Would educated Japanese people without special training be able to understand Buddhist mantras/真言?


A well-educated speaker of Hindi (a modern descendant of Sanskrit) who doesn't
have any special training in Buddhist (or Hindu) liturgy would probably be
able to more or less understand the following short mantra. (As far as I can
tell, this particular one isn't actually used outside of Shingon, but that
shouldn't matter for the purposes of this discussion.)

> Namah samanta-buddhanam bhah

The Japanese equivalent of this appears to be:

> ノウマク・サンマンダ・ボダナン・バク

Would an equally-educated speaker of Japanese without any special training in
Buddhist liturgy be able to understand that mantra (or any such mantra; no
need to focus on this particular one)? Or is all this Sanskrit-derived
Buddhist stuff more in the realm of a foreign language which one would need to
learn separately?




The average Japanese person you pull in off the street would not be able to
read a mantra or sutra without special training. Due to the way Buddhism came
to Japan, even though these texts are pali in origin, Buddhists texts brought
into Japan were written completely in Chinese characters. Many of these
characters are not common or part of the joyo. Graduate school in "Indian
philosophy" in Japan is largely about learning how to decipher this.

Some famous ones might have a katakana version that people would recognize due
to popularization, but the meaning is gibberish to them unless they've been
told it -- as Japanese is not anything like Pali.

