Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24422405-20150519150103/@comment-995426-20150520182428

No hiragana, no katakana, and definitely no rōmaji. Pure Chinese characters, which are the same thing as kanji (kan = "Han; Chinese"; ji = "character"). They're written in Chinese, so some of the are really hard to read. Judging from the chants Splinter and Leo used, it is Chinese&mdash;likely &mdash;using ( or ) pronunciations. The scroll itself seems to be written in vertical columns from right to left, which was the only typical way Chinese (or Japanese for that matter) were written before the 20th century. The fact that this mantra is in Chinese seems to be a  thing, since Classical Chinese has long been an important liturgical language (like Latin is for Roman Catholics); Japanese Zen Buddhism derived from Chinese Chán Buddhism (Middle Chinese Dzyen), which itself derived from the Indian  Buddhist practice of.

Problem is, I've never been fluent in Japanese or Chinese, nor do I know more than a few dozen kanji. I know all hiragana and katakana, but none of them are on this scroll, which is a huge giveaway that it's not written in the Japanese language itself. So far, these are the characters I've been able to decipher, in the first five columns from the right. Question marks are characters I skipped over because I haven't been able to decipher them yet.

  那慕薄？？？怛 路迦鉢？底尾始瑟 吒耶母馱耶薄？？ 审怛？野他唵尾戍 馱耶娑麼娑漫多？ It's possible some of them are mistakes.