The Library Unbound: Milne Library News

What are you reading? [more like attempting to read]

I am currently trying to read the Buddhist sutra called Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra [or The Sutra of the Right Mindfulness of the Dharma].  I will first explain how I came across this sutra.

Being an avid fan of anime, I discovered a series called “Hozuki no Reitetsu” or “Hozuki’s Coolheadeness”.  [Side note: this series takes a dark humor approach to the afterlife, so if you like dark humor I would suggest watching it or reading the manga]   This series takes place in Buddhist Hell.  As the introduction song says “Japanese Hell has 16 divisions.  In all there are 272!!”  You are probably baffled at the idea that Buddhists have a hell, let alone 272 separate hells.  There are eight great hot hells and eight great cold hells, each have sixteen subdivisions.

Image source: https://www.crunchyroll.com/hozukis-coolheadedness

The anime had me curious about the ideas of a Buddhist Hell, so I found a book called “The Buddhist Concept of Hell” by Daigan and Alicia Matsunaga.  In this book, they give an outline of the sutra and describe the hot hells and their subdivisions. I wanted to learn more about the source material.  I’ve spent years trying to track down this sutra in English.  I was finally able to find a digital version on the NTI Reader site: https://ntireader.org/taisho/t0721.html but sadly it’s in Chinese and I only knew a handful of characters [we can thank Cardcaptor Sakura for my knowledge of 日 [sun] and 月 [moon]]. 

So, I went on to try to find a translation for a few months, but came up empty handed.  Finally I decided to attempt to translate it myself.  The NTI reader has a wonderful English translation function where you can copy entire words into their dictionary and the resulting characters will be translated into English; or you can hover over a character for the translation.  This is helpful, but is extremely difficult when one character has 20+ definitions and about a third of them sound like they can fit the sentence. I have also made use of “A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms” by William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodus; along with other translating services and dictionaries.   I won’t bore you with my translation methods.

There are 70 scrolls in total. The descriptions of the hells span nearly ten of the scrolls. I have just started the 8th scroll which is discussing the fourth greater hot hell realm called Raurava [translated as the Hell of Screaming].  This hell is for sinners who use alcohol to commit a multitude of evil karma.  The current passage I am reading deals with people who water down alcohol and sell it as pure alcohol.  The descriptions of the punishments are as/ if not even more brutal than they are outlined in "The Buddhist Concept of Hell." 

It’s taken me over 3 months to get this far, but I seem to be able to translate 1 scroll per week depending on the difficulty of a sentence. I have a long way to go before I finish, but it’s proven a valuable exercise in studying Buddhism and language learning.  The rest of the sutra outlines the other rebirth realms such as the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, the Realm of Animals and the Heavenly Realms.  I'm excited to learn more about those since I have not read anything about them in detail yet.