Chinese commentaries on the Lotus and other sūtras were produced in great numbers, especially during the fifth through tenth centuries. Through commentary, and other forms of interpretation as well, the sūtras were given innovative readings and made to speak to issues specific to the interpreter’s own time and place. Thus, a third aim of the current volume is to explore this living interface between text and commentary in Buddhism, using the Lotus as an exemplar.

Rather than taking on the impossible task of cataloging the long tradition of commentary on the Lotus Sūtra across Asia, we focus on the Japanese figure Nichiren (1222-1282), who stands among the greatest of the Lotus Sūtra interpreters.

A third message that Nichiren drew from the story of the buddha Mahābhijfiājfiānābhibhū [Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Tathāgata] and his sixteen sons was the importance of perseverance in practice. In the “Parable” chapter, Śākyamuni tells Śāriputra that he had once followed the bodhisattva path in prior lifetimes but had since forgotten it. What had caused Śāriputra, this wisest of all śrāvakas, to “forget” and abandon the bodhisattva way? The Lotus Sūtra does not tell us, but a story in the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom (Dazhi du lun) and other sources fills in the gap. It explains that in the past, Śāriputra had already practiced bodhisattva austerities for sixty eons and was cultivating the virtue of giving or generosity, the first of the pāramitās or perfections that a bodhisattva must master on the path to buddhahood. At that point, a certain beggar (in alternate versions, a brahman) asked for one of his eyes. When Śāriputra replied that his eye could not possibly benefit anyone else, the beggar rebuked him, saying that so long as Śāriputra was committed to mastering the practice of generosity, he could not refuse to give what was requested of him. Śāriputra accordingly plucked out an eye and offered it. The beggar sniffed it, flung it to the ground, and stepped on it. Disgusted, Śāriputra concluded that such people were hopeless. At that point, he abandoned the bodhisattva’s commitment to saving others and retreated to the śrāvaka’s pursuit of personal nirvāṇa. In Nichiren’s reading, Śāriputra, deceived by evil influences, had abandoned the Lotus Sūtra for provisional teachings and, as a result, had fallen into the Avici hell, languishing there for vast numbers of eons. Not until he re-encountered Śākyamuni Buddha in the present world was he again able to hear the Lotus Sūtra, regain the bodhisattva path, and receive a prediction of future buddhahood.

In terms of practice, the account of Śākyamuni Buddha’s instruction as unfolding over many lifetimes in the “Apparitional City” chapter assumes a double significance in Nichiren’s thought. On the one hand, this account teaches the need to maintain one’s own practice of the Lotus Sūtra, no matter what hardships or discouragement one might encounter. At the same time, it suggests that teaching the daimoku to others, even if they initially mock or malign it, is always a fruitful effort, establishing for them a karmic connection with the Lotus Sūtra and thus ensuring that they will one day achieve buddhahood.

In Buddhism, one could perhaps say that, in a certain sense, all scripture is commentary. That is, all Buddhist traditions hold that the Buddha’s enlightenment was complete, that he attained complete knowledge of the state of liberation and the path to it during his meditation on that full-moon night. Thus, everything that he spoke thereafter was in a sense an articulation of that experience, adapted for the audience he was addressing. This is one reason why the events immediately following the Buddha’s enlightenment, the period of forty-nine days in which he savored the experience of his enlightenment without speaking, is the focus of so much interest in the tradition. Should he teach? If so, whom should he teach? And what should he teach them? These questions appear in the earliest renditions of the story of the Buddha’s awakening, and they reappear, with important refinements, in the second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra.

The authors of the Lotus Sūtra were deeply learned in the language of Buddhism, and the text is filled with all manner of allusions to, and radical reinterpretations of, the Buddha’s teachings. A second goal of this book, therefore, is to focus on what was at stake in the compilation of a Mahāyāna sūtra — what it meant to compose a revelation of a new teaching, to legitimize that revelation as the Buddha’s words, and then to use it as a polemic against the established tradition. Readers accustomed to the traditional claim held by many devotees, that the Lotus Sūtra is the teaching of the historical Buddha expounded in the last eight years of this life, may initially find this perspective challenging. We suggest, however, that one’s appreciation of the brilliance and power of the Lotus Sūtra is only enhanced when the historical circumstances of its composition are taken into consideration. That is, the genius of the Lotus Sūtra becomes fully apparent only when one engages with the kinds of questions the compilers themselves were compelled to address.

