Category Archives: Innumerable

LS32, Innumerable

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

In the second chapter of The Infinite Meanings Sutra, we get this discussion of emptiness:

The Buddha replied: “O you of good intent! This particular Dharma approach is known as Infinite Meanings. A bodhisattva who wishes to achieve mastery in the practice of Infinite Meanings must perceive and observe that, in and of themselves, all phenomena intrinsically have been, successively will be, and currently are tranquil and empty in nature and aspect, without greatness or smallness, without origination or cessation, neither fixed nor moving, non-advancing and non-retreating. Like the emptiness of space, they are without duality. Living beings, however, thoughtlessly and falsely make polar assessments: ‘It is this,’ ‘It is that’; ‘It is gain,’ ‘It is loss.’ Unwholesome thoughts arise in them, producing harmful karmic causes. They cycle and recycle in the six realms of existence, piling up harmful passions and sufferings, and for hundreds of millions of myriads of kalpas they cannot break themselves free. Clearly perceiving this, the great-being bodhisattva must bring forth a mind of mercy and give rise to great compassion—particularly wishing to relieve living beings of suffering.

“He or she must then more completely fathom all phenomena: aspects of phenomena being as such, as such will phenomena come forth; aspects of phenomena being as such, as such will phenomena settle; aspects of phenomena being as such, as such will phenomena change; aspects of phenomena being as such, as such will phenomena become void. Aspects of phenomena being as such, an unwholesome phenomenon is able to come forth. Aspects of phenomena being as such, a wholesome phenomenon is able to come forth. So it is also with regard to settling, changing, and becoming void.

“After perceiving, observing, and fully understanding everything about these four modes from beginning to end, the bodhisattva must next perceive and observe that all phenomena are impermanent—coming forth and becoming void over and over again from moment to moment, and further grasp that their coming forth, settling, changing, and becoming void are instantaneously occurring. Having perceived and comprehended this, the bodhisattva will then have insight into the various conditioned desires of the senses of living beings.

When I read this it struck me how this is the foundation upon which Ichinen Sanzen is built.

LS32, Innumerable, b4today

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

Following today’s recitation of The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, I offer Nikkyō Niwano’s discussion of the Buddha’s teaching for Bodhisattvas in Chapter 2: Preaching [Dharma Discourse]:

The six worlds continually occur in man’s mind and shift from one to another. This state of mind is called “transmigration within the six worlds” (rokudō rinne). If we have no good teaching and no way of practice, we permanently transmigrate within the six worlds, and our distresses and sufferings will never disappear. Anyone will realize this as soon as he reflects on himself.

The Buddha taught the bodhisattvas as follows: “When you, bodhisattva-mahāsattvas, observe all the living beings who are transmigrating within the six realms of existence, you should raise the mind of compassion and display great mercy so as to relieve them from such realms. First, you must penetrate deeply into all the laws. If you understand them deeply, you can realize naturally what may emerge from them in the future. You can also realize that they remain settled, without changing, for a time. You can also realize that they change. Moreover, you can realize that they eventually vanish. Thus you can observe and know the reasons that good and evil laws emerge. Having finished observing and knowing all four aspects of the laws from beginning to end, next you should observe that none of the laws remains settled for even a moment, but emerges and vanishes anew every moment. After such observations, you can know the capacity, the nature, and the desires that each living being possesses as if you had penetrated each of their minds.”

Buddhism for Today, p9
LS32, Innumerable, b4today

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

For today’s journey through The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, I offer Nikkyō Niwano’s discussion of the 10 Merits gained by the practicer of this sutra:

This [Ten Merits] chapter expounds the merit one can gain, the virtuous deeds he can accomplish, and the service he can render to society if he understands the teachings preached in this sutra. Some people say that religion should not bring merit to its believers, but this is a specious argument. It would be, rather, a wonder if one did not gain merit when he truly understood a correct religion, believed in it deeply, and practiced it. Needless to say, there are varying degrees of merit according to one’s degree of understanding and the speed of the actual manifestation of merit. In any case, it is natural for one to gain merit through his religion when he has faith in it.

As mentioned earlier, the teachings of the Buddha are the truth of the universe, which of course includes human beings. It is no wonder, and certainly no miracle, that if one lives according to the truth, his life works out well. This is like the fact that if we switch on the television set and tune in exactly to the wavelength beamed from a particular television station, a vivid image appears on the screen and a clear voice is heard.

