(4) I would like to profess definitely—if somebody would raise to me the question: “Is it difficult to learn Buddhism?”—that Buddhism is not difficult to learn. The obstacle to the mastery of Buddhism is apt to loom big before a learner. But it is really not at all formidable. Let me take the word, Buddha, for example. Now, suppose you are about to learn the meaning of the word. At first glance it might strike you as a difficult word. However when you are told that it is a word derived from Sanskrit and that its signification is “an awakened, enlightened, and yet enlightening one”, or “a person who has peace of mind and perfect personality”, then you would probably feel relieved as if one layer of its mystifying apparel has been peeled off. In other words, as soon as you have gathered sufficient information about the word “Buddha”, the obstacle to your mastery of the word “Buddha” is dissolved. What is the core tenet of Chan? “To refrain either from feeding your mind with reveries or from allowing it to concoct reveries” is the core tenet of Chan. What is meant by “Bodhi”？Well, the answer can be like this: “By ‘Bodhi’ is meant the situation where awakened wisdom has displaced ignorance.” Then, what is meant by “ignorance”? The answer can be like this: “Ignorance means fundamental misunderstanding of reality, which stems from a basic error in mode of perception that prevents people from seeing things as they really are, rather than from a lack of factual knowledge”. Examples serving to expatiate on why Buddhism is not difficult to learn are too numerous to be discussed in detail here. In a word, obstacles to mastery of Buddhism arise primarily from an individual’s limited stock of words or limited vocabulary. An educated Chinese knows almost all of the most commonly used Chinese characters, but he, or she, tends to be deemed illiterate when all the most commonly used Chinese characters are written in the Chinese carapace-bone-script. The main obstacles lying in the way of our mastery of Buddhist Scriptures arise from the fact that when translators in ancient China engaged in translating into classical Chinese the Buddhist Scriptures written in either Sanskrit or Pali, they were in the habit of resorting to transliterating—rather than translating—most of the proper nouns they encountered in the course of translating. Thus most of the proper nouns in the Chinese version of a Buddhist sutra are various instances of transliteration, which constitute the main obstacle to the mastery by a Chinese of the content of a sutra. Moreover since the pronunciations of a great number of Chinese characters have undergone changes in the course of nearly three millennia of development of Chinese civilization, this aggravates the situation in which modern Chinese address themselves to figuring out the legitimate meaning of a transliterated pronoun in the classical Chinese version of a sutra. Therefore to propagate Gautama Buddha’s teachings, a very urgent and important task we have to fulfill now is to translate Tripitaka into vernacular Chinese. To sum up, the obstacle which is occasioned by inappropriate or inadequate translation needs to be removed. Else the general public would inevitably think that Buddhism is very difficult to learn and thus choose to leave Buddhism alone. Given the said obstacle, both Buddhists and the laity would be equally piqued by the inaction on the part of the agent that ought to be held accountable for eliminating the obstacle.(From My Heart My Buddha)