Press 600 volumes into 260 words
What did the < Heart Sutra > lose?
Six hundred volumes
How much is it?
Xuanzang spent about three years translating the Great Prajna Sutra.
The Chinese translation of this sutra
More than five million words
That's about five times the size of Dream of the Red Chamber.
And then...
Someone from these five million words
Two hundred and sixty words
It's called the Heart Sutra.
compression ratio
About 20,000 to one
The intuition in your head right now
Maybe something like this.
The Great Prajna Sutra must be filled with countless different kinds of wisdom
After all, there are so many volumes
The Heart Sutra must have retained only one ten-thousandth of the essence
Let me tell you a fact that will surprise a lot of people
In the 600 volumes of the Great Prajna Sutra
The content of the first five sessions
It's the same story.
The core teachings are exactly the same
It's just that the wording and expression are different.
And there's a word in Buddhism for this.
synonymous
different languages
The translation is: in 600 volumes
There is a considerable part
Is saying the same thing in different words
This is not a mistake.
This is the design.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
Today's issue
We speak of the Great Prajna Sutra.
Tell me what the raw material was before it was compressed into the < Heart Sutra >
But more importantly
We're going to ask a question: Press 600 volumes into 260 words.
Something is missing.
If you have read our previous < Heart Sutra >
You already know
The structural core of the Heart Sutra is Prajnaparamita
Rather than being empty as we usually think
Today we go upstream
Let's see what those 600 volumes are
And that compressed motion.
What does it mean?
Background first
The Great Prajna Sutra is not a single classic
It's a classic collection.
Xuanzang translated this group of classics into Chinese
Divided into sixteen sessions
Four locations
Records of the Sixteen Fa Meetings
Put it together.
That's 600 volumes.
This collection includes the < Diamond Sutra > you are familiar with.
The full name of the Diamond Sutra
It is called Able to Break the Vajra Prajna Paramita Sutra
It is the ninth meeting of the Great Prajna Sutra
That is, a component of this collection
The same prajna doctrine
There's 600 volumes in full unfolding.
There are about 5,000 words of the < Diamond Sutra >.
At the end, there was only 260 words of the Heart Sutra.
There are three scales.
Getting leaner
In these sixteen sessions
The first five sessions are all about the same set of prajna teachings
The further back, the simpler.
First, there will be 400 volumes.
And they get shorter and shorter.
You can think of it as a ridiculously thick lecture transcript
Same class.
The teacher told the different students over and over again
The words are not exactly the same every time
The audience is different every time.
But the core content
It's the same set.
So this creates a problem.
Why repeat?
This is a very central concept in Buddhism.
Convenience
Convenient in modern Chinese
It's what we mean every day
But in Buddhism
It's completely different.
convenient
It is an accurate adaptation to the specific situation
How, to whom, and at what time to say what
Let the other party really receive that wisdom
It's called convenience
Buddhism has a saying
It's called 84,000 Dharmas.
Not that there are 84,000 kinds of wisdom.
It is a path to the same wisdom.
There are 84,000.
Each one is designed for a different type of heart
Massive repetition of the Great Prajna Sutra
It is the concrete implementation of this logic
It is also the central insight that all laws are empty
For a person who is obsessed with material things
To cut in from the impermanence of everyday life
For someone obsessed with logical deduction
In terms of causal analysis
For someone who already has a good foundation in practice
You can talk about emptiness directly
Don't beat around the bush
Same content.
different objects
Different packaging
Different entrance
Have you ever experienced this kind of thing: the same principle
You used to listen to it a hundred times without feeling anything
But on a certain day, in a particular situation
Someone uses a phrase you've never heard before
Suddenly it works.
That is convenience.
No, that's changed.
Is that expression
Exactly aligned with your current state
The 600 volumes of the Great Prajna Sutra
It's for countless different states
Be prepared for countless different alignment methods
Six hundred volumes
It is to take care of 600 different hearts
OK
Now let's introduce a modern perspective
Because it makes the whole thing really clear.
