Musings on Two Old Favorites

One unique thing about Buddhism is that there is no single scripture that encapsulates all the teachings and that everyone follows. Coming from a cultural background informed by the Abrahamic faiths, I find this very interesting and a bit challenging. It's quite easy for Christians to bust out a Bible or Muslims to whip out the Quran but what's a Buddhist to do? Carrying around the entire Canon of Buddhist scriptures is a tad impractical (although not impossible now with the right files loaded into a PDA or iPhone).

Despite the massive amount of teachings, there are quite a few "all time favorites" that are easily picked out. For me, two such texts are 'The Dhammapada' and 'The Heart Sutra'.

Some might yawn at these choices since they have (thankfully!) became VERY popular and well known in modern times. It's not a stretch to say that the Dhammapada and the Heart Sutra are the two most popular Buddhist scriptures period.

My connection with the Dhammapada is a special one: it was the first actual Buddhist scripture I ever read. I've encountered many, many translations of this text, some good, some not so good, but my favorite one is the Gil Fronsdal version. Fronsdal's rendering perfectly balances elegant poetic expressions with precise, penetrating insight.

The full translation by of Fronsdal's Dhammapada is available from Audio Dharma.

The Heart Sutra is particularly popular not only for the depth of it's meaning but also for it's brevity. This makes it a staple of nearly every Mahayana ceremony/event/practice. The sutra is popular in many languages such as the original Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tibetan. Translating these translations into English leaves us with nearly as many English versions as there grains of sand in the Ganges river.

My favorite examination of the sutra is Bill Porter's (Red Pine) "The Heart Sutra: The Womb of Buddhas". His commentary is short yet profound, just like the sutra itself.

As far as actual translations go, I really like the one from the Buddhist Text Translation Society but it's not my favorite. My favorite Heart Sutra translation is from the Order of Interbeing, a branch of the Vietnamese Zen tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Plum Village Foundation Hong Kong has a link to their version (rendered as The Heart of Perfect Understanding) as well as the audio of it being chanted in English. And I must say, it sounds absolutely amazing!