Day 8 concludes Chapter 4, Understanding by Faith, and closes the second volume of the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma.

Last month I finished the prose section and now it’s time for the gathas.

Hearing your teaching of today,
We are dancing with joy.
We have never had
Such joy before.

You say:
‘The Sravakas will be able to become Buddhas.’
We have obtained unsurpassed treasures
Although we did not seek them.

Parable of the Rich Man and His Poor Son

You are like the father.
Knowing that we wished
To hear the Lesser Vehicle,
You did not say to us,
‘You will become Buddhas.’
You said of us to others:
‘Though they are my disciples, they are Sravakas.
They eliminated asravas,
But attained only the Lesser Vehicle.’

You said to us:
‘Expound the most excellent Way
[to Bodhisattvas]!
Those who practice the Way
Will be able to become Buddhas.’

By this order of yours
We expounded the unsurpassed Way
To the great Bodhisattvas
With various stories of previous lives,
With various parables and similes
And with various discourses.

Hearing the [Way, that is, the] Dharma from us,
Those sons of yours
Thought it over day and night,
And practiced it strenuously.
Thereupon the Buddha assured them
Of their future Buddhahood, saying to them:
‘You will become Buddhas
In your future lives.’

You expounded the real thing,
That is, the store
Of the hidden core of the Buddhas
Only to the Bodhisattvas.
You did not expound
This truth to us.

The poor son came to his father,
And took custody
Of the things of his father,
But wished to take none of them.
The same can be said of us.

We did not wish to have the treasure-store
Of the teachings of the Buddhas
Although we expounded it [to the Bodhisattvas].

We were satisfied with the elimination
Of illusions within ourselves.
What we accomplished was that elimination.
We did nothing more.

The Daily Dharma from Sept. 2, 2016, offers this to consider:

These verses are sung by Subhūti, Mahā-Kātyāyana, Mahā-Kāśyapa, and Mahā-Maudgalyāyana in Chapter Four of the Lotus Sūtra. They use the parable of the wayward son in this chapter to describe their own realization that the Buddha had not held any teaching back from them. Instead, the Buddha earlier allowed them to remain in the satisfaction of ending their own suffering. But before they can continue their progress towards the Buddha’s own enlightenment, they must give up their preoccupation with suffering, as the boy in the parable had to give up his idea of himself as a lowly hired worker, rather than the heir to his father’s treasure.

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