Red Pine gives us a fine translation and an illuminating commentary on one of the most widely loved texts in Asia. We know it in Japan as the “Hanya Shingyo” where it’s available in charming little accordion-like books and held in awe by the ordinary people who chant it every day and copy it for good luck without knowing of its origins and its depths. This kind of devotion reminds me of my folks in the American South and how they held the bible in similar dread. I remember being warned never to write notes–however scholarly–in my copy of the King James, because it showed disrespect for the Creator!

“Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form,” is the “whole truth and nothing but” if I ever heard it. It certainly explains the pitch and tenor of my past existence.