Hello,
My name is Chris and I'm new to the community here. I live in Nagano prefecture in central Japan. I've been sitting on and off for a number of years and am excited to see what everyone is doing with the online sangha here!
So, as the title of this post says, I'm seeking an online reference/ dictionary with English renditions of Japanese Buddhist terms (but working from Japanese script). I'm working on a Japanese to English translation that uses a fair amount of Soto Zen terminology. Occasionally there are simple terms like 習禅、but more frequently I'm dealing with quotes from Dogen or phrases like 無所得無所悟。Understanding the meaning is usually no problem, and of course I can come up with my own translations. There may well not be "standard" translations for many of the terms, but it's still useful to compare my takes with what others have done. For certain things a Google search works, but for others nothing really comes up. Doing that I often have to cross-reference between the Japanese Shobogenzo and the English (I've started using the Nishihima-Cross adaptation on Cohen-sensei's recommendation). This works but is a huge time consumer as the terms aren't referenced in the original text I'm working from and searching for their sources is not always as straight forward as I'd assumed. I've also tried using the dictionary at www.buddhism-dict.net, but that typically comes back with nothing.
Any ideas on how to approach this would be so greatly appreciated. In return for your kind assistance, I'll give the forum here a shout out once the book is finally published. Also, if there's another forum here that would be more appropriate for this post, please let me know.
Thank you in advance.
合掌
Chris
My name is Chris and I'm new to the community here. I live in Nagano prefecture in central Japan. I've been sitting on and off for a number of years and am excited to see what everyone is doing with the online sangha here!
So, as the title of this post says, I'm seeking an online reference/ dictionary with English renditions of Japanese Buddhist terms (but working from Japanese script). I'm working on a Japanese to English translation that uses a fair amount of Soto Zen terminology. Occasionally there are simple terms like 習禅、but more frequently I'm dealing with quotes from Dogen or phrases like 無所得無所悟。Understanding the meaning is usually no problem, and of course I can come up with my own translations. There may well not be "standard" translations for many of the terms, but it's still useful to compare my takes with what others have done. For certain things a Google search works, but for others nothing really comes up. Doing that I often have to cross-reference between the Japanese Shobogenzo and the English (I've started using the Nishihima-Cross adaptation on Cohen-sensei's recommendation). This works but is a huge time consumer as the terms aren't referenced in the original text I'm working from and searching for their sources is not always as straight forward as I'd assumed. I've also tried using the dictionary at www.buddhism-dict.net, but that typically comes back with nothing.
Any ideas on how to approach this would be so greatly appreciated. In return for your kind assistance, I'll give the forum here a shout out once the book is finally published. Also, if there's another forum here that would be more appropriate for this post, please let me know.
Thank you in advance.
合掌
Chris
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