[A]fter Zhiyi’s time, through the efforts especially of Zhanran and the Korean scholar-monk Chegwan, the Tiantai school gradually developed a model that divides the Buddha’s teaching career into five periods that span fifty years. According to this model, the Buddha began by preaching the Flower Garland Sūtra (Avatamsaka Sūtra), a highly advanced doctrine directed solely to bodhisattvas. None of the śrāvakas in the assembly could understand it and were struck dumb, just as the impoverished son was terrified when first forcibly approached by his father’s attendants. Seeing that the Flower Garland teaching was beyond his auditors’ capacity, the Buddha then backtracked and for twenty years preached the āgamas, … emphasizing the four noble truths, the twelve-linked chain of dependent origination, and the goal of nirvāṇa — that is, the teachings sometimes disparaged as the “Hinayāna.” This period corresponds to the wealthy man hiring his son to sweep manure for twenty years. In the third period, seeing that his followers were maturing, the Buddha preached the vaipulya or introductory Mahāyāna teachings such as the Vimalakirti Sūtra, which criticize the one-sided emphasis on emptiness and detachment found in the āgamas and instead extol the way of the bodhisattva. This corresponds to the son having “free access to his father’s house” yet still living in his own humble quarters. In the fourth period, the Buddha preached the prajn͂ā or wisdom teachings, which integrate all of his teachings up to that point in the two discernments of emptiness and wisdom by which bodhisattvas both uproot attachment and act compassionately in the world. This corresponds to the wealthy man entrusting the care of his fortune to his impoverished son. Then finally, in the fifth period, during the last eight years of his life, the Buddha set aside the coarse and incomplete provisional teachings of the preceding four periods and preached the perfect teaching that opens buddhahood to all. This teaching is represented by the Lotus Sūtra, and — in the Tiantai reading — restated in the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, said to have been preached just before the Buddha’s passing. This corresponds to the father, now approaching death, publicly acknowledging his son and bequeathing all of his wealth to him. In this way, the parable of the wealthy householder provided a basis for grasping the entirety of the Buddha’s teachings as integrated into a single, comprehensive chronological and soteriological agenda, by which he sought to gradually cultivate his followers’ capacity until they were mature enough to receive and accept the message of the one buddha vehicle.

By Nichiren’s time, educated people were often familiar with these stories, and the Lotus Sūtra’s message that all could attain buddhahood was widely accepted — although how that buddhahood was to be achieved and how long it might take were subjects of debate. Nichiren himself sometimes alludes to these parables in advocating the daimoku as the path of realizing buddhahood in the present age, but he rarely dwells on them at length.

Nichiren makes only limited reference to the parable of the burning house that occupies most of this chapter’s narrative. In a few passages, he refers to the great cart drawn by a white ox metaphorically as the vehicle that will carry Lotus Sūtra practitioners to “the pure land of Vulture Peak,” that is, the realm of enlightenment, or as a war chariot that he rides in a great dharma battle between true and provisional teachings. He does not provide an extended discussion of the parable itself. Rather, as we go through these initial chapters of the Lotus, we will see how Nichiren drew out the significance of other passages that might not seem central to the sūtra’s narrative but that assume considerable importance in his reading, a reading that was shaped by the sūtra’s reception history, by his contemporary circumstances, and by his own perspective.

[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.

Starting what will be at least two cycles through my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra practice tied to the new book Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, I’ve got lots to say.

First, I’m constantly reminded that this is not a Buddhist text but instead an academic text about Buddhism. Grin and bear such slights as:

As we shall see, the Lotus Sūtra is obsessed, perhaps above all, with its own legitimation, with an almost palpable anxiety to prove that it was spoken by the Buddha. That obsession is evident from the first three words of the Sanskrit text: evam mayā ‘rutam, ” thus have I heard.”

or this:

Roughly a thousand years after the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, in an entirely different cultural sphere, the Buddhist teacher Nichiren maintained that now in the time of mappō, the entire sūtra was encompassed in its daimoku or title, and that chanting the title was the chief practice of the Lotus Sūtra for the present era. “Whatever sūtra he expounded,” Nichiren wrote, “the Buddha assigned it a title expressing its ultimate principle.” Today we know that the historical Buddha did not preach, let alone name, the Lotus Sūtra, but the idea that a sūtra’s title embodies its essence was well established in Nichiren’s time.

And I’m just going to ignore the declaration that the “early Buddhist tradition” will be called “mainstream Buddhism,” the choice of modern scholars, we’re told on Page 37. Mahāyāna is not mainstream? Seriously?

But that is not to say I haven’t found nuggets worth picking up and putting in my pocket.

Take for example the discussion of what “mainstream” Buddhists would be shocked by in the first chapter, Introduction.

There is much to ponder here [in Mañjuśrī’s recollection of time long in the past], as the Lotus Sūtra makes a powerful claim for its own authority. The sūtra, which no one has ever heard before, is not new. In fact, it is very old, so old that it has been all but forgotten. It was taught many eons ago, by a buddha so ancient that his name does not appear in the standard list of the previous buddhas. The only familiar name in the story is Dipamkara (16), the first buddha in the list of twenty-five buddhas of the past, according to the Pali tradition.

In that tradition, it was at the feet of Dipamkara that Sumedha, the yogin who would one day become Śākyamuni Buddha, vowed to follow the long bodhisattva path to buddhahood. It was Dipamkara who prophesied that Sumedha would become a buddha named Gautama. Hence, the first buddha known to the collective memory of the tradition was the last son of the last buddha Candrasūryapradipa [the Buddha Sun-Moon-Light in Muran’s translation] to become enlightened. This means that the story told by Mañjuśrī is about events in a past so distant that no record of them exists. In other words, prior even to the time of the buddha Dipamkara, under whom the buddha of our world, Gautama or Śākyamuni, first took his bodhisattva vows, another buddha, Candrasūryapradipa, taught the Lotus Sūtra. Furthermore, Candrasūryapradipa was Dipamkara’s father, placing him in a position of authority, both in age and in lineage, to the first buddha named by the tradition. The Lotus Sūtra is therefore older than any teaching previously known.

And this description of how the shaking of the worlds in Chapter 1 is linked by Nichiren to the devastating quakes of his time:

Nichiren was initially moved to remonstrate with government authorities by the suffering he had witnessed following a devastating earthquake in 1257. It was then that he composed and submitted his treatise Risshō ankoku ron, his first admonishment to persons in power. Initially he saw that earthquake as collective karmic retribution for the error of neglecting the Lotus Sūtra. But over time it came to evoke for him the shaking of “the whole buddha world” (5) in the “Introduction” chapter presaging Śākyamuni’s preaching of the Lotus. Thus the 1257 quake assumed for him a second meaning as a harbinger of the spread of the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, the teaching for the Final Dharma age. “From the Shōka era (1257-1259) up until the present year (1273) there have been massive earthquakes and extraordinary celestial portents,” he wrote. “… You should know that these are no ordinary auspicious or inauspicious omens concerning worldly affairs. They herald nothing less than the rise or decline of this great dharma.” Just as the quaking of the earth had presaged the Buddha’s preaching of the Lotus Sūtra, a violent earthquake had preceded his own dissemination of the sūtra and the practice of chanting its daimoku. This is but one example of how Nichiren read the events of his own life and times as mirrored in the Lotus Sūtra.

It looks like I’m going to have pockets full of nuggets when this journey is complete.