Make Your Own Buddhist Sutra Book

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about home Buddhist practice, including home Buddhist services and such. These are things that devout lay-Buddhists often do (myself included), but then I realized I never talked about making one’s own sutra book.

There are a couple reasons why one might make their own.

First, Buddhist resources outside of Buddhist countries are hard to find. For someone like me who lives on a large city with a large Asian community this is not so hard. But if you lived in, say, rural Iowa, it might be a lot harder. So, sometimes you have to just DIY.

Second, it’s a nice way to personalize your Buddhist practice in a way that suits you.

I started making my own maybe about 9-10 years ago. I picked up a nice little Paperblanks notebook at the airport at the time, and I decided to collect Buddhist sutras and quotes that I liked. I started out small, just copying things now and then from sites like accesstoinsight.org, or copied from books.

This is a small quote from the Dhammapada :

And the Metta Sutta from the Pali Canon:

I also recorded Mahayana Buddhist sutras as well, such as this quote from chapter 5 of the Earth Store Bodhisattva Sutra:

I copied each of these by hand. I even tried to copy much longer texts, such as the 4th chapter of the Golden Light Sutra, which is a very beautiful prose about repentance and goodwill, but the text was much longer than I thought, and I eventually gave up halfway.

But eventually, around 2017-2018, when I left my old Jodo Shinshu-Buddhist community and started exploring other sects, I focused more on home practice and I started to add Japanese-style liturgies as well:

I also wrote specific sutra chants too, such as the Shiseige:

And chapter 2 of the Lotus Sutra:

As you can see from the featured photo above,¹ I keep this sutra book on my home altar (bottom left in photo), and use it almost daily. A personal sutra book works best when it’s meaningful, simple and useful for you, so the important thing is to not do what other people do, but make it useful for yourself. Find sutras or Buddhist quotes you like, collect them into a notebook, and copy them by hand (word of advice, use a gel pen, not a ballpoint pen, it’s easier to read), and make it your own. There’s no wrong way to do it.

Further, the sutra book I made has gradually progressed over time, just as my own path and practice have and I still have more room to write things in the future.

¹ You can also see my Buddhist rosary, a Tendai-style rosary I ordered online, along with a boxed copy of the Heart Sutra, which I got in 2023 while visiting Nara‘s Kofukuji Temple, one of my personal favorite.