[Before] examining the Buddha’s opening remarks more closely, let us consider to whom he spoke them.

One might expect that he would address his remarks to Maitreya or to Mañjuśrī, the two interlocutors in the sūtra up to this point, and both also bodhisattvas. But he speaks instead to the monk Śāriputra. In the mainstream Buddhist tradition, that is, the monastic majority, who were not Mahāyāna followers, Śāriputra was renowned as the wisest of the Buddha’s disciples. Prior to becoming a disciple of the Buddha, he met a Buddhist monk and asked him what his teacher taught. When the monk demurred, saying that he was a beginner and thus unable to explain it in detail, Śāriputra asked for a summary. The monk replied with a single verse, “Of those things produced by causes, the Tathāgata has proclaimed their causes and also their cessation. Thus the great ascetic has spoken.” Merely by hearing those words, Śāriputra achieved the first level of enlightenment, the stage of the stream-enterer. According to tradition, the abhidharma, the part of the canon dealing with technical analysis of doctrine, was first taught by the Buddha to Śāriputra. Śāriputra was also one of the few monks whom the Buddha sanctioned to deliver discourses, so that some sūtras are spoken by Śāriputra rather than the Buddha.

Śāriputra is a śrāvaka and an arhat, having achieved the profound wisdom necessary to destroy all ignorance and to enter final nirvana upon his death. In the mainstream tradition, the Buddha is also called an arhat because he has achieved that same wisdom and will enter parinirväva at death. The primary difference between a buddha and an arhat in the early tradition appears to have been that a buddha discovers the path to nirvana without relying on a teacher, while an arhat must rely on the Buddha’s teachings to do so. A buddha also possesses certain supernormal powers that an arhat may not have, but both were held to partake equally in the liberating insight that is the goal of the Buddhist path. Because Śāriputra was the wisest of the arhats, one often asked to speak for the Buddha, there should not, from the perspective of the Buddhist mainstream, be a substantial difference between the wisdom of the Buddha and the wisdom of Śāriputra; there should not be something of substance that Śāriputra fails to understand, that is, not until these first remarks of Śākyamuni in the Lotus Sūtra. In another case of inversion, Śāriputra, like Maitreya in the preceding chapter, is perplexed.

The size of the Lotus Sūtra’s audience is the first sign of something extraordinary. A second sign is a second constituency within the audience: eighty thousand bodhisattvas.

In the early Buddhist tradition, and in what scholars have come to call “mainstream Buddhism” (that is, non-Mahāyāna), there are three paths to enlightenment. The first is the path of the śrāvaka or disciple (literally, “listener”), one who listens to the teachings of the Buddha, puts them into practice, and eventually achieves the state of the arhat, entering final nirvāṇa at death. The second is the path of the pratyekabuddha, or “solitary enlightened one.” Pratyekkabuddhas are rather enigmatic figures in Buddhist literature, said to prefer a solitary existence, achieving their liberation at a time when there is no buddha in the world. Having achieved their enlightenment, they do not teach others. The third path is that of the bodhisattva, a person capable of achieving the state of an arhat but who instead seeks the far more difficult and distant goal of buddhahood, perfecting himself over many billions of lifetimes so that he may teach the path to liberation to others at a time when it has been forgotten. Thus, a bodhisattva only achieves buddhahood at a time when the teachings of the previous buddha have faded entirely into oblivion, a process that takes many millions of millennia. Different versions of the tradition say that Śākyamuni Buddha, the buddha who appeared in India some two thousand five hundred years ago, was the fourth, the seventh, or the twenty-fifth buddha to appear in our world during the present cosmic age. There is a bodhisattva, Maitreya, said to be waiting in the Tuṣita (“Satisfaction”) heaven to be the next buddha, who will appear in our world when the teachings of our buddha have been completely forgotten, something that will not occur for millions of years. Śākyamuni and other, prior buddhas were bodhisattvas before their enlightenment. In the present age, mainstream Buddhism essentially recognizes only a single bodhisattva: Maitreya. The audience of the Lotus Sūtra, however, has eighty thousand bodhisattvas. The sūtra tells us that these eighty thousand bodhisattvas have “paid homage to countless hundreds of thousands of buddhas” (3), far more than four, seven, or twenty-five. The text lists eighteen of these bodhisattvas by name. They include two who would become the most famous in the Mahāyāna pantheon: Avalokiteśvara and Mañjuśrī. And they include the only bodhisattva whose name would have been recognized and whose existence would have been accepted by all: again, Maitreya. Thus, on the first page of the sūtra, a reader familiar with the canon would have been comforted by the familiar opening phrase and the familiar setting, only to be dumbfounded, and perhaps confounded, by the size and composition of the audience, an audience that grows even further as one reads on, with all manner of gods and demi gods arriving from their various heavens, each with hundreds of thousands of attendants. Also present is one human king, Ajātaśatru, apparently after he had repented the murder of his father, the Buddha’s patron and friend, Bimbisāra, king of Magadha.

Another nugget. While an academic exercise, I see this information as helpful for appreciating the intent of the authors of the sūtra. And, no, I do not have any problem with Mahāyāna sūtras being composed centuries after the historical Buddha’s death. Since nothing was written down during the Buddha’s lifetime, all sūtras reflect the efforts of later authors. The role of a sūtra is to be a guide, and I believe the Lotus Sūtra is the best guide.

As Two Buddhas authors explain in their Authors Introduction:

In the vast literature of Buddhism, the Lotus Sūtra stands as one of the most inspiring, and the most controversial, of Buddhist texts. As a Mahāyāna sūtra, a sūtra of the “Great Vehicle” tradition, the Lotus Sūtra was not accepted by the Buddhist mainstream of its own time as “the word of the Buddha” (buddha-vacana). It is not accepted as the word of the Buddha by the Theravāda traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia today. But in East Asia, especially in China and Japan, perhaps more than any other text, the Lotus Sūtra has come to define what distinguishes the Mahāyāna from the teachings that preceded it. Indeed, one might say that the Lotus Sūtra both explains that difference and then seeks to explain it away, asserting that the Mahāyāna and the earlier tradition both sprang from the Buddha’s single intent.

Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō

This should be Day 1 material, rather than today, and yesterday should have been Day 2. I’ve added tags to reflect that organization.