I’m woefully unprepared to talk about any matters on Buddhism. I find it a fascinating subject, but sadly haven’t been able to spend all that much time familiarizing myself with any of it’s deeper aspects. But, regardless, I just wanted to say that that tracing sheet is absolutely amazing! Thank you so much for making it!
Now then, time to actually try and read this Sutra I guess 
Thank you, but I hope that you did not actually print the tracing sheets out yet! I made the borders too small, and the page numbers were pushed off the bottom. I just fixed it and re-uploaded the correction.
Also, I would have preferred to fit more on each sheet to use less paper, but I felt that the brief explanations next to each kanji should be there.
Also, I have never seen a version with katakana for the Sanskrit terms, but it just makes sense from a comprehension point of view.
@anon3564849 It will make more sense if you read a few translations from around the internet too, because I tried to make a one word translation of each kanji, over sentences that hold together logically.
Now, back to
I thought, given the context, you might be interested by this.
I finally learned the kanji for Buddha yesterday and so dropped my mother a message (who is also Buddhist) to say how exciting I found it to learn that the reading is ぶつ. This made so much sense, because growing up and hearing gongyo chanted every morning and night meant that I heard that particular reading a lot, since it shows up in many places in the portion of the Lotus Sutra that Nichiren Buddhists chant.
I had sent my mother an image of the kanji, and she sent me a message back, saying she suspected that the characters used in her book were probably ancient Chinese (which would make sense, since it was translated from Sanskrit) and sent me this picture:
To me this is a pretty interesting, because that’s the Chinese hanzi (not ancient) for Buddha, with Japanese pronunciation in furigana.
The Sutras have so many Chinese versions of kanji. It seems that the characters have often been modernized, but still Chinese characters, not Japanese. There is a whole history here that I am sure a very literate person could explain much more of. It has grabbed my curiosity enough that I am sure that I will learn more.
In Sutras and older books, I see 佛 but in contemporary Japanese, it is usually written 仏.
Next up, a quicky: 十句觀音經
I did a bit of reading on this and apparently「仏」predates「佛」by several centuries (5th vs 8th, resp.), but the former eventually fell out of use in China. Nowadays both traditional and simplified Chinese use the latter, so this is one of those cases where Japanese actually uses a more archaic kanji (even though it looks simpler).
Thank you for your superior scholarship on this one! I really should have investigated individual kanji more in detail, but I finally became caught up in just getting through the whole text so that I can read it and understand it.
I just leafed through one of my books from my year teaching at a Japanese Buddhist high school yesterday and figured that bit out for myself: 十仏名
The other ten names of Buddha.
But yeah, that one’s not a Kannon sutra.
Cheers!
The four Bodhisattva vows.
四弘請願
衆生無邊誓願度
煩悩無盡誓願斷
法門無 量 誓願學
佛道無上誓願成
衆生無邊誓願度
煩脳無儘誓願斷
法門無量誓願學
佛道無上誓願成
I like this liberal translation, from here.
The many beings are numberless: I vow to save them.
Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly: I vow to abandon them.
Dharma gates are countless: I vow to wake them.
Buddha’s way is unsurpassable: I vow to inhabit it fully.
I love these. I love the boldness of vowing to save all beings.
I will post a literal translation shortly, but this is pretty easy compared to the last.
衆生 all living things (populace, living)
無辺 limitless (辺 is simplified form of 邊)
誓願 vow
度 degrees. used as a shorthand for paramita? to enable to achieve perfections is good translation
煩悩 worldly desires. Three poisons of greed hatred ignorance.
無儘 no exhaust. 儘 simplifies to 盡 and 侭 and 尽
誓願 vow
斷 sever, quit. simplifies to 断
I thought this was read ぼんのう instead.
You put 誓願 twice 
The version I am familiar with in English goes:
Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
The Dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.
The Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to attain it.
I have always enjoyed the explicitly paradoxical character of this version of these vows since it brings to mind Alice’s White Queen who says that she sometimes used to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Thanks for working through the original!
I also am familiar with the more common English translations.
I like the logic of this translator not using the word sentient, because then it brings up the question of which beings are sentient.
Better to just save them all.
For myself, I assume that most animals have some type of sentience.
When I have time, I will tackle some of the Pure Land Sutras. I am doing these vows because I have always liked them, and because they are short enough for me to actually finish working through them.
