The Lotus Sūtra, like all Mahāyāna sūtras, is an apocryphal text, composed long after the Buddha’s death and yet retrospectively attributed to him. To establish its authenticity, the Lotus Sūtra must produce its own community of faith, but it must also respond to its enemies, those who declare, with some historical justification, that the Lotus Sūtra is a fraud, a work that only pretends to be the word of the Buddha. This seems, in fact, to have been a frequent charge leveled by mainstream monastics against the Mahāyāna sūtras. When prominent monks and nuns of the Buddhist community in India, where the Lotus Sūtra first appeared, declared it to be spurious, noting, correctly, that it was not to be found anywhere in the various collections that had been compiled in the centuries since the Buddha’s death, the proponents of the Lotus Sūtra had to respond. They could not claim that the sūtra appeared in the existing collections, because it did not. How could the Lotus Sūtra have been spoken by the Buddha without others knowing about it? One implicit explanation is that before the Buddha could teach the sūtra, five thousand members of the audience stood up and walked out. They did not know about the Lotus Sūtra because they were not there to hear it. If these arrogant monks and nuns had only stayed, they would have heard the Buddha preach the Lotus Sūtra. (Although we are now partway through the second chapter, the Lotus Sūtra has apparently not yet begun.) One could also see this mass exit as a criticism of those mainstream monastics who rejected the Lotus Sūtra. “The roots of error among this group had been deeply planted, and they were arrogant,” we are told, and the Buddha himself is made to dismiss them as “useless twigs and leaves.”

Although we are now [ONLY] partway through the second chapter, to use Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s words, I have run out of patience. When I wrote Two Authors Seated Side By Side earlier this week, I said I was “wary of Lopez’s influence on Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, but I’m excited about the opportunity to use this book in my daily practice.” Now I’m just annoyed. Jacqueline I. Stone’s descriptions of Nichiren, his times and his thinking, are excellent. She maintains academic detachment without resorting to the sort of disparagement that Lopez inserts at each opportunity – “the Lotus Sūtra has apparently not yet begun.”

Picking someone who demonstrably has such little respect for the Lotus Sutra to be its auditor is a waste. Imagine if Stone had had the opportunity to partner with the late Gene Reeves to write this book. That would be worth buying. Were it not for Stone’s part in this book, I would put it down now and never pick it up again.

I’m going to keep using quotes from the book where they offer insight into the sutra, especially Stone’s insight.