Relatively early in its reimagining of the journey of the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang (a.k.a. Tripitaka) to the “Western regions” (i.e., Central and South Asia) to collect Buddhist scriptures, the beloved sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West features a pivotal scene in which Tripitaka hears an oral recitation of the Heart Sutra and immediately commits it to memory. The novel adds that it is through Tripitaka that the sutra “has come down to us this day. It is the comprehensive classic for the cultivation of Perfection, the very gateway to becoming a Buddha.”a
The historical Xuanzang was responsible for the first Chinese version of the sutra, and a 661 CE stone inscription of his 649 CE translation is the earliest extant dated version of the sutra available in any language. Seductively short at only 260 Chinese characters and filled with seemingly paradoxical assertions such as “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” the Heart Sutra has since become Buddhism’s most popular sutra. Just as the sutra was translated into Chinese from Sanskrit,b Buddhism itself was introduced into China from Central and South Asia, though over time it has become an integral part of Chinese culture and society and recognized as one of China’s “Three Teachings,” along with Confucianism and Daoism.
Organized religion has had a rocky trajectory in China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In modern China religious practice was restricted and suppressed for more than a quarter of a century, with religious faith being partially replaced by political belief. Since the beginning of the Reform Era in 1978, however, the practice of the nation’s five officially recognized religions—namely, Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam—has experienced a significant revival.c According to a 2018 government white paper, “China’s Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief,” China currently has nearly 200 million religious believers, including approximately 20 million Muslims, 6 million Catholics, and 3.8 million Protestants. The white paper notes that it is difficult to calculate the much larger number of Buddhists and Daoists with any precision, though if one focuses more narrowly on professional clergy, the nation currently has approximately 222,000 Buddhist and 40,000 Daoist clergy members.d
Set in a religious training center located on the campus of the National Politics University in Beijing, Yan Lianke’s novel Heart Sutra focuses on a cohort of disciples and clergy who have enrolled in the center for periods ranging from three to twelve months. Most of their courses focus on religious and political topics, but in addition to their formal studies, the disciples also engage in activities such as a series of tug-of-war competitions between teams belonging to different religions. One of the novel’s notable fictional conceits, these athletic competitions dramatize a set of internal conflicts within the training center, while also symbolizing a broader set of tensions between religious and secular life that underlie the work as a whole. Of the five religions represented at the center, Yan’s novel gives particular attention to Buddhism, embodied by the nun Yahui, and to Daoism, embodied by the monk Gu Mingzheng. In contrast to the training center’s other disciples, who are all senior clergy, Yahui and Mingzheng are rather young. Yahui is eighteen and is attending classes at the center on behalf of her mentor, or shifu—an older nun known as Jueyu, who has been hospitalized with a health crisis brought on by the tug-of-war competitions.e Mingzheng, meanwhile, has apparently managed to enroll in the center thanks to his high-ranking father—though Mingzheng himself is not entirely sure who his father is, and one of the novel’s subplots involves Mingzheng’s efforts to find and identify him. As the center’s two youngest disciples, Yahui and Mingzheng quickly bond and fall in love, which helps catalyze their determination to leave organized religion and “return to secular life.”
As Yan Lianke notes in his Afterword to the novel, Heart Sutra follows in the tradition of other religious-themed works such as The Scarlet Letter, The Brothers Karamazov, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Satanic Verses. Unlike those other works, however, Heart Sutra examines the dynamic religious environment of a modern state that is nominally areligious. Using a combination of realism, allegory, fantasy, and satire, the novel focuses on the interstitial space between religious and secular existence, using religion to reflect on a variety of secular concerns, while at the same time underscoring the degree to which secular issues permeate religious practice and belief. Moreover, like Yan’s use of Biblical language in his earlier novel The Four Books, in Heart Sutra he draws on a variety of religious discourses to develop a unique new literary language and aesthetic vision.
Like Journey to the West, in which the fictionalized version of Xuanzang is accompanied and often amusingly upstaged by a group of supernatural disciples, including a pig, a horse, a river ogre, and an incorrigible monkey named Sun Wukong, Yan’s Heart Sutra features an eclectic mix of realism and fantasy, history and allegory, and a complicated interplay between humans and deities. The novel’s main diegesis is centered around the training center and combines quotidian descriptions with references to celestial deities, while the narrative of Yahui and Mingzheng’s romance is interspliced with another romance between the Daoist sage Laozi and the Bodhisattva Guanyin—two very familiar deities in China who, under ordinary circumstances, are rarely discussed in the same breath.
Laozi is a sage figure believed to have lived in the sixth century BCE and is traditionally credited with having written the canonical Daoist text, the Daodejing. Guanyin, meanwhile, is the Chinese version of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara and is also known as the goddess of mercy. Referenced in the first line of the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteśvara was originally gendered as male in South Asian Buddhism but was subsequently gendered as female after being introduced into China as Guanyin—a historical detail that resonates ironically with one of the plotlines in Yan Lianke’s novel.
The illustrations featured in the Guanyin and Laozi plotline are intricate papercut images that were commissioned and created specifically for this volume by the artist Shang Ailan. Although the Chinese editions of several of Yan Lianke’s earlier novels included similar papercut images, Heart Sutra is the first of his novels in which the papercut images are directly integrated into the work’s plot. Not only is the novel’s Guanyin and Laozi plotline narrated primarily through papercut images, but Yahui is also presented as a skillful papercut artist in her own right. Yahui’s creations are discussed at various points throughout the novel, and even have a crucial significance in one pivotal scene.
The mixture of realism and fantasy in Yan’s Heart Sutra can be viewed as an example of a contemporary narrative mode that Yan, in his book of literary criticism Discovering Fiction, calls “mythorealism,” which he explains “is not a bridge offering direct access to truth and reality, and instead it relies on imaginings, allegories, myths, legends, dreamscapes, and magical transformations that grow out of the soil of daily life and social reality.”f
Although in Discovering Fiction Yan Lianke identifies mythorealism as a relatively recent literary development that builds on earlier narrative practices ranging from Western modernism to Latin American magical realism, he simultaneously cites Journey to the West to emphasize that mythorealism “is not something that any one author created from scratch, but rather it is something that Chinese literature has possessed all along.” With its combination of history and fantasy, religious allegory, and satirical humor, Journey to the West is a key antecedent of the approach that Yan Lianke adopts in Heart Sutra and also offers an intriguing commentary on how one might approach the text itself. In the final reference to the Heart Sutra in Journey to the West, Tripitaka and his disciple Sun Wukong are debating the sutra’s meaning. Sun Wukong suggests that although Tripitaka may be able to recite the sutra, he doesn’t necessarily understand it. In response, Tripitaka angrily asks Sun Wukong whether he understands the sutra, to which Sun Wukong replies, “Yes, I know its interpretation!” and then falls silent. Tripitaka’s other two disciples proceed to raucously mock the simian disciple for his apparent ignorance, until Tripitaka interrupts them to specify that “Sun Wukong’s interpretation is made in a speechless language. That’s true interpretation.”g
Tripitaka is referring here to the Heart Sutra, but a similar point could perhaps be made about Yan Lianke’s Heart Sutra itself—namely, that while its intricately allegorical structure might appear to invite or even demand an elaborate interpretation, a “true” interpretation might be one that simply appreciates the text on its own terms.
Yan Lianke concludes his Afterword by noting that the novel was produced by “three other individuals and one cohort,” and I would like to conclude here by noting that this translation was similarly a collaborative effort. The quotes from the Daodejing were borrowed (with minor alterations) from Victor Mair’s translationh and the elegant translations of the novel’s excerpts from the opera The Decapitation of General Shan were proposed by Eileen Chengyin Chow. I am also grateful to my editors and copyeditors, Peter Blackstock, Emily Burns, Greg Clowes, and Kathryn Jergovich, for many detailed and very helpful suggestions. Finally, I would also like to express my appreciation to Yan Lianke himself, for being such an excellent collaborator on this and many other projects over what has now been a decade-long partnership.
a Anthony Yu, ed. and trans., Journey to the West, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 390.
b There is no extant version of the sutra that definitely antedates the earliest Chinese version, and some scholars have argued that the Heart Sutra may have originated as a Chinese text. See, for instance, Jan Nattier, “The Heart Sūtra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15, no. 2 (1992): 153–223.
c Ian Johnson, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (New York: Pantheon, 2017).
d The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief” (April 2018). http://
e In the original novel, Jueyu is named Yuhui, but given that the romanized name Yuhui and that of her disciple Yahui are visually very similar, we decided (with the author’s approval) to change the name Yuhui (meaning “jade wisdom”) to Jueyu (meaning “awakened jade”).
f Yan Lianke, Discovering Fiction, trans. Carlos Rojas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
g Anthony Yu, ed. and trans., Journey to the West, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 264.
h Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, ed. and trans. Victor H. Mair (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).