In the field of artificial intelligence
There is a concept called knowledge distillation
You have a huge model.
It's often called the teacher model.
It has hundreds of billions of parameters.
Extremely capable
But it's very expensive to run.
Then you train a much smaller model
It's called the student model.
Student models are not learned directly from original data sources
They learn from the teacher model.
It looks at how the teacher model processes various inputs.
Imitate its output law
Distillate the wisdom of teachers into their own more compact parameter spaces
Good knowledge distillation
Let the students model even though the parameters are only one percent of the teacher's
But achieve more than 90% of the teacher's performance on core tasks
What have you found now?
The Great Prajna Sutra is a teacher model.
The Heart Sutra is a student model
The reason why the < Great Prajna Sutra > is repeated
Precisely because it is a teacher with an infinite number of different inputs
It needs to be expressed in a different way
Demonstrate the same core wisdom to different types of learners
And what the Heart Sutra does
Did you compress the < Great Prajna Sutra > file?
It's about taking that core wisdom from all of those layers of expression and pedagogical adaptation.
Stripped out
Distilled into pure essence that is irrelevant to specific audiences
I talked about the Dharani issue before
I've used the Compression is Smart framework.
It was about compression of sound sequences.
Today it's more accurately referred to as knowledge distillation.
Not file compression
There's a fundamental difference between these two things.
The logic of file compression is to keep the original information intact
Just store it in a more economical encoding
Open compressed package
The original information is still there verbatim
The logic of knowledge distillation is completely different
The concrete expression of the teacher model is discarded
What remains is a deeper intellectual structure
Student models can do what teachers do
But it's not a scaled-down version of the teacher.
It is the distillation of all the teacher's knowledge and experience after digestion
This means one thing: you have no way to get from
The < Great Prajna Sutra > is restored from the < Heart Sutra >
There are a lot of specific teaching situations in those 600 volumes
Convenient methods for different root implants
The gradual process of understanding in dialogue
It was consciously removed.
left behind
Is the shape of core intelligence
Rather than the full development of the core wisdom
This is what the Heart Sutra has lost.
I've divided it into three layers.
first floor
Lost context
In the Great Prajna Sutra
Every teaching has a clear context
When did you say that?
To whom?
So what happened?
These situations are not decoration.
They are the conditions for intelligence to land
Same sentence
Speak to different people at different times
The meanings are completely different.
Color is emptiness
For someone who has just lost a loved one
And for someone who is planning to start a business
What it can do
different
The < Heart Sutra > abstracts all the situations
Only the conclusion remains
second floor
Lost the process
There's a lot of dialogue in the Prajna Sutra.
Disciple questions
Bodhisattva responds
layer by layer
The process of dialogue is itself training
It doesn't just show the conclusion
It's about how to think about the full path to that conclusion.
How to get from a wrong understanding
Step by step, they are pointed in the right direction
This path is visible in the Great Prajna Sutra
The Heart Sutra only gave the destination
No map
Third floor
Lost convenience
The Great Prajna Sutra is full of precise adaptations to specific situations
Talk empty to those who cling to some
Don't be empty to those who are obsessed with emptiness
Speak the easy way to those who are afraid that it is difficult to practice
These are convenient
It is part of a complete education system
< Heart Sutra > Remove all these
Only the core structure behind all the convenient methods is retained
Now here's a historical detail that I find very interesting.
And this detail has been controversial in the academic community
The Origin of the Heart Sutra
Some Western Buddhist researchers have put forward a subversive view
American scholar Nantir published an influential paper in 1992
Propose: The most widely circulated Xuanzang version of the < Heart Sutra >
Most likely not translated from Sanskrit
It was written in China itself.
The evidence she provided was: the core passage of the Heart Sutra
It matches the earlier Chinese translation of Kumarashi
But it is different from the original Sanskrit script
This makes no sense in translation logic.
