BooksIncenseWhite flowersLightRecitation of the heart sutraStudy
Invocation Approach
Tone
Austere luminous
Address
PrajnaparamitaGreat MotherPerfection of Wisdom
Relationship
The text that reads the reader
Warning
She is not a goddess who grants things she is the seeing itself
Resonance
Students of emptiness those who think too much
Symbols
Prajnaparamita bookLotusVajraHeart sutraMala
Mythology Summary
Prajnaparamita is the Perfection of Wisdom personified: the sutras themselves praise her as the mother of all Buddhas, and the Prajnaparamita literature — the Ashtasahasrika, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra — is the Mahayana's foundational statement of emptiness. The Heart Sutra gives its dialogue to Avalokiteshvara teaching Shariputra, but the figure of Prajnaparamita as a goddess with her own iconography (four arms, books on lotuses, white, sometimes on a lion throne) develops in East Asian and Tibetan art from the eighth century onward, and in Tibetan practice she is closely paired with Manjushri. She is the personification of a text and of a way of seeing rather than a deity with an ancient cult, and the 'Mother' language is the literature's own.
Modern Practice
The Heart Sutra is recited daily across East Asian and Tibetan Buddhism, and 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form' is the most quoted line in the tradition; practitioners take her as the figure of the insight the recitation is meant to produce. The Western temptation is to make her a goddess of feminine wisdom; the tradition's claim is more demanding — that she is what remains when every fixed view has been released.