Two Buddhas, p24[Nichiren’s] earliest surviving essay, written when he was twenty-one, suggests that he already took the Lotus Sūtra to be the sole teaching of universal buddhahood; his subsequent studies enhanced and deepened this conviction. Throughout, he was guided by the words of the Nirvāṇa Sūtra — regarded in Tendai circles as a restatement of the Lotus — to “rely on the dharma and not on the person.” For Nichiren, this meant that one should rely on the sūtras rather than the works of later commentators or the opinions of contemporary teachers, however eminent. And among the sūtras, one should rely above all on the Lotus, which is complete and final, and not others, which are incomplete and provisional. It is essential to bear in mind that for Nichiren, as for many of his contemporaries, the sūtras were literally the Buddha’s words; the stages of his fifty-year teaching career as mapped out in the Tendai doctrinal classification system represented historical truth; and the ranking of particular scriptures in the Tendai hierarchy of teachings directly mirrored their degree of salvific power.
Category Archives: 2buddhas
Nichiren as Interpreter
Two Buddhas, p21-22The Japanese Buddhist teacher Nichiren (1222-1282), arguably the Lotus Sūtra’s most famous interpreter, lived and taught in a historical and cultural milieu quite different from that of the sūtra’s original compilers. As Buddhism spread through the Sinitic world, the Lotus had come to be widely revered as Śākyamuni Buddha’s highest and final teaching, and Nichiren asserted that only this sūtra represented his complete message. Like his contemporaries, Nichiren believed he was living in the age of the Final Dharma (J. mappō), a degenerate era when people are burdened by heavy karmic hindrances and liberation is difficult to achieve. Now in this evil era, he claimed, only the Lotus Sūtra leads to buddhahood; other teachings had lost their efficacy and must be set aside. Nichiren taught a form of Lotus practice accessible to all, regardless of social class or education: chanting the sūtra’s daimoku, or title, in the formula Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō. By chanting the daimoku with faith in the Lotus Sūtra, he said, one could realize buddhahood in this very lifetime. And, as faith in the Lotus Sūtra spread, the ideal buddha land would be realized in the present world.
Esoteric teachings
Two Buddhas, p21The buddha of the esoteric teachings is not the historical buddha Śākyamuni but the cosmic buddha who is timeless and omnipresent: all forms are his body, all sounds are his voice, and all thoughts are his mind, although the unenlightened do not realize this. Through the performance of the secretly transmitted “three mysteries” — the performing of mudrās or ritual gestures, the chanting of mantras, and the ritual use of mandalas — the esoteric adept was said to unite his body, speech, and mind with those of cosmic Buddha, thus “realizing buddhahood with this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu). Esoteric Buddhism contributed to the rise, in Japan’s medieval period, of the Tendai doctrine of original enlightenment (hongaku hōmon). According to this doctrine, buddhahood is not a distant goal but the true status of all things: the purpose of practice is not to “attain” buddhahood as a future aim but to realize that one is a buddha inherently. These developments all helped to shape the context in which Nichiren would read the Lotus Sūtra.
The Status of Arhatship
Two Buddhas, p58-59Different Mahāyāna sūtras treat the status of Arhatship — the goal of the mainstream tradition — in different ways, for example, as a lesser but still viable goal (as in The Inquiry of Ugra) or as an outright misunderstanding on the part of the Buddha’s disciples (as in the Vimalakirti Sūtra). There was a shared consensus, however, that persons of the first two vehicles, in liberating themselves from rebirth by achieving the goal of nirvāṇa, were thereby excluded from achieving the buddhahood that is gained on the bodhisattva path. The Lotus Sūtra is distinct in asserting that the apparent threefold division of the teaching into the distinct vehicles of śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas is only apparent: ultimately, all are following the bodhisattva path and will eventually become buddhas. This “revival” of śrāvakas, causing them to realize that they are actually bodhisattvas, was identified early on by Chinese exegetes as a crucial feature of the Lotus.
Intertwining of Mahāyāna threads
Two Buddhas, p11-12One way to think about the Mahāyāna is not as an internally consistent movement, but as an intertwining of texts made up of threads of varying circumference, weight, and texture. Among those threads, none is more luminous than the Lotus Sūtra, in part because of its influence and in part because so many things that we associate with “the Mahāyāna” are found there. Yet it is also a distinctive text with its own psyche and its own legacy of influence and interpretation. Indeed, the brilliance of the sūtra only becomes clear when one considers (or at least imagines) the circumstances of its composition, and the questions its authors wrestled with.
The perspective of two historical moments
Two Buddhas, p9-10[Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side] takes the form of a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sūtra. We consider the significance of each chapter from the perspective of two historical moments: what it may have meant in the first centuries of the Common Era in the Indian cultural sphere as the Lotus Sūtra came to take its present form, and how it was read by Nichiren in Japan roughly a thousand years later. Rather than divide the volume into two sections, the first commenting on the Lotus Sūtra itself and the second introducing Nichiren’s reading, we have intentionally alternated our discussion of the Lotus text with Nichiren’s comments in each chapter, to avoid as much as possible a somewhat artificial division between the original text and Nichiren’s later interpretations. For devotees of the Lotus Sūtra, text and interpretation have been inseparable – in effect, parts of the same scripture – as has been the case with many great religious texts over the course of history.
