Editable — and you can rename it inside Anki later.
A spaced-repetition deck of the selected cards. Exporting also marks them as known, so your next deck starts where this one left off.
Anki is the app that studies these cards with you. Install it first, then open the file you download here. Find your device below.
Install Anki — free. Download the .apkg, then double-click it. If your computer asks what to open it with, choose Open with Anki.
Install AnkiDroid — free. Download the .apkg, tap it, and choose Open with AnkiDroid if prompted.
Install AnkiMobile, then download the .apkg, tap it, and choose Open with AnkiMobile. AnkiMobile is a one-time $24.99 purchase.
To avoid that cost: study in a browser at AnkiWeb (free, needs an internet connection), or import the file with a third-party .apkg reader.
Just open the file. Re-importing an updated deck edits the cards you already have instead of duplicating them, and keeps your review history.
A quick self-test, not a study system. It deals cards from whichever pile you pick, with no scheduling behind it — change a setting and the queue rebuilds as you go. For real spaced repetition — intervals that grow as you get things right, and a review history that survives — build a deck on the card sets page and press To Anki (.apkg).
Pick the liturgy sets you want to study, glance down the card list and mark anything you already recognise, then press To Anki (.apkg) and open the file that downloads. That is the whole app.
Building a deck also records those cards as known, so the next deck you build from the same material contains only what you have not covered yet. Everything below is optional reading — open a section if you want the detail.
Use this alongside Pleco. These cards are an index to the liturgy, not a dictionary — the gloss on a card records how that term was translated in that passage, which is narrower than what it can mean. The app assumes you have Pleco installed and reach for it whenever a term is new or refuses to stick. Get it free for Android or iPhone and iPad.
The back of each card carries two small icons in the bottom corners. They are dim on purpose — they are there when you want them and out of the way when you do not.
📕 bottom right — Pleco. Opens that character straight into Pleco’s dictionary entry on your phone or tablet. On a desktop computer it says so rather than failing, since Pleco is a mobile app. If you tap it and nothing happens, Pleco is probably not installed: Android, iPhone and iPad.
📔 bottom left — HanziCraft. Opens the character on hanzicraft.com in a browser, which works on every platform including desktop. It breaks a character into its components and lists the words it appears in — useful for a character you keep confusing with another one.
Check one or both whenever a term is new, or when one refuses to stick. Seeing the fuller range of a character’s senses, and the other words it lives in, is usually what makes it hold. Then use Edit Note in Anki to add whichever glosses helped — the deck is designed to be annotated, and a card in your own words is a card you will remember.
Before you start, install a Buddhist lexicon in Pleco: Menu sidebar → Add-ons → Dictionaries → All Free Dictionaries, then choose A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, partway down the list. Reorder it above the general dictionaries so Buddhist senses come back first. Without it, Pleco will give you the everyday sense of a character where the liturgy means something else entirely.
The mode decides what appears on the front of a card, and it is more consequential than it looks.
Type A — Chinese and pinyin on the front, English on the back. The reading is given to you; you are learning what a term means, not how to pronounce it. Cards follow the order of the liturgy.
Type B — Chinese alone on the front, pinyin and English on the back. Cold recognition: you must supply both the sound and the sense. Cards follow the order of the liturgy, as in Type A; the two modes differ in what the front of the card shows, not in what they cover or in what order.
Type A and Type B keep separate records of what you know. This is deliberate. Recognising 手 with pinyin sitting underneath it is a different skill from recognising it cold, and the app does not treat one as evidence of the other. Most students work a set in Type A first and return to it later in Type B.
The app remembers every character you have marked as known, separately for each mode. This record is what keeps your decks from filling up with material you have already worked through.
A card is identified by its character and its reading together, so 行 xíng and 行 háng are two separate cards: knowing one does not silence the other.
