One of Michael’s more listened-to series of dharma talks is on the Heart Sutra. These six talks were recorded during his 12-day intensive at Centre of Gravity in 2012. Over the span of six months, we’ll be transcribing, editing, and designing these talks into booklets for you, our Patreon community. Afterward, we’ll combine the six “chapters” into one book—a sort of study guide on the Heart Sutra.
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In the first chapter, titled Heart Sutra: Seeing the Background, Michael talks about the beginner’s mind, knowing as renunciation, and Hakuin’s commentary, “It’s like beads rolling on a tray: sudden, ready, uninhibited.”
Here is an excerpt:
“So, welcome to Toronto for those of you who are not residents and also welcome to Toronto for those of you who are residents. Like Mina was saying, we’re going to have a different perspective on the city. The city is a fabulous place to practice. If you want to study interdependence, a city is a great place to practice.
The text that we’re going to look at is called the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. In the Buddhist tradition, this is the most chanted text on earth. Probably any hour of the day somewhere in the world, there is a group of people chanting the Heart Sutra. For me, personally, the Heart Sutra is mixed up with a time in my life when I was unemployed. I had a lot of time on my hands to practice. I was quite down at the time and I used to walk a lot, and I’d memorized the Heart Sutra, which I actually don’t have memorized anymore. It comes and goes, but I had it memorized and I was just chanting all the time.
So, sometimes when I hear the chant of the Heart Sutra, way, way back, I still am aware of those times. Does anybody have that? It’s like you hear a pop song or something and you’re back in your first relationship? So, whenever I chant it, I feel these waves of something I don’t totally understand—and chanting is like that. You chant it and some days you’re really seeing the meaning of it, and some days you chant and it’s just mechanical, and some days, you chant and the meaning percolates through [like] some deep feeling that’s hard to name. So, I thought what we would spend our time on today is just the title, in keeping with our tradition of going extremely slowly through texts and not finishing them.”
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