If no image appears on the television screen, however often we try to tune in the channel, the television set is useless. It will be put away in some storeroom, where it will be covered with dust. Numerous religions have sprung up throughout history, but some of them have gradually lost their power and finally have become distant from the people. This is because they have forgotten the merit to be gained by believers, or because they have preached only the merit to be gained after death – that one will go to heaven or be reborn in paradise.

The true teachings of the Buddha, however, do not preach an intangible merit that one cannot realize until after death. The merit preached by the Buddha appears clearly in our lives in this world. In addition to ourselves, it is a merit that exerts an influence upon all of society and upon all people. If we disregard this merit and make light of it, it is as if we deliberately shut out the light of the Buddha’s teachings with a black curtain. Such an attitude is due to the shallow understanding peculiar to people today.

We should abandon such shallow thinking and bathe ourselves in the light of the Buddha by drawing aside the curtain. This is the true hope of the Buddha and the sole purpose of his appearance in this world.

Buddhism for Today, p13-14
d22b, d23b, WONS, 2buddhas, Innumerable

The All-Encompassing Lotus Sutra

Nichiren grounded his reasoning in his understanding that the Lotus Sūtra, and specifically its title, is all-encompassing. In a famous passage, he explained that simply by upholding the daimoku, one can gain the merit of the entire bodhisattva path: “The Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings states: ‘Even if one is not able to practice the six perfections, they will spontaneously be fulfilled.’ The Lotus Sūtra states, ‘They wish to hear the all-encompassing way. …’ The heart of these passages is that Śākyamuni’s causal practices and their resulting merits are inherent in the five characters myō-hō-ren-ge-kyō. When we embrace these five characters, he will spontaneously transfer to us the merits of his causes and effects.”

Two Buddhas, p196-197
LS32, Innumerable, Blog

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

Each time through The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra (Watson translation this time), I’m confronted with the question of how to describe the Buddha’s appearance. In particular, the sign that appears on his chest.

It was during my 21-day stay-cation retreat last year that I first read The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings (Reeves translation that time) and found this:

His chest, marked with a swastika,
Is like the chest of a lion.

I have known about the use of the swastika as a Buddhist marking for some time. I wrote about the decoration atop the Hanamatsuri shrine at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. That post has a lot of nice background information that I won’t bother to duplicate here.

The point today is the decision of translators – other than Reeves – to avoid confusing the mark with the Nazi symbol.

The BDK English Tripitaka translation by Kubo and Logan offers:

Your chest is like that of a lion, and it is marked with the sign of virtue. (Page 13)

While the Kosei publishing 1975 translation by Tamura, Schiffer and Del Campana used the “swastika mark,” the “Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers” (Kosei 2019) translated by Shinozaki, Ziporyn and Earhart follows the BDK English Tripitaka example and offers:

His chest, bearing the mark of virtue, is like a lion’s chest.

Which brings us the reason I’m rehashing all this today.

Burton Watson’s translation of The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra chooses to keep the literal character while eschewing the word swastika.

… breast displaying a fylfot pattern; lion chested; …

The Buddha and the Fylfot

While I admire Watson’s effort to remain true to the literal text (see A Note About Translations at the bottom of yesterday’s post for another example), why can’t translators use the proper spelling of the word swastika, which is svastika? That eliminates the Nazi baggage and restores the idea that this image on the Buddha’s chest “is a statement of affirmation, ‘It is!’ ‘Life is good!’ ‘There is value’ ‘There is meaning!’ Svastika is a term that affirms the positive values of life.” (Also see this discussion of the Japanese meaning of the symbol Manji.)

And getting back to the topic of The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra …

See The Essential Point

LS32, Innumerable, b4today

The Essential Point

The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings ends with the following words: “At that time all in the great assembly, greatly rejoicing together, made salutation to the Buddha, and taking possession of the sutra, withdrew.” To sum up briefly the essential point of this sutra, it is that all the laws originate from one Law, namely, the real state of all things. All phenomena of the universe, including human life, manifest themselves in myriad different ways, and appear, disappear, move, and change. Man’s mind is apt to be led astray in suffering from and worrying about discrimination and change. If we pay no attention to such visible discrimination and change, and if we are able to see in depth the true state of things transcending surface discrimination, the true state that is unchangeable forever, we will be able to attain the mental state of being free of all things while leading ordinary everyday lives.

However, the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings does not explain in detail what the “real state of all things” is and what we should do to discern it. This important point is elucidated in the Lotus Sutra, which follows.

