Blood Writing

Copying out sutras has long been regarded as highly meritorious within Mahayana Buddhism. Many texts extol the benefits of copying and distributing scriptures. The Lotus Sutra, for instance, emphasises that anyone who copies even a verse of its text is a spiritually advanced being. Copying sutras was a means to read, study, and memorize a sacred text and, through doing so, to generate merit, which might then be dedicated to departed relatives.

In China, devotees of particular sutras sometimes copied them out using a mixture of ink and their own blood. The justification for this practice comes from the apocryphal Brahma Net Sutra, which instructs: ‘keep, read and recite the scriptures and monastic regulations of the Great Vehicle with a single mind. Cut away your skin for paper, draw your blood for ink and use your marrow for water. Break off a piece of your own bone for a pen and copy out the Buddhist precepts.’

Blood writing is a form of self-sacrifice – the deliberate endurance of pain was regarded as spiritually meritorious and admirable. An especially dedicated individual might copy out the entire Avatamsaka Sutra (which in my English translation is about 2000 pages long) using their own blood. Blood writing remained popular into the modern period.