Comments on the
The Booklet from
The Way of Eiheiji: 
Zen Buddhist Ceremony

A two record box set put out by Folkways Records in 1960
Created by Elsie and John Mitchell 

The Way of Eiheiji was unique in its time in offering to the serious  student of the Orient, or  anyone interested in Buddhism,  a window into the world of the Zen monk's way of life in Japan. Still, there's nothing like it. The recordings are gems of Buddhist sound and history and practice and the booklet that accompanies them  presents a thorough and fascinating picture of daily life at Eiheiji - from the point of view of a Western woman most interested and versed in the subject..  

Where OCR (optical character recognition) was utilized, this reproduction of the booklet is not photographically accurate and only the scanned images retain the same look and the diacritic marks for the letters which were faithfully presented in the original - most of them can be found accurately represented in the glossary or Chinese character pages..

  The Way of  Eiheiji  is presented here so those who have these recordings can read it - because it's not, I don't think, included with the CD's and tapes sold by Smithsonian Folkways (see ordering). It is also offered for its historical significance as one of the first such publications, and not as a sole scholarly reference for those wishing to study these recitations - though I am impressed with the overall quality of the translations and transliterations which were done just for this booklet by the translators mentioned herein working with Elsie. For more current transliterations and translations please search the web or other sources. I found a number of links by searching Google for "soto zen sutras."  - DC