My Heart Sutra by Frederik L. Schodt

Author:Frederik L. Schodt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press

Portion of Heart Sutra in rubbing of Da Tang Sanzang sheng jiao xu bei in Xi’an’s Beilin Stele Forest museum. Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

For Fukui, the existence of a contemporary inscription, and the existence of so many ancient references in China listing Xuanzang as the sutra’s “translator,” was proof of its authenticity. That Nattier was not convinced by this was simply too much. In his list of objections in his book, in (K), as he wrote (using an English word), it was “unfair.”92

To a layperson, scholars seem to have an infinite capacity for this type of argument, but to me, Fukui’s strong reactions to Nattier’s text go slightly beyond mere scholarly reservations. His criticism of Nattier’s work concluded with an exhortation to younger Japanese Buddhologists, encouraging them to do what ought to have been obvious, namely, to study more “Sinology,” especially classical Chinese language and culture and, as Japanese, to utilize their inherent strengths in Chinese characters. In what seems a bit of a nationalistic critique, he indirectly criticized North Americans and Europeans for putting too much emphasis on the study of Central Asian languages and criticized scholars who rush to study Sanskrit and Tibetan because, he says, there are far more important and accurate documents in Chinese. In between the lines, it is hard not to sense that Fukui, as a renowned scholar of a conservative older generation, in a field where most researchers have been overwhelmingly male, may not have been entirely comfortable with a paper in his field by not only a foreigner, but a scholar of another gender.

Lastly, perhaps because Fukui’s main language is not English, he seems to occasionally confuse and conflate Nattier’s use of the concepts “apocryphal” and “back-translation” with forgery. In her original essay, these are two separate arguments that Nattier makes about the Xuanzang Heart Sutra—(1) that it may have originated in China and (2) while acknowledging that she is going out on a limb a bit, speculating that it may even have been back-translated into Sanskrit in India by Xuanzang himself. Nattier only uses the word “forger” once in her seventy-two-page document, somewhat lightheartedly, in the sentence “If the image of Hsüan-tsang as a forger of an Indian Buddhist text seems amusing (or perhaps, to other readers, alarming), it is because it is so contrary to what the standard histories of Buddhism would lead us to expect.”93 Yet this concept of “forgery,” which is very different from “apocryphal,” was seized on in Fukui’s writing and in Japan in general. No coincidence perhaps, but Fukui’s section on Nattier in his book is titled (in his own translation) as “Jan Nattier’s New Thesis: The Forged Heart Sutra in China.”94

Criticism of Nattier soon appeared in other academic papers in Japan, usually by researchers with a religious affiliation (many Japanese private universities are run by religious groups). At the end of 2002, a paper on Japanese translations of the Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra was published in the journal Mikkyō bunka (Esoteric Buddhist culture).

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