The Heart Sutra
A short Mahayana text on emptiness, chanted daily in much of East Asian Buddhism.
The Heart Sutra is very short, and it is chanted rather than read in most of the traditions that use it. Its subject is emptiness, and it ends in a mantra that is usually left untranslated even in translated liturgies.
It is a daily text in Zen, in Chinese and Korean Buddhism, and in Tibetan practice, and the same few lines are recited in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan and Vietnamese depending on where you are standing.
Why the words are not here
The Buddhist texts here are from Pali sources in nineteenth-century public-domain English. The Heart Sutra is a Mahayana text with a different transmission, and the English versions in liturgical use are modern and in copyright.
Every text on this site names the edition it came from and was checked against it twice. A prayer nobody can cite an edition for does not get printed here, however well known it is. The verification record lists what was held back and why, and how rights are established explains the test.
What we do hold
When is this prayer said?
The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
Which tradition is this prayer from?
This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.
Content last changed 15 October 2026. Dates come from this page’s own revision history, not from the last time the site was deployed.