Heart Sutra follows on from my earlier book, Soma: guarding the body, in that a text from another and very old tradition has been retrieved as a contemporary text for a contemporary poet. I first read the Buddhist Heart Sutra in the translation and commentary of Edward Conze in the early 1960s, and the extraordinary challenge and depth of the text has continued to enlarge my sense of it over the intervening years. The present pared down version has been extracted and modified from a number of English versions variously derived from Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese versions retrieved by Buddhist and other scholars from both the east and the west. For those who may be troubled by a secular reading/rendering of a religious text, the challenge for me has been to see if a religion-based text can be made to speak to anyone whatsoever without violence to its meaning, and yet stand as a positive mutation of the extra-curricular tradition of the philosophia perennis. I am nevertheless deeply grateful to the Buddhist monks and scholars who have for centuries preserved this most difficult, minimalist, and personally challenging account of whatever it is we might call 'reality'.

The book is written, designed, printed, and with images by Alan Loney. Types are Giovanni Mardersteig's Dante and S H de Roos's Libra. Paper is 175gsm BFK Rives Heavyweight, damped for printing on a Pratt-Albion handpress, No. 11, 2005. The images are made up from brass rules on loan from the Otakou Press at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and a wood block held at the Press. Further handwork has also been added after printing. Binding is soft cover. Page size 240x155mm.

PRICE : AUD $250 for a single copy : $200 for 2 or more copies.  —  Out of Print.