衆生 living things (populace, living)
無辺 limitless (辺 is simplified form of 邊)
誓願 vow
度 degrees. used as a shorthand for paramita ? to enable to achieve perfections is good translation
煩悩 worldly desires. Three poisons of greed hatred ignorance.
無儘 no exhaust. 儘 simplifies to 盡 and 侭 and 尽
誓願 vow
斷 sever, quit. simplifies to 断
法門 dharma gates
無量 immeasurable
誓願 vow
學 learn (thankfully, we write this as 学 now!)
佛 Buddha
道 path
無上 best
誓願 vow
成 become
I have a question to myself about this, and other sutras and such. Buddhism does not need to be doctrinal. One need not accept the Buddha’s message as faith. A person explores it, and can then validate its’ truth.
So why are these things always written with out of date kanji? There is nothing holy or mystical or powerful about old kanji. They are simply the kanji that were used when these teachings arrived in China.
So why do Japanese people persist in using the old kanji that have disappeared everywhere else in Japan except Buddhist texts? It is very annoying, and is simply an unnecessary complication, as far as I can see.
This text wasn’t as bad as some.
As a formal student of zen for the past several years here is my take on your question (and forgive me if you know all of this stuff, since I don’t know your experience in this matter). Zen practice is full of very particular liturgical details, not just in the sutras recited, but everywhere – every detail of life in a formal zen monastery is spelled out precisely. The American zen I have encountered is pretty loose compared to traditional Japanese practice, but the idea is the same. Three bows here, done in just this way, the timing of the various gongs and wood block strikes and other instrumentation that takes place daily is precise, formal meals are carefully scripted and choreographed. There is a set of chants recited every day that are in some ancient Sino-Japanese that nobody understands, but all memorize and chant in a particular way. At first for me this was hard to deal with, since I grew up without religion and the whole thing seemed kind of silly at best and suspicious at worst. Was this some sort of attempt at mind control?
But then slowly I started to realize the point. The precise content doesn’t matter as much as the opportunity all of this gives to learn how to pay attention. Why three bell strikes here and two there if “form is emptiness?” Why stick slavishly to these outdated kanji, when there are more modern ways of saying things? No reason really, except for maybe the value in learning how to pay attention to many, many details in a highly scripted and choreographed way of approaching life. Eventually I really got into it and even when I was appointed to the role of time-keeper in a long retreat with huge numbers of things to keep track of it was kind of like learning a complex dance – a unique challenge that I don’t think I could have gotten in another way. The point is, I find at least, is that it is important to “pick and stick” to avoid having to worry about coming up with the perfect system when things are always changing anyway, and instead to use the scripted details as a form to learn how to pay attention to everything in the midst of life outside of formal practice. That’s my sense of things anyway…
As a side note: All of this also really comes across very clearly in a profound and wonderful book called Eat, Sleep Sit by Koaru Nonomura, which is about his year spent at the most formal and rigorous zen training monastery in Japan, Dogen’s home monstery of Eiheiji, in case you want a modern Japanese person’s take on the topic. As a lay person who enters the monastery he reflects a lot on all of the “empty forms” that make up life there in all of its challenges.
I am a Shin Buddhist. Shin Buddhism is the Buddhism of regular non-monastic people. A crazy version of 学 just makes things more confusing. But really, if I was a native reader and understood all of the regular kanji better, the oddballs wouldn’t be so annoying.
I need to take this opportunity now, based on your avatar, and ask this non-serious question: “Why did you come from the West?”
Vast emptiness, nothing sacred.
Actually, back to your original question for a second. It occurs to me also that there is a veneration of the past that is a bit foreign to Western sensibilities as well that might be a part of the reason to stick to the old ways of writing the sutras. I hadn’t thought of that before, but that is no doubt because, whether I realize it or not, my expectations are steeped in practicalities and pragmatism. We should do things only to the extant that they work in other words, is my natural assumption. But that might not be the whole story. There might be a bit of magical thinking involved in venerating old language, but then maybe that is important in the West to a certain extent as well. After all why should the Bible be written with archaic forms like “thou shalt not” and not just “Don’t do it…?” As long as we don’t get hung up on it and take it too seriously that it gets in the way…
I’d love to learn more about Shin Buddhism myself.