When you open the customize screen, anything on your known list is automatically unchecked — it will not go into your deck — but it stays visible in the table, greyed, sorted to the bottom. The counter above the table reads, for example, 615 of 812 cards selected · 192 already known. Nothing is ever removed from view, and re-checking any row puts it straight back into the deck.
Take a minute with the card list before you build a deck. For anything you already recognise, press the button in the Known column: it fills with a check mark, the row unchecks itself and drops to the bottom. This is the single most useful habit in the app. A deck of 600 cards where you already know 200 of them is a deck you will abandon; the same deck trimmed to the 400 you actually need is one you will finish.
When you export to Anki, every card in that deck is added to your known list for the current mode. The reasoning is that a card you have put into Anki is a card you are working on, and the next deck you build should start where this one left off. It is why the same set produces a shorter deck each time you return to it.
Downloading a printable PDF or the raw card data does not touch your known list. Only the Anki export does.
Selecting a set whose terms are nearly all on your known list is not an error, and the app will not warn you. You will see almost every row greyed and unchecked, a count along the lines of 3 of 105 cards selected · 102 already known, and a very short deck at the end of it. That is the system working: the three cards left are the three you have not yet covered. To rebuild the whole set instead, tick the checkbox in the table’s header row to re-select every card. (That only puts them back in the deck; they stay marked known until you clear them in the known-cards viewer.)
Quiz in the top bar is a rolling self-test. There is no start and no end: opening the page begins one from your last settings, and changing a setting rebuilds the queue underneath you without resetting your score. It is a way to shuffle cards between the two piles by feel, not a study system — that is what the Anki deck is for.
Three settings sit at the top: which pile (New or Known), which type (A or B, exactly as on the card sets page), and which decks. Decks default to Random — every deck, all cards shuffled together — and the dropdown holds the same categories and sets as the home screen, where ticking a category takes all of its sets. A term that appears in several liturgies is asked once however many of them you select, and the count beside the dropdown is that de-duplicated number. While a quiz is running the settings show as chips above the card, alongside a live count of your known list for that type.
New pile — nothing is recorded unless you say so. Right and wrong are just a score; neither touches your known list. If a card turns out to be one you already know, use the + known half of the green button — it sits against “Got it” because it is the same judgement, one step stronger. It fills in once set, and clicking it again takes the card back off.
Known pile — missing a card removes it. Press “Missed it” and that card comes off your known list for the current type. The counter drops immediately and the term reappears in the next deck you build. Getting one right changes nothing.
Skip moves on without scoring. Back returns to the previous card and undoes what leaving it did — the score, and a known-list removal if that is what happened. Both are grey; the red and green buttons between them are the ones that count.
Each quiz card carries the same 📖 Pleco and 📕 HanziCraft links as the Anki cards, in the same two corners, behaving the same way. Reach for them when a card will not stick.
Keyboard: Space or Enter reveals, then 1 got it, 2 missed it, S skip, B back.
When you have marked anything as known, counters appear in the upper corners of the home screen — Type A on the left, Type B on the right — each showing your total against the size of the corpus. Click either one to open the known-cards viewer.
The viewer has a tab per mode and groups your characters into study sessions: entries added to the same set within ten minutes of each other are shown together with their date. It is a record of what you covered and when. Each group has a Remove group control, so if a session was marked known prematurely — or an export swept in more than you meant it to — you can put those characters back into circulation, and they will reappear, checked, the next time you build a deck from that set.
Your known lists live in your browser’s local storage on the device you are using. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and no one else can see what you have studied.
The trade-off is that this record is local. It does not follow you to another device or another browser, and it can be lost if you clear your browsing data or if the browser reclaims storage from sites it considers inactive. Use Export Progress on the home screen to save a copy, and Import Progress to restore it or carry it to another device.
Nothing else in the app depends on it — your decks, once downloaded, are yours permanently, and Anki keeps its own review history independently.
To Anki (.apkg) turns your current selection into an Anki deck. The first click takes a moment while the necessary tools load; after that it is immediate. Open the downloaded file and Anki imports it, with the card layout, fonts, and source tags already in place.
