because every life you help makes you feel great. That sharing and appreciation of good qualities is amazing.

If you can help unlimited life then that means the chance is there for your own appreciation and grateful feeling to be multiplied in unlimited ways.

Why multiplied? Because the sharing and appreciation is from both sides.

You appreciate the wisdom you develop and the other side appreciates to learn it. 

This is called heart-to-heart meditation, lifetime to lifetime, not from mind.

We pass through mind as a bridge so we eventually connect to our heart, make our heart use right wisdom.

What is wisdom? 

You always have a choice. Be a judge, not to blindly follow your feeling. 

Whatever you feel that is negative don’t follow.

When it is positive also you can follow but observe it first. That positive could have negative side-effect later so always observe. Observe negative or positive feeling. All could be blind but give yourself double-choice through the wisdom that Buddha teach.

The Buddha teach that crystal-clear wisdom from every angle to talk about what is life. That is your map.

That map you get from Buddha, from what he teaches, he explains: essence function and goal of life.

So you use it. If you don’t use the map its like you don’t have the map.

Use the map to create the second choice, which is to create wisdom naturally from your heart directly to be aware of this four eternal heart, spiritual unlimited intention. It’s not easy to be this wisdom. Easy to say, hard to do.

Four Eternal Hearts

1. It is easy to say Kind without ego, but truly ego is always there but kind, not much there.
2. Want to truly care for every life without personal or negative emotion, woah, most life only care mostly for their own ego I and my. Care for every life seems to never be there. What about without any negative or possessive or personal involved or blindness personal involved? That’s much harder.
3. Then want to enjoy life! Great, but what about no side effects? No blindness? That’s how hard because enjoy life we naturally want it but never have enough wisdom to calculate. Whatever we say is ‘enjoying life’ is tricky. Is it truly enjoy or is it pollution we get influenced by the way we grow up from society? Or by past lives already building blindness habit become our fear in this life. Fear doesn’t even now what we blindly fear. Or worry as a habit doesn’t even know what to worry about. All the worry itself is a black hole. First worry, then you worry you have worry.  Then you worry how to get rid of worry. Just lost deeper and deeper into that black hole. So if you don’t have wisdom to see through this habit you will never be able to be free from this suffering so forget about trying to practice joy!
4. What about free from all ego and greedy. From the beginning our heart always beginning with fear and ego and greedy and for billion lifetimes involved in that. But now you have a chance to develop eternal wisdom and you have a chance to clean out that billion lifetimes of blindness habit. Not easy. but its possible. and thats what Buddha teach.

All of this wisdom, once you absorb it clearly in your mind you have to practice to make it become from your heart.

Then spiritual reality start to appear.

Eternal Power

Still your life will have a lot of trouble but you can challenge it. You start to have a little smile like: “I know how to handle that trouble or …hmmm how am I going to enjoy and challenge that trouble with less stress and become wiser and not make the trouble become even bigger trouble?”

You start to have more wisdom and self-confidence. When that is rising up from heart to become a new nature and new habit and then your spiritual character and spiritual ability becomes eternal because that power is your own development. It’s through your own development, your own observation, through recalculating life and not blindly following your own feeling or other influence. Through understanding the whole life system recalculated carefully from the deepest of your own heart and the purest and crystal-clear power of your awareness ability it finally can form eternal power. No other pollution can destroy it.

Your Bridge

And that power Siddharta says is in every life. If you are willing to awaken it, willing to absorb the philosophy and let the philosophy be a key and let it open your eternal heart.

The Heart Sutra is a bridge to help you develop to this point.

From a talk given on the 13th of April, 2014.