Note f97 — HISTORY OF ZEN BUDDHISM FROM BODHI-DHARMA TO HUI-NENG (YENO) (520 A.D.–713 A.D.)

Hsin, is one of those Chinese words which defy translation. When the Indian scholars were trying to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit works into Chinese, they discovered that there were five classes of Sanskrit terms which could not be satisfactorily rendered into Chinese. We thus find in the Chinese Tripitaka such words as prajñā, bodhi, buddha, nirvāṇa, dhyāna, bodhisattva, etc., almost always untranslated; and they now appear in their original form among the technical Buddhist terminology. If we could leave hsin with all its nuance of meaning in this translation, it would save us from the many difficulties that face us in its English rendering. For hsin means mind, heart, soul, spirit—each singly as well as all inclusively. In the present composition by the third patriarch of Zen, it has sometimes an intellectual connotation but at other times it can properly be done by “heart.” But as the predominant note of Zen Buddhism is more intellectual than anything else, though not in the sense of being logical or philosophical, I decided here to translate hsin by “mind” rather than by “heart.”