空即是空 The Buddha Expounds
那如來正講到這：那如来正讲到这：
逐句解 Line by line
That Tathāgata was just then expounding this:
Seven characters, and they hand the page straight over to the Buddha.
"Within not-being, being; within not-nothing, nothing.
中 is zhōng, within, both times. The whole discourse is built eight characters to the line, four and four across the pause.
Within not-form, form; within not-emptiness, emptiness.
色 and 空 — form and emptiness, rūpa and śūnyatā — are the pair the Heart Sūtra turns on, and this passage is about to turn them over four more times.
What is not being is taken for being; what is not nothing is taken for nothing.
為 is wéi, is taken as — against the wèi of 何為, for what reason, five passages back.
What is not form is taken for form; what is not emptiness is taken for emptiness.
The line finishes the 非…為… frame started in the one before, swapping 色 and 空 in for 有 and 無 in exact parallel.
Emptiness is just emptiness; form is just form.
即是, is precisely — a flat assertion of identity, which the next three lines set about qualifying.
Form has no fixed form; form is precisely emptiness.
無定色, no fixed form. Here is the qualification: the identity holds because neither term has any settled content of its own.
Emptiness has no fixed emptiness; emptiness is precisely form.
The mirror image of the line before, with 空 and 色 swapped throughout.
To know emptiness as not empty; to know form as not form —
知…不… turns the discourse from statement into instruction. What is being asked for is a way of knowing, not a proposition to agree with.
this is called illumined comprehension, and only then is the wondrous sound attained."
照了 takes liǎo — the Buddhist compound 照見了知, to illumine and comprehend, where the verb is complete in itself rather than the light le the automatic reading gives. 名為 takes wéi, is called.
The discourse is placed here for a reason that is structural rather than doctrinal. The Buddha is expounding, at length and in perfect parallel, the proposition that form and emptiness have no fixed content and pass into one another — and at that very moment two identical monkeys are brawling toward the door. The chapter has spent five courts on the question of which of two indistinguishable things is real, and the Law being preached says the question is badly put.
The passage is balanced prose rather than metrical verse, and it is set apart as a showpiece because the Wikisource text indents it: the house rule is that the printed page decides. The form deserves attention on its own account — eight characters to the line, four and four across the pause, with 有 and 無, 色 and 空 rotated through every available position. It performs the interchangeability it asserts.
名為照了，始達妙音 is the turn. After eight lines of paradox the conclusion is not a proposition but a faculty — 照了, illumined comprehension — and a result, 妙音, the wondrous sound. Knowledge arriving by ear rather than by eye, which is exactly what Diting offered and exactly what the Buddha is about to supply.