Day 2 completes Chapter 1, Introductory.

Having last month learned of the Bodhisattva who was called Fame Seeking, we begin Manjusri’s repetition of what he saw, this time in gathas.

Thereupon Manjusri, wishing to repeat what he had said, sang in gathas in the midst of the great multitude:

According to my memory,
innumerable, countless kalpas ago,
There lived a Buddha, a Man of the Highest Honor,
Called Sun-Moon-Light.

That World-Honored One expounded the Dharma,
And caused innumerable living beings
And many hundreds of millions of Bodhisattvas
To enter the Way to the wisdom of the Buddha.

Seeing the Great Saint
Who had renounced the world,
The eight sons born to him when he was a king
Followed him, and performed brahma practices.

The Buddha expounded
To the great multitude
A sutra of the Great Vehicle
Called the ‘Innumerable Teachings.’

Having expounded this sutra, the Buddha sat cross-legged
On the seat of the Dharma [facing the east],
And entered into the samadhi
For the purport of the innumerable teachings.

The gods rained mandarava-flowers.
Heavenly drums sounded by themselves.
The gods, dragons, and other supernatural beings
Made offerings to the Man of the Highest Honor.

The worlds of the Buddhas quaked much.
The Buddha emitted a ray of light
From between his eyebrows,
And showed things rarely to be seen.

Back at the beginning of February on Day 31 I mentioned that I had recently been reading “Readings of the Lotus Sutra,” a book of essays on the Lotus Sutra edited by Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone. One essay, Gender and Hierarchy in the Lotus Sutra, uses the parables of the sutra to conclude that the sutra focuses on children who are inferior to their father in wisdom and realization. I used this to point out that this was not true in Chapter 27, King Wonderful-Adornment as the Previous Life of a Bodhisattva. In reading Day 2, it is untrue here as well. These sons realize their father’s accomplishment, dedicate themselves to the pursuit of Buddhahood and eventually become Buddhas themselves. Clearly, the conclusions of the essay Gender and Hierarchy in the Lotus Sutra suffers from its focus the parables of the Burning House, the Rich Man and His Poor Son and the Skillful Physician and His Sick Children. There is much more to the Lotus Sutra than the parables.