The Grammar of Not
The most common character in the Buddhist canon is 無 — there is not. The second most common is 不 — not. Between them they are one character in every twenty-seven you will ever read. This is not a stylistic tic. Buddhist Chinese is, statistically, a language for saying what is not the case.
是諸法空相，不生不滅，不垢不淨，不增不減。
These dharmas are empty of characteristics: not arising, not ceasing; not defiled, not pure; not increasing, not decreasing.
Two characters, one in twenty-seven
For comparison: 佛, the Buddha himself, is only the eighth most common character in his own scriptures. 無 beats him by a factor of two.
Three negations, three jobsGet this one distinction straight and it does more for your reading than the next hundred characters
English uses not for nearly everything. Classical Chinese does not, and the difference is grammatical rather than stylistic.
無before a noun — there is no ___
It denies existence, or strips an attribute away. 無色 — there is no form. 無我 — there is no self. 無所得 — there is nothing attained. Think of it as the opposite of 有, there is, which ranks seventh.
不before a verb — does not ___
It denies an action or a quality. 不生 — does not arise. 不滅 — does not cease. 不異 — is not different from. The line in the hero above is six of these in a row.
非before a noun predicate — is not ___
It denies an identification. 非菩薩 — is not a bodhisattva. 非相 — is not a characteristic. Where 無 says the thing is absent, 非 says the thing is present but is not what you called it. That is a sharper and more dangerous instrument, and the Perfection of Wisdom literature runs on it.
Tap a character above.
即是 · 即非
即 means precisely, is exactly. It is the hinge on which the Diamond Sutra turns, and it swings both ways. 即是 asserts an identity in the strongest available terms: 色即是空, form is precisely emptiness. 即非 denies one in the same breath.
The characteristic of self is precisely a non-characteristic. Not "self does not exist" — that would be 無我, and the text says that elsewhere. This is the harder move: the mark is there, and it is not what it presents itself as.
Tap a character above.
The same structure one sentence earlier: 若菩薩有我相、人相、眾生相、壽者相，即非菩薩。 — If a bodhisattva has the mark of a self, of a person, of a being, of a life span — then they are precisely not a bodhisattva. One 若, four 相, one 即非. You have the grammar for the whole sentence.
若 … 若 … and then four negations at once
若 ranks eleventh in the canon. It means if, but its commonest job is listing alternatives: whether … or … or …. Here is the Buddha enumerating every kind of being he has vowed to liberate:
Born from eggs, from a womb, from moisture, by transformation; with form or without form; with perception or without perception — and then the last item, which is doing something else entirely.
非有想非無想. Neither with perception nor without perception. The text has already given you 有想 and 無想 as a clean pair, and now it negates both of them, together, with 非. Six characters, four negations, and a category that neither of the previous two exhausts.
This is the single most characteristic move in Mahāyāna argument, and you have just read it in the original.
Tap a character above.
One sentence with the whole sutra in it
This comes a few lines after the passage above. It is the Diamond Sutra's thesis, and there is nothing in it you have not now met.
Diamond Sutra · T0235
如是滅度無量、無數、無邊眾生，實無眾生得滅度者。
"Thus he brings to final release immeasurable, countless, boundless beings — and in reality there is no being who is brought to release."
Three 無 compounds pile up the scale — 無量 beyond measure, 無數 beyond counting, 無邊 beyond limit — and then a fourth 無 takes the whole thing back. 實 marks the register shift: in reality. And 者 at the end turns the verb into its agent: not "no release" but "no one who is released."
Tap a character above.
Check yourselfWhich negation, and why
色不異空，空不異色。
"Form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form."
不, because 異 (to differ from) is a verb. Using 無 here would say "there is no difference," which is a claim about difference rather than about form. From the Heart Sutra, which you read in full next session.
是故，空中無色，無受、想、行、識。
"Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, perception, volition, or consciousness."
無 twice over a list, because every one of these is a noun. And 是故 from Session 2 tells you a conclusion is landing.
如來說第一波羅蜜，非第一波羅蜜。
"The Thus-Come One speaks of the foremost perfection — which is not the foremost perfection."
非, because what is being denied is an identification, not an existence. The thing was named; the name does not hold. Neither 無 nor 不 would carry this, and the Diamond Sutra does it dozens of times.
Session 4 — Two Hundred Sixty Characters
You now have the opening frame, the dialogue formulas, and the grammar of negation. That is enough to read a complete Buddhist scripture from the first character to the last, so that is what happens next. The Heart Sutra is 260 characters long and uses only 117 distinct ones. Twenty-one of those 260 characters are 無.
Running total after Session 3: 65 characters, 16 formulas, and the thesis of the Diamond Sutra read in the original.
Where the numbers come from
Every frequency on this page was counted, not estimated. The corpus is the 1,482 texts tagged
三藏/經 in the Taishō canon — 26,422,454 Chinese characters after stripping front
matter, headings, and the CBETA apparatus. Ranks are positions in the frequency list built from
that corpus; formula counts are string occurrences, given with the number of separate sutras they
appear in, because a formula used 10,000 times in one text is a quirk while one used in 700 texts
is a convention.
Counting scripture separately from commentary matters. Run the same analysis over a corpus that includes the śāstras and the vocabulary tilts hard toward Abhidharma technical terms, and the character list ends up teaching you to read treatises rather than sutras. This course teaches sutras first. On how Ru-Yi translates and why, see Translation Method.