Rinzai Zen Sutra Book

Recently, I wrote about a Soto Zen sutra book I purchased some years ago, and it’s still one of the best books I own. Today, I wanted to highlight another Japanese-Buddhist sutra book that I had for years, but never really understood what it was about.

The book is available online here, among other places. The book was published by Nanzenji temple, a major Rinzai Zen temple, and I found it at a Kinokuniya bookstore here in the US in the Japanese-language section. It is titled 私の般若心経 (watashi no hannya shingyō, “My Heart Sutra [book]”)

The sutra book is really small, and easily fits in the palm of my hand. As the website description states, this is designed to that one can carry it on one’s person as a charm, but also use it for home liturgy. Pretty clever. I’ve seen such “sutra book charms” before but usually they are very small, and the print is lower-quality, since it’s meant to be carried, not read. This by contrast is very nice quality.

Inside, the contents are surprisingly dense for such a small book. Inside contains the texts necessary to do a home service according to Rinzai tradition, though it differs slightly from the one I posted previously.¹

The contents, shown below include basic liturgy such as repentance verses, the opening of the sutra, a copy of the Heart Sutra, dedication of merit, four bodhisattva vows, and so on.

Below, you can see the Heart Sutra from end to end (read right-to-left, vertically). If you can read Japanese hiragana script, you can recite this because each Chinese character is annotated with a pronunciation guide (a.k.a. furigana):

The furigana script is a bit small and hard to read, but that’s understandable given how small this book is.

Surprisingly, the sutra book contains other things I wasn’t expecting, such as mantras for the Thirteen Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, often recited during yearly memorials for the deceased. The book also the Mantra of Light, surprisingly. It also contains the five verses for contemplating food.

Finally, the book contains a sermon by the author, and has a handy blank section at the end for taking notes.

Weirdly, I’ve owned this book for almost 10 years, but back then I couldn’t read Japanese very well, so I didn’t fully appreciate what the contents of the book were, plus I had no familiarity with Rinzai Zen. Now that I have a bit more experience, I can appreciate this book a lot more, and have been using it for home liturgy lately.

For such a compact book, it’s really very nice, and only costs ¥550.

If you’re able to read basic hiragana script, and have an interest in Rinzai Zen, it’s definitely worth a purchase.

¹ As noted in a previous post, Rinzai Zen in particular a number of lineages and factions, each one based around a different temple. This may help explain why the liturgy varies as much as it does.