I completed two cycles through Leon Hurvitz’s translation “Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma.” Revered for its academic thoroughness, I found the text less useful for my purpose. Leon Hurvitz’s translation is pretty and ornate, but Senchu Murano’s English translation of the Lotus Sutra is much better suited for the task of propagation.

For example, here’s Hurvitz’s final gāthā from Day 14 and the opening prose from Day 15:

Medicine King, I now proclaim to you
The scriptures that I preach;
And among these scriptures
The Dharma Blossom is foremost.

At that time, the Buddha again declared to Medicine King, the bodhisattva-mahāsattva: “The scriptural canons I preach are in the incalculable thousands of myriads of millions, whether already preached, now being preached, or still to be preached. Yet among them this Scripture of the Dharma Blossom is the hardest to believe, the hardest to understand.

Senchu Murano’s translation of the same final gāthā from Day 14 and the opening prose from Day 15:

Medicine-King! I will tell you.
The Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma
Is the most excellent sūtra
That I have ever expounded.

Thereupon the Buddha said again to Medicine-King Bodhisattva mahāsattvas:
“I have expounded many sūtras. I am now expounding this sūtra. I also will expound many sūtras in the future. The total number of the sūtras will amount to many thousands of billions. This Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma is the most difficult to believe and the most difficult to understand.

One of my many items on my To-Do List is to collect quotes such as these for use in encouraging new practitioners. A envision a Daily Encouragement, incorporating easily digested morsels that taken over time provide a healthy Dharma meal.

Tabbed for my 32-days of of the Lotus Sutra practice, The Threefold Lotus Sutra will be the text I use for the English translation for the next two months.

I have read The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings only once or twice and never read the entire Sutra of Meditation on Bodhisattva Universal Virtue. I have three weeks coming up when the wife will be away and I’ll have no distractions. I hope to replicate the The Encouragement of Universal-Sage Bodhisattva, who says in Chapter 28 of the Lotus Sutra:

“World-Honored One! The bhikṣus, bhikṣunīs, upāsakās or upāsikās who seek, keep, read, recite and copy this Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma in the defiled world in the later five hundred years after [your extinction], if they wish to study and practice this sūtra, should concentrate their minds [on study and practice] strenuously for three weeks. When they complete [the study and practice of] three weeks, I will mount a white elephant with six tusks, and appear before them with my body which all living beings wish to see, together with innumerable Bodhisattvas surrounding me. I will expound the Dharma to them, show them the Way, teach them, benefit them, and cause them to rejoice.