Unlike Saichō, … Nichiren did not ground his own argument that all can attain buddhahood in claims for universal suchness, a term that occurs only rarely in his writings but, rather, in the mutual inclusion of the ten realms. This doctrine also renders irrelevant Hossō and Kegon claims that the Lotus Sūtra should be ranked below the Explanation of the Intention or Flower Garland sūtras because the parable of the wealthy man and his impoverished son, on which the Tendai hierarchy of Buddhist teachings is based, was spoken by śrāvakas. Nichiren wrote, “The four śrāvakas expressed their understanding, saying, ‘The most magnificent jewels have been obtained without being sought or awaited.’ They represent the śrāvaka realm within ourselves.” Central to Nichiren’s understanding was the idea that, because the ten realms are mutually inclusive, if beings of one realm can attain buddhahood, so can those of any other. In his reading, the initial chapters of the Lotus Sūtra open buddhahood not merely to previously exduded śrāvakas, but to all beings.

For Nichiren, convinced as he was that only the Lotus Sūtra leads to liberation in the mappō era, preaching exclusive devotion to the Lotus was not dogmatic self-assertion, but a compassionate act of bodhisattva practice. Whether others accepted the Lotus Sūtra or rejected it, telling them of its teaching would implant the seed of enlightenment in their minds and thereby enable them to establish a karmic connection to the sūtra that would someday allow them to realize buddhahood, whether in this lifetime or a future one.

Here in Chapter Two, [the Buddha] provides a commentary on his own earlier teachings, looking back on the teaching of what he had taught long ago, accounting for it, and almost renouncing it. Central to this retelling is the claim that had befuddled Śāriputra and the other arhats: that the apparent division of the Buddha’s teaching into three vehicles was the Buddha’s “skillful means” that lead ultimately to the one buddha vehicle. In the words of the great Chinese exegete Zhiyi, the Lotus “opens the three vehicles to reveal the one vehicle.” The sūtra’s initial declaration of this teaching appears here in the second chapter and is further elaborated in Chapters Three through Nine by means of parables and other explanations. In Zhiyi’s analysis, these eight chapters together constitute the “main exposition” section of the sutra’s first half or trace teaching (shakumon in Japanese). They may also represent the earliest stratum of the sūtra’s compilation.

In its original context, the message of the “one buddha vehicle” first articulated in Chapter Two was directed from the marginal Mahāyāna movement toward the Buddhist mainstream, that is, the majority of monks and nuns who counted themselves as śrāvakas and aspired to the arhat’s nirvāṇa. But a thousand years later, in medieval Japan, the Mahāyāna was the mainstream; that is, Japanese Buddhism was entirely Mahāyāna, and there were no śrāvakas, except those mentioned in texts. Largely through the influence of the Lotus-based Tendai Buddhist tradition, the idea that buddhahood is at least in theory open to all had gained wide currency. In Nichiren’s reading, the thrust of the Lotus Sūtra’s one-vehicle argument therefore shifts in significant ways. No longer is it about opening buddhahood to specific categories of persons previously excluded, that is, to people of the two lesser vehicles. Rather, it is about opening buddhahood as a reality for all beings, in contrast to what Nichiren deemed purely abstract or notional assurances of buddhahood in other, provisional Mahāyāna teachings. Recall that, in the Tendai tradition in which Nichiren had been trained, the Lotus Sūtra is “true” and all others are “provisional,” meaning that the Lotus Sūtra is complete and all-encompassing, while other teachings are accommodated to their listeners’ understanding and therefore partial and incomplete. For Nichiren, now in the age of the Final Dharma, only the Lotus Sūtra embodied the principles by which Buddhist practitioners could truly realize enlightenment.