Yesterday’s post asking whether Chih-i believed in the Western paradise of Amitābha and hoped to reach it after his death begged the question: What does it matter?
Nichiren considered himself a follower of Chih-i. And it’s Nichiren’s focus on Chih-i that gives the question whatever importance it may have. Personally, I believe the suggestion Chih-i believed in the Western paradise of Amitābha was a fabrication of later followers.
First, the rise of Pure Land Buddhism coincided with the fear that Śākyamuni’s teachings were entering the age of the decline of the Dharma, mappō, when their efficacy would be lost. But Chih-i did not live during the age of mappō. He clearly still felt the Lotus Sutra was the Śākyamuni’s ultimate teaching and still very much worth practicing.
That was very different by Nichiren’s time.
“A Buddhist Kaleidoscope: Essays on the Lotus Sutra,” edited by Gene Reeves and published in 2002 by Kōsei Publishing includes an essay by Jacqueline I. Stone entitled “When Disobedience Is Filial and Resistance Is Loyal: The Lotus Sutra and Social Obligations in the Medieval Nichiren Tradition. In it she offers this observation about Nichiren’s dispute with then-current Tendai teaching.
Nichiren’s Tendai contemporaries, too, held the Lotus Sutra to be all inclusive, but generally took this to mean that, properly understood, any practice, such as chanting Amida Buddha’s name or invoking the Bodhisattva Kannon, could be considered practice of the Lotus Sutra. Nichiren decried this interpretation as a confusion of the true and the provisional and rejected all other, “pre-Lotus Sutra” teachings as no longer suited to the present time of mappō. Like medicine that stands too long on the shelf and becomes poisonous, these other teachings and the practices based upon them were, in his view, not only soteriologically useless but positively harmful. For Nichiren, to willfully set aside or ignore the Lotus in favor of other, “lesser” teachings amounted to “slander of the Dharma” and would pull the practitioner down into the lower realms of rebirth.
Today this idea that all practices are the Lotus Sutra practice is still around and just as misguided. They put expiration dates on medicines for a reason. They should not be ignored.