Buddhism for Today, p19
d1b, 2buddhas, Innumerable

The Great Instruction

With the audience having been enumerated [in Chapter 1, Introductory], the Buddha then teaches a Mahāyāna sūtra identified in Sanskrit as Mahānirdeśa. However, nothing of the content of that teaching is provided, and mahānirdeśa is a generic term that simply means “great instruction.” Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation, however, renders this as “a Mahāyāna sūtra named Immeasurable Meanings,” and by the fifth century, a text purporting to be this very sutra was circulating in China, also with the name Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings (Ch. Wuliang yi jing), said to have been translated by a monk named Dharmāgatayaśas. No Sanskrit original, or reference to the Sanskrit original, has been located, nor are any other translations attributed to Dharmāgatayaśas, leading scholars to consider the text to be a Chinese apocryphon, a work composed in China that purports to be not only of Indian origin but spoken by the Buddha himself. It achieved canonical status in China, where it is regarded as the first of three sūtras comprising the so-called threefold Lotus Sūtra. The text itself is short, not quite thirty pages in English translation, and has only three chapters. The first describes the bodhisattvas present in the assembly and reports their lengthy praise of the Buddha. In the second, the Buddha praises the importance of the Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings and then gives the actual teaching, which is that, although buddhas teach immeasurable meanings, they all originate from a single dharma, which is without form. Also in the chapter the Buddha says, “For more than forty years I have expounded the dharma in all manner of ways through adeptness in skillful means, but the core truth has still not been revealed.” East Asian commentators would find great meaning in this statement, for it serves to position the Lotus Sūtra as the Buddha’s final teaching. The third and longest chapter is devoted to ten benefits accruing to those who hear one verse of this sūtra or keep, read, recite, and copy the sūtra.

Two Buddhas, p39-40
LS32, Innumerable, b4today

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

I feel it somehow fitting to begin this extended cycle through the Lotus Sutra with Nikkyō Niwano’s conclusion of his commentary on the Lotus Sutra in his book, Buddhism For Today: A Modern Interpretation of the threefold Lotus Sutra.

When you have read through the entire Threefold Lotus Sutra and have examined yourself in the light of its teachings, you may find that the actual state of your mind is so imperfect as to seem hopeless, and you may feel at a loss as to what to do. I was told that someone confessed that he found it hard to approach the Lotus Sutra again after having read it because of its extreme profundity. I can understand why he felt cowed by the profundity of the sutra. I suspect, however, that he had not read the sutra deeply enough, and that if he had read it repeatedly, he would have come to regard it as the teaching capable of leading all of us directly to salvation. We should start our practice from even one teaching in the Lotus Sutra and from even the smallest act in our daily lives. The sutra itself exhorts us not to think that its teachings are beyond our capacities.

There is an appropriate story in the Sutra of a Hundred Parables (Hyakuyu-kyō) … . Once there was a very stupid man. As he was parched with thirst, he roamed here and there looking for water. While walking about, he luckily arrived at the shore of the Sindh River. For some reason, however, he just stood on the riverbank instead of drinking. A friend nearby wondered at his behavior and asked him, “Why don’t you drink the water in the river?” The man answered, “I am dying for a drink! But the river has so much water that I cannot possibly drink it all. So I am hesitating as to whether I should drink or not.”

I sincerely hope that no one will harbor such a foolish idea toward the teaching of the Threefold Lotus Sutra.

Buddhism for Today, p460

The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings list 10 benefits of progressively more impressive stature for those who read or hear the sutra, but the first benefit, when one is just introduced to the sutra, is its most profound:

The Buddha said: “Good sons, first, this sutra leads a not-yet-awakened bodhisattva to aspire to awakening, leads one without human kindness to aspire to kindness, leads one with a murderous heart to aspire to great compassion, leads one who is jealous to aspire to respond with joy, leads one with attachments to aspire to impartiality, leads one who is greedy to aspire to generosity, leads one who is full of arrogance to aspire to be moral, leads one who is angry to aspire to patience, leads one who is lazy to aspire to perseverance, leads one who is distracted to aspire to meditation, leads one who is ignorant to aspire to wisdom, leads one who lacks concern for saving others to aspire to saving others, leads one who commits the ten evils to aspire to do ten good things, leads one who is willful to aspire to let things be, leads one who is prone to backsliding to aspire to never retreat, leads one who commits faulty acts to aspire to being faultless, and leads one who suffers from afflictions to aspire to detachment. Good sons, this is called the first amazing power of blessing of this sutra.”

