The Heart Sutra and the Mayan Tzolkin Calendar

by
Douglass A. White

Recently I was staying at a friend’s house and noticed a fine piece of Chinese
calligraphy on the wall. The text was the compact edition of the Prajnaparamita
Heart Sutra as translated by Xuanzang (602/603? - 664 CE), a Tang dynasty Buddhist
monk. Xuanzang traveled to India to obtain Sanskrit copies of Buddhist scriptures
for translation into Chinese. His most famous translation was his terse and precise
rendering of the Heart Sutra.

As I stood in front of the text admiring the calligraphy I noticed how neat and
symmetrical the text was. The calligrapher organized the text in columns from right
to left so that it formed a perfect rectangular grid. That meant each column of text
had the same number of characters. I counted the characters in a column and found
there were 13. Then I counted the number of columns and found there were 20.
Suddenly I recalled that the text indeed contains only 260 Chinese characters,
something I had noted many years ago but never thought much about.

Recently there has been a lot of media attention on the year 2012 because it marks the
completion of a major cycle in the Mayan Long Count Calendar. The ancient
Mayans used a number of calendar systems. The Long Count contains cycles within
ever larger cycles that extend to millions of years and essentially have no limit.
Within the Long Count is embedded a vague solar year of 18×20 = 360 days that they
call the Haab. This solar year interacts with a shorter sacred calendar day-count
cycle called the Tzolkin. The sacred Tzolkin day-count calendar is a cycle of 13×20
= 260 days and forms an important part of Mayan spiritual culture. The interaction
of the 260-day Tzolkin day count and the 360-day Haab vague solar year day count
produces a longer cycle of 52 years.

The Mayan Tzolkin-Haab system is closely related to the calendar systems encoded in
the Tarot (4×14 = 56, 14×26 = 364) and the Poker (4×13 = 52, 13×28 = 364) playing
card decks. The correspondence of Xuanzang’s 260-character Heart Sutra and the
Mayan 260-day Tzolkin cycle is probably just a “cosmic” coincidence. However, it
means there is a character in the Heart Sutra for each of the days in the Tzolkin cycle.
Characters in both cycles repeat numerous times with subtle nuances. The website
http://www.michielb.nl/maya/calendar.html will calculate for you the current Tzolkin
date. Below is the Heart Sutra correlated to the Tzolkin. Have fun.
The Heart Sutra and the Tzolkin