As I announced at the start of the year, I am going to attempt to divide the Lotus Sutra into 365 roughly equal parts and pair each day with one of Shinkyo Warner’s Daily Dharma or an appropriate quote from one of the books I’ve read. Next year I’ll publish those daily.

To that end I’ve gathered the text of Senchu Murano’s Lotus Sutra from the 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra files into a single document.

This is now available at 500yojanas.org/lotus-sutra/book/

Beyond my needs, this will provide a place where you can search the entire Lotus Sutra in your browser.

For example, considering Jan Nattier’s discussion of “Counterfeit vs. Semblance” as the English word to describe the age after the parinirvāṇa of a Buddha, we find Murano’s translation uses “counterfeit” 19 times in both prose and gāthās when describing the predictions of future Buddhahood for various  disciples and when describing  the Buddha called Powerful-Voice-King in Chapter 20, Never-Despising Bodhisattva. Semblance is not used in Murano’s Lotus Sutra.

Considering Nattier’s discussion of the Final Dharma, we find hints of this when the Buddha mentions the “latter days after [my extinction]” four times in Chapter 14, Peaceful Practices. Countering that, however, we have Chapter 11: Beholding the Stupa of Treasures, in which the Buddha notes the efforts of Buddhas to “have the Dharma preserved forever” and then asks his sons to “Make a great vow / To preserve the Dharma forever!”

Murano’s translation contains 83,817 words, which includes the titles and the declarations at the end of each volume. Dividing that by 365 gives you something short of 230 words per day. That’s a really small block of text. This blog post has 295 words when you reach the period at the end of this sentence. I may want to rethink this project.