Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26184563-20130421015649/@comment-995426-20160505165314

The Chinese characters? Yes, gibberish. I had the scroll's text examined; individually, the characters are real, but together they don't mean anything intelligible. It's like someone chose a bunch of pretty-looking characters and chained them together without regard for meaning. It's meant to resemble a Buddhist sutra written in Classical Chinese.

Thus far there has been no in-universe magic. Splinter is intensely spiritually trained. The psychic powers on the show are a biological ability. Sir Malachi is a mutant whose "magic" was all a psychic illusion. Really the closest thing the show has to magic is Renet's time scepter, which is more of a supernatural consciousness that arbitrates fate, but could be explainable as a sufficiently advanced technology from the distant future involving quantum mechanics.

You can say some of the science fiction involved is soft on the sci-fi hardness scale, but that's an issue of plot holes, not of magic.