OK, so far I have covered the first line of the Heart Sutra. Yay me!
Depending on how you count, we are now either going to start on the first or the second line of the Heart Sutra. If we count the title as the first line (which is what I’ve been doing), then here is the second line:
觀 自 在 菩 薩 行 深 般 若
kwan ja jae bo sal haeng shim ban ya
avalokiteshvavra bodhisattva practice deep prajna
The fist three characters, 觀自在 (guān-zì-zài), are highlighted in red. This is one of the names of Avalokiteshvara.
Now, everyone knows that the Chinese name for Avalokiteshvara is Kwan Yin, or Kwan Shi Yin. And all good Korean Buddhists know that the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese name for Avalokiteshvara is Kwan Seum (or, more completely, Kwan Seum Bosal). And all good Japanese Buddhists know Avalokiteshvara as Kannon or Kanzeon. So what’s this Guān-Zì-Zài (or in the Koreanized version, Kwan Ja Jae, or in the Japanese version Kan Ji Zai)?
It’s not completely clear (at least to me) where exactly this Chinese name for Avalokiteshvara comes from. But I’ll leave that discussion for another time. In the remainder of this post I’ll briefly take a close look at these three characters.
觀 means “perceive”. So far so good.
自 means “onself”. Hmmm. That’s interesting.
在 can mean “in”, or it can also mean “happening right now” (like the suffix -ing in English).
At least some Chinese Buddhists say that 自在 taken together means “freedom”. But another meaning for this two-character combination is “comfortable” or “at ease”.
So 觀自在 could mean “perceive oneself within”, or “perceive freedom”, or “perceive tranquility”. I even read somewhere online “see yourself clearly and be at ease”, or something like that.
The first character, 觀 (guān), is a fairly complex character deserving of a little further scrutiny. It has two parts: 雚 + 見. 雚 (guàn) is the character for “heron” or “stork”, while 見 (jiàn) is the character for “see” or “meet” (and it occurs once on it’s own in the Heart Sutra).
