Across East Asian Buddhist traditions, the Heart Sutra has served as a concise yet far-reaching expression of the Mahayana teaching on emptiness, shaping doctrine, practice, and culture. Its famous declaration that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” became a philosophical touchstone for Chinese schools such as Tiantai and Huayan, and later for Japanese Zen, as they articulated non-dual awareness and the insubstantiality of all phenomena. Because of its brevity and density, it came to function as an introductory gateway into the broader Prajñāpāramitā literature, used in educational settings to convey core themes such as non-attachment, interdependence, and the bodhisattva path. In this way, the text provided a shared doctrinal vocabulary through which diverse schools could explore the nature of reality and the self.

At the same time, the Heart Sutra became deeply woven into the liturgical life of East Asian Buddhism. It is chanted in daily monastic services, in meditation halls, and in a wide range of ceremonial contexts, so that its verses are heard and recited by both ordained and lay practitioners. This repeated recitation is regarded not only as an act of devotion but also as a practical means of cultivating wisdom and merit, allowing the teaching of emptiness to permeate the rhythms of everyday religious life. For many, the sutra functions as a meditative text, its lines serving as objects of contemplation to dismantle attachment to conventional appearances and to clarify the experience of emptiness directly.

The influence of the Heart Sutra also extends into the cultural and artistic spheres of East Asia. Its phrases have inspired calligraphy, painting, and literary works, becoming a kind of spiritual shorthand for non-duality and the insight that all dharmas lack fixed essence. The mantra “Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā” in particular has become widely recognized, recited both within formal Buddhist settings and in broader cultural contexts as an emblem of the journey “to the other shore” of awakening. Different schools have drawn out distinct resonances from the text—Zen and Chan teachers often using it to point directly to Buddha-nature, Pure Land masters relating it to faith and other-power—yet all treat it as a distilled expression of the wisdom dimension of the path. Through this combination of philosophical depth, ritual centrality, and cultural presence, the Heart Sutra has come to embody, in a remarkably compact form, the heart of East Asian Mahayana understanding of emptiness.