The Heart Sutra is roughly 260 characters in Chinese and is chanted daily by millions who will spend decades on what it means. Its method is negation: form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then no eye, no ear, no nose, no path, no wisdom, no attainment — dismantling the tradition's own core lists one by one. It is not nihilism; the claim is that everything lacks independent, fixed existence, including the teachings that say so. It ends, unexpectedly, in a mantra — the argument stops and a sound takes over.