October 13, 2021
Oeshiki Gift: Writings of Nichiren Shonin, Volume One Second Edition
When the Writings of Nichiren Shonin Doctrine 1 was published in 2003, the traditional book market was still intact. That is to say large print runs with book publisher deals that included distribution, inventory warehousing and handling returned stock still existed. This world disappeared quickly in the face of Amazon online sales where Amazon and print on demand (POD) is, more or less, the only game now.
The collapse of the traditional book publishing was particularly hard for a small academic and religious positioned publishers like NBIC and the Writings of Nichiren Shonin series. When preparing the last title of the series, Followers II • Volume 7, our publisher, University of Hawaii Press, casually informed us, “due to inventory costs we are are changing our inventory and warehousing partner, all unsold inventory not returned to the owner by this date will be destroyed.” Thank you for your business.
Faced with losing the entire WONS inventory, Nichiren Shu arranged for the back inventory to be shipped to the NBIC warehouse where it is today. Unfortunately that arrangement meant we only had the means to sell those books on the NBIC web store. Just as this was happening we had just finished the 3rd Edition reprint of Bishop Murano’s ‘The Lotus Sutra’. We decided to take the plunge of using the Lotus Sutra digital master we had just created and remaster it for Amazon on-demand, Kindle and iBook Store formats.
The learning curve was steep but by 2015 the Lotus Sutra eBook for Amazon and iBooks was completed, and we had come up with a plan to create a digital remaster of the Writings of Nichiren Shonin series. The trouble was getting a digital master to begin with. It’s easy to imagine that if you have a text document on a computer, you can quickly make a book with it. That’s not the case with the backup files we received from University of Hawaii Press: each series title had been created by a different designer using different layout software with no matching style sheets or fonts between any two titles.
Imagine having to serve a traditional 6 course French Cuisine dinner but you go into the kitchen and find the first course is Italian, the second course is Japanese, the third course Sudanese, and so on, and make it all work as one. This was the situation facing us. On top of that some of the layout software used for some titles was obsolete, we worried some files might be unusable.
Fortunately our designer Alan Rowe was able to take the whole mess of data files and rescue the basic data, wrangling it into a consistent modern format. With the basic text in place, the real work began. In his article for Nichiren Shu News reproduced below, Editor Rev. Shinkyo Warner explains the difficult process of combining and reworking all the separate glossaries of the seven volumes into one and the details of the improvements in Volume 1.
The two most important publications for Nichiren Shu are the Lotus Sutra and the collected Writings of Nichiren Shonin (WONS). In 2012, after many years of working with Rissho University and the Nichiren Buddhist International Center (NBIC), we published the third edition of Bishop Senchu Murano’s translation of the Lotus Sutra. As part of those efforts, we produced a digital version that was readable on tablets and other devices. We also moved away from the long-standing practice of printing thousands of copies of a book and then selling them from a publishing warehouse. We moved to “print on demand” where individual books are printed when they are ordered.
Back in 2002, Rev. Kyotsu Hori, with the support of the Nichiren Shu Overseas Propagation Promotion Association (NOPPA), released the first of seven volumes of translations from the Nichiren Shonin Zenshu, Complete Writings of Nichiren Shonin. These included Nichiren Shonin’s five major works, Rissho Ankoku-ron, Senji-sho, Kaimoku-sho, Kanjin Honzon-sho, and Ho-on Jo, and all of his other letters and minor treatises deemed authentic and included in the Showa Teihon. Rev. Hori continued working his way through the series, publishing the sixth volume in 2010.
After organizing translations for the seventh volume, Rev. Hori became ill and was unable to continue his work. In 2014, I was asked to help finish the seventh volume, so I reassembled the team that had worked on the third edition of the Lotus Sutra, and we went to work.
By the time we released the seventh volume in 2015, publishing had moved almost entirely over to print on demand. This meant we could no longer follow the old publishing model. Fortunately, we had also set up the seventh volume for print on demand, but this had not been done with the previous six volumes, so they needed to be reformatted with that in mind. As such, we would need to redo the entire series.
As we approached the work, one of our first decisions was that we also wanted to create a digital version of WONS as we had done with the Lotus Sutra. This would make it so that all of Nichiren Shonin’s writings could be searched at the same time, rather than having to look through seven separate physical books.
Having just finished work on the seventh volume, I figured that producing the other six volumes would be roughly repeating what we had done about six more times. I thought it might take a bit longer as some of the volumes had more pages and more complex writings.
However, there was a critical difference in this series that only became clear as I started looking at the series as a whole. With the Lotus Sutra, we had a single translator in Senchu Murano. With WONS, dozens of translators had contributed to the project. Working together with so many people was part of the genius of Rev. Hori’s approach. This made it possible to complete all seven volumes much more quickly than if there had only been a single translator.
The disadvantage was that there were many differences in how terms were translated and described by the different translators. The differences were subtle in places, but at times they made it hard to see key connections between writings. I also began to notice differences in the focus of glossary entries for the same term in different volumes.
As we were creating a main volume for the series, we needed a main glossary. Combining glossaries was a huge under- taking. We started with around 1,500 terms in the seven volumes. After combining and refining them, we narrowed it down to around 1,000. We also had to keep track of which terms were used in which volumes. It would be impractical to include all the terms in each printed volume. In the later volumes in the series, it would have doubled their size.
The first version of the combined glossaries was completed last year and presented to NOPPA just weeks before the pandemic lockdown began. Since then, we have been working through the first volume, finding changes in the main text that resulted from changes in the combined glossary, in addition to other revisions meant to make the text more consistent and readable.
Thanks to the keen eye of our designer, Alan Rowe, advice and many clarifi- cations from Rev. Sensho Komukai, and the patience and support of NOPPA, we will be releasing the first volume of the new series, including on Amazon, on October 13 to coincide with Oeshiki.
This volume includes two of the five major works, the Rissho Ankoku-ron and Senji-sho. It also contains a fascinating description of the rulers of Japan, Sovereigns of our Divine Land, and an expansion of Nichiren Shonin’s famous reproach of Hachiman, Admonition of Bodhisattva Hachiman.
We have already begun work on the second volume, which contains the Kaimoku-sho and Kanjin Honzon-sho. The Ho-on Jo comes in the third volume. We plan to keep chipping away at the series. The second volume should be easier than the first volume, since the glossary for the entire series had to be completely reworked before we could finish the first volume. We will certainly keep you informed as volumes in the series come out.
Writings of Nichiren Shonin Volume 1 2nd Edition is available on Amazon