Because if it's translated from Sanskrit
It should be closer to Sanskrit
go one step further
She speculated
This editor
It was probably Xuanzang himself
If this statement is correct
And what does that mean?
Means the person who compressed the 600 volumes into 260 words
The person who translated these 600 volumes
Xuanzang spent about three years translating the Great Prajna Sutra.
Then use his thorough understanding of this set of classics
I wrote a refined version of myself
That's the Heart Sutra we recited today.
It's no longer about translation.
It's after the student digests the teacher completely
Write a summary of your own
Is this statement accurate?
The academic controversy continues
Japanese and some Chinese scholars hold different opinions
I'm not saying it's true.
But the controversy itself is revealing.
It reminds us that even the most classic Buddhist texts
Its formation process may also be more creative than we imagine
More people's hands are inside
OK
Speaking of which
I'd like to ask a question.
Why do so many people recite the Heart Sutra every day?
But very few people really understand it
Have you ever seen this happen?
A person memorized the < Heart Sutra > thoroughly
But when he really encountered the hardships in his life
He had no idea about the 260 words or the incident in front of him.
What does it matter?
Carry on the back
It just becomes a pure sound.
There is no meaning to land
I think
This is precisely because of the < Heart Sutra >
Is a student model with no training data attached
When you open a knowledge distilled artificial intelligence model
You can talk to it.
It can give you useful answers
But if you want to know why it thinks that way
What is its internal logic?
You need to see how its teacher model deals with these issues
The Heart Sutra is the student model.
You recite it, recite it
Has its specific effect
But if you really want to understand what it's saying
You need its training data.
That is, the Great Prajna Sutra.
Those specific situations
Those gradual conversations
Those convenient methods for different root organs
This might explain one thing
Practitioners in history who have a truly deep understanding of the Heart Sutra
Almost without exception
They all reached that understanding after studying a large number of prajna classics
They didn't just recite 260 words
I was trying to fit the background of 600 volumes into my head.
Then when they read another 260 words
Behind every word stands those six hundred volumes
In other words, the Heart Sutra presupposes that it can be understood
Is that you already know what it leaves out
Stop this sentence
It's worth remembering.
Speaking of which
And I wanted to take that insight and push it in a broader context.
Perhaps we are facing
It is not just the relationship between < Great Prajna Sutra > and < Heart Sutra >
It is the relationship between all the classics and all the aphorisms
Every motto passed down through the ages
There is a 600-volume volume hidden behind it
There are 5,000 words of the Tao Te Ching behind inaction and inaction
Behind the 5,000 words are the observations of Lao Tzu's life
Behind the unity of knowledge and action are all the works of Mr. Yangming
Behind those works, he was demoted to the dragon field and attacked again and again
The true journey of finding again and again
We're looking at the last 260 words.
But behind those 260 words stood a whole person.
And all his encounters
The way we acquire knowledge today
It's more and more like reading the Heart Sutra in bulk
Fewer and fewer people are reading those 600 volumes
The density of information is increasing.
But that highly condensed information
It's a lot of context, a lot of convenience.
A lot of distilled dialogue.
Without the original context
The extract itself is suspended in the air.
good looking
But can't land
I'm not saying we're all going to read 600 volumes.
I mean...
When you hold a highly compressed intelligence in your hand
You know, it's compressed.
You need to know what's behind it
Know what you don't know
Intelligence itself
Which leads me to leave you with a question.
Is there a time in your life when
You think you understand something
The result is in a specific situation
You just found out
You just memorized the Heart Sutra
But you don't know how to use it.
That gap
That's the distance between 600 volumes and 260 words.
It's not your problem.
It's the price of compression.
There's only one way to land it
It is to put the specific life situation
Pick it up again
Have you had that experience?
Is there something you always thought you knew?
The result is that one day
At a specific moment
You really understand
The understanding before and the understanding after
Through what?
Welcome to let me know in the comment area.
I'm curious about your stories.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.