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In a Japanese translation of exerpts of the Lotus Sutra, there is kanji which
is used that is to varying degrees still used today. Some of them are
relatively common in normal speech or writing, whereas others seem to me to be
more stilted or only used in formal writing (e.g. 無量 as muryō). Other times,
there was kanji used that is still commonly seen in writing, but when one says
it, there is a different name for it (e.g. 力 is used in the text and is
written in katakana as "りき", but I believe that nowadays, its said, "ちから").

What is the name of this dialect (if there is one) and is it just a temporal
difference that caused this contrast- similarly to how Shakespeare sounds
weird to English speakers in the modern day. And lastly, is there a way to
learn more about this type of Japanese?

Here is a [link to a webpage that has the translation written in
romaji](http://allaboutbuddhism.blogspot.com/2010/10/gongyo-lyrics-myo-ho-ren-
ge-kyo.html?m=1). I couldn't find one that had just the Japanese and kanji on
it, so I just have a sample photo below:

[![Here's an
exerpt](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKkUF.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKkUF.jpg)
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2022-03-10T11:58:27.613
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kanji old-japanese
What kind of Japanese "dialect" is this?
The origins of Buddhist sutra are compilicated, but they are generally based
on the transliterated Sanskrit/[Pali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali) or
their Chinese translations. See [Lotus Satra on
Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra). Although they might
have been more or less "Japanized" in terms of pronunciation, they are
basically not Japanese. (Noticed all the characters in the page are read with
on-yomi?) I believe no Japanese people talked in this way anywhere in the
history. Some words such as 感無量 were "cherry-picked" into the ordinary
Japanese vocabulary, though.

Today, all Japanese high school students learn basic 古文 (archaic Japanese),
but they cannot understand the meaning of sutra because they look totally
different. Personally, I can identify some words (三昧, 如来, 未曾有, ...) in the
pasted page, but cannot get the meaning of the sentences at all.

If you want to seriously learn more about this language, perhaps you need to
enter a university that has a Buddhism course. Or learning Chinese may help?

**TL;DR** : It's more like Latin rather than Shakespeare :)
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Yes, this is not Japanese at all. It's not even kanbun in the sense of
"Chinese text read as if it were stilted Japanese." It is medieval Buddhist
Chinese read character-by-character _as_ Chinese but with a strong "Japanese
accent."
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Many Buddhist prayers and chants aren't really understood by most Japanese
people (except perhaps monks and scholars). I've attended Buddhist temples and
ceremonies in Japan and Taiwan and they use very similiar chants. In Japan,
it's basically pseudo-Chinese (which resembles archaic onyomi but it's unclear
if it was ever used in Japanese). They make the sounds (pronounced slowly
syllable-by-syllable) following a prayer book. Often they do not understand
the original meaning or significance of the Kanji and some books are entirely
in hiragana. It's similar in some regards to reading songs or Christian
prayers in Latin in western countries. It's not a local dialect at all, these
are used at Buddhist ceremonies throughout Japan even today, including regions
which have strong local accents and dialects.
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answer