Heart Sutra

The Heart Sūtra (Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya) is a famous sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its Sanskrit title, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, literally means "The Heart of the Perfection of Understanding".

The Heart Sūtra is often cited as the best-known and most popular Buddhist scripture of all. The text is very short, and it is generally believed to be Buddhist apocrypha written in China using excerpts of a translation of the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra; see Nattier hypothesis below.

The Heart Sūtra, belonging to the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) category of Mahāyāna Buddhism literature along with the Diamond Sutra, is perhaps the most prominent representative of the genre.

The long version of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a prose text of some 280 words. In the Chinese version of the short text attributed to Xuanzang (T251), it has 260 Chinese characters. In English it is composed of sixteen sentences. This makes it one of the shortest texts in the Perfection of Wisdom genre, which contains scriptures in lengths up to 100,000 lines. "The Essence of Wisdom Sutra (Heart Sūtra) is much shorter than the other Perfection of Wisdom sūtras but it contains explicitly or implicitly the entire meaning of the longer Sutras."

This sutra is classified by Edward Conze as belonging to the third of four periods in the development of the Prajnaparamita canon, although because it contains a mantra (sometimes called a dhāraṇī), it does overlap with the final, tantric phase of development according to this scheme, and is included in the tantra section of at least some editions of the Kangyur. Conze estimates the sutra's date of origin to be 350 CE; some others consider it to be two centuries older than that. Recent scholarship is unable to verify its existence before any date earlier than the 7th century CE.

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