The deck is named after the set you selected, with its Chinese title — Heart Sutra 心經 — or, if you combined several sets, after those sets joined with “&”. You can edit the name in the field beside the button before downloading, or rename the deck inside Anki afterwards. Re-importing a corrected deck later updates your existing cards rather than duplicating them, so your review history survives.
If your selection spans several liturgies, Or keep the N decks separate appears under the button. It lists each set with its card count and a Download of its own, plus one button that saves them all as separate files in a row. Each becomes its own deck in Anki, named after its liturgy, rather than one combined deck. Either way the cards you export are marked known.
Under Download Data you will also find printable double-sided flashcard PDFs and the raw card data as CSV, XLSX, JSON, or Google Sheets. Choosing a format there does not download it — it reveals a download button, and for the PDFs the page count and the card design controls, so you can see what you are about to get.
Every screen has its own address, so a link you copy reproduces what you were looking at: a whole section, a specific combination of sets, or the known-cards viewer. Sending someone the link to a set gives them the same starting point you had — though not your known list, which stays on your device.
This deck is a study apparatus built on the published English translations of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association. Its purpose is to give students of the liturgy a term-level entry point into texts they already chant.
Chinese text and English translation are taken from the CTTB / DRBA editions of each liturgy. The English glosses are not machine translations. Each gloss is drawn from the published rendering of the line in which the term occurs, so that the vocabulary a student learns here is the vocabulary they encounter in the hall. Where a term has no isolable counterpart in the published English, a plain lexical gloss is supplied and marked by its brevity; no interpretive translation has been introduced.
Each liturgy is segmented at more than one level. A single character receives an entry where it carries independent meaning. Compounds of two or more characters receive their own entries, so that 香 and 讚 appear alongside 香讚. Phonetic transliterations of Sanskrit proper names — 阿彌陀佛, 舍利子 — are retained whole, since their constituent syllables carry no independent sense. Dhāraṇī are excluded from the vocabulary entirely.
Terms were aligned to their published English renderings with the assistance of large language models (Gemini and Claude). Their function was correspondence-finding between two existing texts rather than translation. Source transcriptions were checked against the printed editions, and readings that were ambiguous in the source were verified against page images before entry.
Two properties of the method should be understood before use.
First, the CTTB / DRBA translations are frequently interpretive rather than strictly literal, and are rendered at the level of the line. A gloss therefore records how a term was translated in that passage, which is not always the same as its lexical range.
Second, because compounds are decomposed into their constituents, a constituent character may inherit the sense of the compound in which it appeared. 天女 is rendered “goddess” as a unit; the published English contains no separate word answering to 女, and the entry for 女 accordingly reflects the compound’s sense rather than the character’s general meaning. This is a consequence of segmentation rather than an error in the underlying translation, and the compound entry is always present alongside it.
Typographical errors occur at a low rate across the corpus. Corrections are welcome.
This deck is designed to be used alongside an active installation of Pleco. It is not a substitute for a dictionary and does not attempt to be one; the two are meant to be open at the same time. Pleco is free for Android and for iPhone and iPad.
These entries are intended as an index to the liturgy, not as a lexicon. For each unfamiliar character, consult Pleco to establish the term’s fuller range of senses, then use Edit Note in Anki to record whichever glosses are useful. The deck is designed to be annotated. Every card carries a Pleco link in its bottom-right corner and a HanziCraft link in its bottom-left corner for exactly this purpose.
Students are advised to install a Buddhist lexicon in Pleco before beginning. In Pleco: Menu sidebar → Add-ons → Dictionaries → All Free Dictionaries; A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms appears partway down the list. Once installed, reorder it above the general dictionaries so that Buddhist senses are returned first. This matters: the published English of the liturgy frequently turns on a Buddhist sense that the general dictionaries do not carry.