Yes, it is mine ... although not exclusively ... and has much to do with how one reads 無上.
So ... in the last line, I use "unattainable" instead of the "unsurpassable" that seems more common in various English translations. Okumura Roshi, in Living by Vow, seems to say that the actual meaning is something like an enlightenment so "unsurpassable" that we can't get there. I would simply add that, while we keep moving forward even though we cannot "get there", from another wondrous way of seeing, we are ALREADY there and thus never any place to get at all.
Okumura says that the "Four Bodhisattva Vows" are associated with one older way that Buddha's Four Noble Truths were written (from p 16 here):
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=...ing%22&f=false
That older version is ...
Later, a Mahayana twist was put on things. It is not only a "Zen" Practice, but most of the other Japanese flavors of Buddhism recite them, as well as Korean and Chinese schools. The present version emphasize that a Bodhisattva vows to do these impossible things but (and this is very important) knowing too that, in Emptiness, there is never any "sentient being" to save from the start, nothing to master or attain.
Realizing such fact of "no sentient beings and nothing to realize" and getting the sentient beings also to realize this "nothing to realize" is precisely how one rescues the sentient beings!!!
[Although the roots of our current version may stretch back further, it is found in the oldest known version (9th Century CE ?) of one of Zen's most cherished texts, the "Platform Sutra of the Sixth Zen Ancestor" (from page 143 here) ....
https://terebess.hu/zen/PlatformYampolsky.pdf
Although the chant there does not specifically seem to include the "although numberless/inexhaustable" part of each sentence, it is somewhat implied in the surrounding text, and a later version (13th Century CE?) of the Platform Sutra does contain wording very very close to the modern (page 48 here) ...
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachin...ranslation.pdf
So, my guess is that, as the Platform Sutra was elaborated in later versions, someone added to the Vows too in order to more clearly reflect the Mahayana/Emptiness aspect.
As to translators, the original in Chinese is this ...
四宏誓願
眾生無邊誓願度;
煩惱無盡誓願斷;
法門無量誓願學;
佛道無上誓願成
Now, when you are a translator, there is much room for word choice and expression as one seeks to capture the meaning from one language to another. So, here is a list of a whole bunch of translations in English (and some in Hungarian!) ...
https://terebess.hu/zen/szoto/vows.html
Our "Treeleaf Version" is this ...
I took this in homage to my mentor, Doshin Cantor, who uses about this version as part of the White Plum Lineage (Maezumi Roshi's Lineage) to which he belongs. A quick online search shows that Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center, also White Plum (who appears earlier in this thread
), uses about this same phrase:
However, is "Reality" a fair and clear translation of "Dharma Gates" (法門 Homon in the original Chinese)? I feel it is. As Okumura Roshi says in Living By Vow (p. 17), "
The original word for 'Dharmas' is homon (Dharma Gate), which means teachings about reality and reality based practice." Tanahashi, in his "Zen Chants" book says:
So, I feel that the White Plum/Upaya version "Reality" which we borrowed is actually clearer than the technical "Dharma Gates" term to modern folks maybe.
But what about 無上?? That can mean "nothing higher" or "unsurpassable," but it can also mean "cannot be gotten on, can not be risen above" a road or "Way." So, it is an Enlightened Way that can not be gotten on or attained. This is more in keeping with the earlier lines about how we Vow to do what is impossible to do.
In fact, I stole some of this from Steve Hagen, another Soto teacher (Katagiri Lineage) who has:
Gassho, Jundo
stlah