So far I’ve done the first four characters in the first line (the title) of the Heart Sutra in Chinese. The next four characters comprise the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit पारमिता (pāramitā), which is 波羅蜜多. Just to make sure we are all on the same page, here is the first line of the Heart Sutra in Chinese, with 波羅蜜多 highlighted in red:

摩      訶      般      若      波      羅      蜜      多      心      經
ma     ha     ban    ya      ba      ra      mil     ta    shim   gyong

The title of the Heart Sutra comes from the fact that it is considered to be the “heart” or the essence of a large collection of teachings known collectively as the Prajna Paramita Sutras (or if you prefer it all diacriticalized: Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras). Like prajna, paramita is a Sanskrit term that is probably best left untranslated. A commonly encountered English translation is “perfection”, but personally I prefer (if it really absolutely must be translated) “virtue”.

I’m going to break up 波羅蜜多 into two parts, and this post will be on the first two characters: 波羅.

波 (pinyin: bō) is the character used to transliterate the Sanskrit syllable पा (pā). The meaning of 波 is “wave” or “undulation”. So a “sound wave” in Chinese is 聲波 (聲 = shēng = “sound”). The character 波 has two pieces: 氵 + 皮. The first part, 氵, is actually the radical form for the character for water (which in it’s non-radical form is 水/shuǐ). The second part is the character 皮 (pí), which means “skin” or “surface”. So in this case the meanings of the two parts kind of make sense.

The character 羅 (luó) is used here to transliterate the Sanskrit syllable र (ra). The meaning of 羅 is “net” or “gauze”. This character has three parts: 罒 + 糹 + 隹. The first part, 罒, is the radical form of the character 网 (wǎng), which by itself means “net”. The second part, 糹, is the radical form of the character for “silk”: 糸 (mì). The third part, 隹 (zhuī) is the character for “small bird”. So together the parts means “a silk net for catching small birds”. The character 羅 is used in the Chinese transliterations for foreign words containing either “ro” or “lo” (with long o sound), such as 聖保羅 (São Paulo) and 羅馬尼亞 (Romania). Notice again the Chinese penchant for turning “ahs” into “ohs”, as mentioned previously in the post on Sutra Copying.

Next time we’ll look at 蜜多, the two characters making up the second half of 波羅蜜多.

Hey – can you guess how to write “big wave” in Chinese characters? It’s in the title to this video below: