Sanzang bowed again. "Might I ask how far it is to the Great Thunderclap Monastery in the Western Heaven?"

The first time on the road that anybody asks how far it is. 大雷音寺, the Monastery of the Great Thunderclap on Vulture Peak, is the destination of the entire book, and this is the first request for a distance to it. 那裡 is the question-word, nǎ.

The Chan Master said: "Far, far. Only the road is thick with tigers and leopards, and hard to travel."

遠哩，遠哩 — far, far. The doubling is a brush-off. He will not name a distance here and does not name one anywhere else either.

Sanzang pressed him courteously and asked again: "And how far is the road in truth?"

慇懃致意 is to press your respects with real earnestness — the polite insistence of someone who will not let a subject drop. Sanzang asks twice because he wants a number.

The Chan Master said: "The road is long, yet a day must come when you arrive. It is the demon-miasmas that cannot be dispelled.

終須有到之日, "a day of arriving must come at last." It is the only assurance the novel ever offers, and it is offered instead of the number. 魔瘴 are demon-miasmas: the vapours that rise off mountain country and breed fever, which in this book also breed fiends. Malaria and monsters share a word.

I have a Heart Sutra, one scroll, fifty-four lines in all, two hundred and seventy graphs.

The scripture is introduced by its catalogue entry before a word of its content: one scroll, fifty-four lines, two hundred and seventy characters. Worth checking that against what follows, because it does not match. Counting the text this edition actually prints, from 觀自在菩薩 to the end of the spell, gives two hundred and sixty characters and fifty clauses on the edition's own punctuation. The Chan Master has over-counted his own sutra by ten.

Where you meet with demon-miasmas, only recite this scripture, and of itself no harm will come to you."

但念此經 — only recite this scripture. Note what is being handed over and on what terms. The sutra is offered as a protective charm rather than as a teaching, and Sanzang takes it as one.

Sanzang prostrated himself on the ground and begged for it, and the Chan Master recited it aloud and transmitted it to him. The scripture says:

口誦傳之, transmitted it by reciting it aloud — mouth to ear, with nothing written down. 經云： is the run-up and closes the prose.

The Heart Sutra of the Perfection of Great Wisdom:

The title 《摩訶般若波羅蜜多心經》 transcribes the Sanskrit Mahā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya, the Heart of the Perfection of Great Wisdom. 般若 is read bō rě, a reading peculiar to Buddhist transcription that overrides both the ordinary bān and the ordinary ruò — a signal, every time it appears, that the word is not Chinese.

The Bodhisattva Who Regards the World Freely, coursing deep in the perfection of wisdom, saw then that the five aggregates are all empty, and passed beyond every suffering and affliction.

觀自在菩薩 is Avalokiteśvara, "who regards freely" — the same Bodhisattva the pilgrims call 觀世音, Guanshiyin, under a different translation of the same name. 五蘊 are the five aggregates, the skandhas, the five heaps a person is made of; 苦厄 is suffering and calamity together.

Śāriputra: form is not other than emptiness, nor emptiness other than form; form is itself emptiness, and emptiness is itself form. So it is also with sensation, perception, volition and consciousness.

舍利子 is Śāriputra, a person's name, so 子 is the full zǐ and not the light suffix zi — the man is being addressed, not diminished. 受想行識 are sensation, perception, volition and consciousness, the four aggregates after form, and 行 here is xíng, rendering saṃskāra.

Śāriputra: all things bear the mark of emptiness. They neither arise nor perish, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor diminish.

空相 is the mark or characteristic of emptiness, and 相 is xiāng here, rendering lakṣaṇa — a defining attribute, not the xiàng of outward appearance the fiend used of his own snout earlier in the chapter. The six negations that follow are three matched pairs: arising and perishing, defiled and pure, increasing and diminishing.

Therefore in emptiness there is no form; no sensation, perception, volition or consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, scent, savour, touch or thing thought of;

The demolition proceeds in order and misses nothing: the five aggregates, then the six sense faculties — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind — then the six sense objects that answer them. 空中 takes 中 as zhōng.

no realm of the eye, and so on to no realm of mind-consciousness; no ignorance, and no ending of ignorance.

A neat trick of compression. The eighteen elements of experience, the dhātus, are dismissed by naming only the first and the last and saying "and so on to"; then the twelve links of dependent origination go the same way, from ignorance at one end to old age and death at the other. 無明 is avidyā, ignorance — literally "no light." 盡 keeps its full jìn, and there is no 不 in front of it here to complicate the tone.

So too there is no old age and death, and no ending of old age and death. No suffering, no stilling, no cessation, no path; no wisdom, and nothing to attain.

A real textual divergence, and worth knowing about. The standard text reads 無苦集滅道 — no suffering, no arising, no cessation, no path: the Four Noble Truths, negated in a row. This edition writes 寂, stilling, where the canonical text has 集, arising. We print what the edition prints and record the standard reading here rather than quietly correcting it. 無智亦無得 takes 得 as dé.

Because there is nothing to attain, the bodhisattva, resting upon the perfection of wisdom, has a mind free of hindrance; and having no hindrance, he has nothing to fear.

罣礙 (guà ài) is obstruction, the thing that snags and holds you up. This is the word Bajie reached for nine passages back when he stood in front of his burnt-out cave and said he had nothing left to hinder him. He was quoting the Heart Sutra, and neither he nor anyone else in the chapter knows it.

Far removed from all inversion and dreaming fancy, he comes at the last to nirvāṇa.

顛倒 takes 倒 as dǎo: viparyāsa, the upside-down seeing of a deluded mind, taking the impermanent for the permanent. 究竟涅槃 is final nirvāṇa, the end of the line.

The buddhas of the three times, resting upon the perfection of wisdom, attain the unexcelled, right and universal enlightenment.

阿耨多羅三藐三菩提 transcribes anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, unexcelled complete and perfect awakening, and is read ā nòu duō luó sān miǎo sān pú tí. Nine characters that mean nothing in Chinese and are pure sound — the translator declined to translate, and every reader since has had to take the phrase on trust.

Know therefore that the perfection of wisdom is the great spirit-spell, the great spell of light, the unsurpassed spell, the spell that has no equal;

Four titles for the 咒 (zhòu, a spell — the Sanskrit mantra): the great spirit-spell, the great spell of light, the unsurpassed spell, and 無等等, which folds back on itself to mean "equal to that which has no equal."

it can cut away every suffering, in truth and not in vain.

真實不虛, true and not empty — where 虛 means falsity, hollowness, not the emptiness the sutra has spent two hundred characters expounding. The two ideas are not the same, and the whole sentence depends on their not being the same.

Therefore is spoken the spell of the perfection of wisdom. The spell runs thus:

即說咒曰: and here the doctrine stops and the sound begins.

"Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā!"

This is transliteration, not language: 揭諦 is gate, 波羅 is pāra, 薩婆訶 is svāhā. It is given in its Sanskrit form because in Chinese it is already a foreign body — a string of characters chosen for their noise and not their sense — and the meaning was never the point of it. Being scripture quoted word for word from another book, the whole sutra is set as prose rather than as verse.