In 1993 I had been practicing what I considered to be Nichiren Buddhism for four years. I had started with Nichiren Shoshu of America before the split with Soka Gakkai and continued with Soka Gakkai after the divorce was finalized. I don’t recall ever being  encouraged to read the Lotus Sutra. I was certainly never encouraged to do more sutra recitation than the shindoku [the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese translation using Romanized text] and nothing beyond the Hoben Pon portion of Chapter 2, and Ji Ga Ge of Chapter 16. It was in this setting that I learned that Columbia University Press had published Burton Watson’s translation of the Lotus Sutra. Soka Gakkai held the copyright for the book and the local SGI community center bookstore had the book for sale. I purchased a copy. I read it once. I recall realizing that a single reading would not be sufficient to gain any appreciation of the sutra, but I never picked up that copy again.

It would be another 22 years before I again read the Lotus Sutra.

Today I’m beginning my 49th cycle through my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra practice. For 40 cycles I used Senchu Murano’s translation. Then I tried Leon Hurvitz’s Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma for a couple of cycles and followed that with the 1975 edition of The Threefold Lotus Sutra, which I dropped after just one cycle. I did one cycle with the BDK English Tripitaka translation and then shifted to Gene Reeves’ translation for two cycles. For the previous two cycles I’ve been using the 2019 edition of the Threefold Lotus Sutra.

I’ve now come full circle, back to Burton Watson’s translation. I’m curious what it will be like to read it again after 27 years.

In Watson’s Preface I still have the page corner turned down marking this quote:

The Lotus Sutra tells us at times that the Lotus Sutra is about to be preached, at other times it says that the Lotus Sutra has already been preached with such-and-such results, and at still other times it gives instructions on just how the Lotus Sutra is to be preached or enumerates in detail the merits that accrue to one who pays due honor to the text. But the reader may be forgiven if he comes away from the work wondering just which of the chapters that make it up was meant to be the Lotus Sutra itself. One writer has in fact been led to describe the sutra as a text “about a discourse that is never delivered, a lengthy preface without a book.*” This is no doubt because Mahayana Buddhism has always insisted that its highest truth can never in the end be expressed in words, since words immediately create the kind of distinctions that violate the unity of Emptiness. All the sutra can do, therefore, is to talk around it, leaving a hole in the middle where truth can reside.

Watson, pxx-xxi

* George J. Tanabe, Jr, and Wilma Jane Tanabe, eds., The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), p. 2 in the introductory chapter by Professor George Tanabe.

When I first read this I could not have possibly fathomed the meaning of that hole in the middle, that central emptiness. As Watson points out in the Preface:

This is the first point to keep in mind in reading the Lotus Sutra. Its setting, its vast assembly of listeners, its dramatic occurrences in the end belong to a realm that totally transcends our ordinary concepts of time, space, and possibility. Again and again we are told of events that took place countless, indescribable numbers of kalpas or eons in the past, or of beings or worlds that are as numerous as the sands of millions and billions of Ganges rivers. Such “numbers” are in fact no more than pseudonumbers or non-numbers, intended to impress on us the impossibility of measuring the immeasurable. They are not meant to convey any statistical data but simply to boggle the mind and jar it loose from its conventional concepts of time and space. For in the realm of Emptiness, time and space as we conceive them are meaningless; anywhere is the same as everywhere, and now, then, never, forever are all one.

Watson, pxvi

How to comprehend this?

Very early in the sutra the Buddha warns us that the wisdom of the Buddhas is extremely profound and difficult to comprehend, and this warning is repeated frequently in later chapters. …

But of course in the view of religion there are other approaches to truth than merely through words and intellectual discourse. The sutra therefore exhorts the individual to approach the wisdom of the Buddhas through the avenue of faith and religious practice. The profound influence which the Lotus Sutra has exerted upon the cultural and religious life of the countries of eastern Asia is due as much to its function as a guide to devotional practice as to the actual ideas that it expounds. It calls upon us to act out the sutra with our bodies and minds rather than merely reading it, and in that way to enter into its meaning.

Watson, pxx-xxi

This is the Essential emptiness. Chih-i equated the Ultimate Truth with the empty space inside a house (The Ulimate Empty Space). The teachings of the Buddha provide the roof beams and pillars, and Lotus Sutra gathers the whole into a house with empty rooms in which to practice. The Emptiness is essential to the function of the house, to the teaching of the Lotus Sutra.