(Reeves, p42)
LS32, Innumerable, b4today

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

For today’s pass through The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings I will quote from Nikkyō Niwano’s Buddhism for Today. This book, which I will be quoting from extensively in the future, offers a commentary on the full Three-Fold Lotus Sutra.

On this first of the three sutras, Nikkyō Niwano writes:

Of the three sutras mentioned above, the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings contains the sermon Sakyamuni delivered on the Vulture Peak (Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa) immediately before preaching the Lotus Sutra. The Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, which is inseparable from the Lotus Sutra, is regarded as the introduction to the latter. This is because in the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings Sakyamuni states the reasons for the aims and the order of his preaching during the past forty years and also says that he has not yet manifested the truth. This does not mean that so far he had preached untruth but that he had not yet revealed the final truth, although all of his previous sermons were true. In other words, he had not yet manifested the full profundity of his teaching, being afraid that people would not be able to grasp it because their understanding and faith were not sufficiently developed. Therefore he made an important promise concerning his next sermon: “I am now to reveal the real truth.” His next sermon was the Lotus Sutra. For this reason, if we do not read the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings we cannot realize clearly either the position of the Lotus Sutra among all the sermons that Sakyamuni preached during his lifetime or the true sacredness of the Lotus Sutra.

Buddhism for Today, pxxii-xxiii
LS32, Innumerable

Another Innumerable Day Before Day 1

Rather than quote from the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings today, I want to the quote from Paul L. Swanson’s essay, The Innumerable Meanings of the Lotus Sutra on Page 51-52 of the book A Buddhist Kaleidoscope. I published this yesterday, but I want to keep this here to make it easier to find later.

The Lotus Sutra can be understood in many ways, or, to put it another way, the teachings of the Lotus Sutra are varied and multivalent. Actually, one of the most important of these many meanings of the Lotus Sutra is its very vagueness and that it presents itself as of “innumerable meanings.” This potential — latent in its self-proclaimed “innumerable meanings” — provides the possibility for the Lotus Sutra to have meaning, not just in the past, but also specifically for the modern age.

Allow me to illustrate. In the introductory chapter we find Śākyamuni entering “the samādhi of the abode of immeasurable meanings.” As if to put the electronic lasers and pyrotechnics of Disneyland to shame, flowers rain down from heaven and the Buddha emits a ray of light that illuminates uncountable universes. Then the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī announces that the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus Sutra. However, the Buddha never does get around to preaching it. In short, an extravagant show is made to prepare for a sermon whose content is never exactly delineated.

What is this “Lotus Sutra” that is never preached? The content of the Lotus Sutra from chapter 2 on consists not so much in the Lotus Sutra itself, as in various praises for and instructions concerning the Lotus Sutra. The reason is that, in a broad sense, all of the Buddha-dharma is the Lotus Sutra, preached by the Buddha from the beginningless past. And if, in the words of the Ta Chih tu lun (Treatise on the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom), the Buddha-dharma is not limited to the words of the sutras, but all good and beautiful words are the Buddha-dharma, then the same can be said of the Lotus Sutra.

The Lotus Sutra is of immeasurable meanings because it is equivalent to the Buddha-dharma. …

This does not mean that the Lotus Sutra can mean anything we want it to, or that we can arbitrarily interpret it to our own liking. “Immeasurable” does not mean “anything” or “everything.” It is important to know what the “Lotus Sutra” (in the limited, textual sense) says (and does not say), what it has meant (or not meant) to people in the past, how it has inspired (or not inspired) people, and what kinds of religious or other experiences it has led to.

On that basis we can more accurately and critically conclude what meaning the Lotus Sutra can have for our modern world. This is the duty of all religionists, whether Buddhist, Christian, or Muslim — to discover the meaning of their faith in their own social, historical, and cultural situation. For the Lotus Sutra adherent, it means the obligation to seek the meaning of the Lotus Sutra that is alive and meaningful for today. And precisely because the Lotus Sutra is of immeasurable meanings, it has the potential for providing meaning in our day.

A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Paul L. Swanson, The Innumerable Meanings of the Lotus Sutra, Page 51-52



For me, the Lotus Sutra constructs a building — foundation, floor, walls, roof. By itself it is nothing more. But we are invited to come inside this building and in the empty space between the floor, walls and ceiling to craft for ourselves a home. This is an idea I hope to develop further in the future.