Variatons on Namu
Two Buddhas, pxiiWe have rendered the daimoku, the invocation of the Lotus Sūtra’s title taught by Nichiren, as Namu Myōhō-Renge-Kyō, which represents the proper romanization for scholarly writing. However, actual pronunciation may vary slightly according to the practice community; some groups collapse the second and third syllables, giving Nam Myōhō-Renge-Kyō (sometimes written without diacritics in their publications). The difference is not one of correct versus incorrect but simply reflects variations among the traditions of individual Nichiren Buddhist lineages.
The Promise of Protection
Two Buddhas, p262Samantabhadra specifically promises to protect those who “preserve this sūtra in the troubled world of five hundred years after.” … [T]he phrase “five hundred years after” was no doubt originally intended to designate the five hundred years following Śākyamuni’s parinirvāṇa, when the sūtra’s compilers believed they were living. However, East Asian commentators took the “five hundred years after” (which can also be read in Chinese as “the last five hundred years”) to mean the last of five five-hundred-year periods in the gradual decline of Buddhist practice and understanding said to take place over the 2,500 years following the Buddha’s passing. For Nichiren, it designated the beginning of the Final Dharma age, when he and his contemporaries believed they were living. This expression “five hundred years after” occurs twice in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter and three times in the present chapter. For Nichiren it predicted in the Buddha’s very words both the task being shouldered by himself and his disciples and the surety of its fulfillment. It designated the time when the buddhahood of ordinary people could be realized. As he wrote: “Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō will spread for ten thousand years and beyond, far into the future. Its merit can open the blind eyes of all sentient beings in the country of Japan and block the road to the Hell without Respite [Avici]. … A hundred years’ practice in the Land of Bliss cannot equal the merit gained from one day’s practice in this defiled world, and propagation [of the dharma] throughout the two thousand years of the True and Semblance Dharma ages is inferior to a single hour’s propagation in the Final Dharma age. This is in no way because of Nichiren’s wisdom, but solely because the time makes it so.”
Far From Ordinary
Two Buddhas, p252-252Nichiren referred to the two princes from the “Śubhavyūha” chapter in encouraging an unidentified couple, possibly Lord Matsuno of Suruga and his wife, who were mourning their deceased son and had apparently become more earnest in their Buddhist practice following his death. Nichiren’s disciple Nichiji, who was related to Matsuno and had reported the matter to Nichiren, informed him that the young man had not only been unusually handsome, but also straightforward and wise. According to Nichiren, Nichiji had told him that he had initially been struck with pity that so remarkable an individual should die young. “But on reflection, I realized that, because of this boy’s death, his mother aroused the aspiration for the way and his father began to take thought for his next life. This is far from ordinary, I thought. And the fact that they have placed faith in the Lotus Sūtra, which everyone opposes, must mean that their deceased son has been at their side, encouraging them to do so.” Nichiren told the parents that he fully concurred with Nichiji’s reading of events, adding, “The king Śubhavyūha was an evil monarch. But when guided by their two sons, the princes [Vimalagarbha and Vimalanetra], father and mother were both able to place their trust in the Lotus Sūtra and become buddhas. The same must be true in your case as well!”
The Workings of the Ten Rāksasis
Two Buddhas, p247Nichiren saw the workings of the ten rāksasis in the events surrounding him, both great and small. He saw their roles as protecting Lotus devotees, occasionally testing their faith, aiding their practice, relieving their sufferings, and chastising those who obstruct their devotion. To a follower, the lay monk Myōmitsu, he wrote: “The ten rāksasis in particular have vowed to protect those who embrace the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra. Therefore they must think of you and your wife as a mother does her only child … and safeguard you day and night.” To two new parents, the samurai Shijō Kingo and his wife, Nichiren wrote that the ten rāksasis would watch over their infant daughter, so that “wherever she may frolic or play, no harm will come to her; she will ‘travel fearlessly, like a lion king’.” He saw the protection of the ten rāksasis in the kindness of an elderly lay monk on Sado Island who had come to his aid, helping him to survive in exile, and in the devotion of a woman who had made him a robe to shield him from the cold in the recesses of Mount Minobu. Their protection was further evident to him in the fact that he had been able to escape unscathed from an attack on his dwelling in Kamakura and survived other threats as well. To two brothers whose father had threatened to disinherit them on account of their faith in the Lotus Sūtra, he suggested: “Perhaps the ten rāksasis have possessed your parents and are tormenting you in order to test your resolve.” He also asserted that the ten rāksasis, along with other deities, had induced the Mongol ruler to attack Japan to chastise its people for abandoning the Lotus Sūtra.