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The Lotus Sutra: A Biography

I was introduced to Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s book, The Lotus Sutra: A Biography, through a review published in the Summer 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly that I found on LionsRoar.com.

Paul L. Swanson’s review concludes: “In short, this book is a biography of a book, one that admits in its final pages that one cannot ultimately answer the question of what that book really is. It is a challenge that Lopez leaves with the reader.”

That was enough to prompt me to purchase the University of Michigan professor’s contribution to Princeton University Press’ Lives of Great Religious Books, “a series of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world.”

And, having read Lopez’s book, I think Swanson missed the point Lopez makes at the conclusion. Here’s what he says:

But where, in the end, is the Lotus Sūtra? It is a text marked with fissures and cracks, like the earth split by a rising stūpa, like the earth rent by bodhisattvas emerging from beneath the soil. Is it a fractured whole, or is it assembled fragments? Perhaps it is a puzzle that can never be put back together, leaving just its name. Nichiren wrote, “Now in the Final Dharma age, neither the Lotus Sūtra nor the other sūtras are of use. Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō alone is valid.” We recall that in Nichiren Shōshū, the dharma in the three jewels is not the Lotus Sūtra; it is the three great secret doctrines: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan.

And so the Lotus Sūtra that we have been seeking seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was never there. This text that seemed to lack any particular doctrine, this text that never seemed to begin, has become a source of short phrases (such as kōsen rufu, “wide propagation”) invested with meanings that would have been incomprehensible to its authors, as is so often the case with sacred texts. Among some of its modern adherents, we are left with something as vague (though laudable) as world peace.

Perhaps we have become those strange beings mentioned in Chapter Seven, called lokāntarika, “those between the worlds.” Perhaps it is time to return to the text, to live in the darkness of the fissures that seem to scar it. By returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra (as the sūtra itself exhorts us to do), by exploring its cracks and fissures, those of us who, in the words of the sūtra, have been living in “the dark places between the worlds, where the rays of the sun and the moon have been unable to penetrate”, may recognize each other as the many different readers of the many different readings of the Lotus Sūtra and say to each other, “How is it possible that sentient beings have suddenly appeared here?”

“By returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra…” That’s the only message worthy of concluding a “biography” of the Lotus Sūtra.

As a postscript I want to delve into Lopez’s quote from Chapter 7: The Parable of the Magic City. I did not recognize it at first since in Senchu Murano’s English translation of the Lotus Sūtra it looks like this:

The Buddha said to the bhikṣus:

“When Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, five hundred billion Buddha-worlds in each of the ten quarters quaked in the six ways, and all those worlds, including those intercepted from the brilliant rays of light of the sun and the moon by the neighboring worlds, were illumined [by great rays of light], and the living beings of those worlds were able to see each other for the first time. They said to each other, ‘How did you appear so suddenly?’

Lopez’s quote comes from Leon Hurvitz’s “Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma,” which is an English translation of Kumārajīva’s Chinese with additional material taken directly from Sanskrit. This is the same portion of Chapter 7:

The Buddha declared to the bhiksus: “When the buddha Victorious Through Great Penetrating Knowledge attained anuttasamyaksambodhi, in each of the ten directions five hundred myriads of millions of buddha worlds trembled in six different ways, and in the intervals between those lands, dark and obscure places that the glorious light of the sun and moon could not illuminate were all very bright. The living beings within them were all enabled to see one another, and all said: ‘Why has this place suddenly produced living beings?’

Making explicit that the universe without a Buddha is “dark and obscure” – the intervals between Buddha worlds – helps reveal what enlightenment means for the universe.

I am currently on my 39th trip through Senchu Murano’s English translation. I’m looking forward to taking up Hurvitz’s “Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma” for a cycle or two and gaining further insight “by returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra.”

d3b, d4b, Blog, LS Biography

Odds and Ends from The Lotus Sutra: A Biography

This is a followup to yesterday’s post about The Lotus Sutra: A Biography with a few additional ideas I want to save for later retrieval.

On the fate of the 5,000 arrogant monks who walked out in Chapter 2, Expedients, of the Lotus Sūtra:

For Zhiyi, and for many readers over the centuries, the Lotus Sūtra has two major messages. The first, found in the first half of the sūtra, is that there are not three vehicles; there is one vehicle, which will eventually transport all sentient beings to buddhahood. The second, found in the second half of the sūtra, is that the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable. These two doctrines are generally compatible with the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, allowing Zhiyi to continue to uphold the supremacy of the Lotus. But if everything is said in the Lotus, what is the purpose of the Nirvāṇa? Here, those five thousand haughty monks and nuns who walked out in the second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra come to the rescue. The sūtra does not explain what became of them, but Zhiyi explains that they returned to the assembly that surrounded the Buddha’s deathbed. The Buddha thus compassionately reiterated the central message of the Lotus Sūtra to those who had missed it the first time. It was also important, at the moment of his apparent passage into Nirvāṇa, for the Buddha to reiterate what he had declared in the Lotus: that like the wise physician, the Buddha only pretends to die; in fact his lifespan is immeasurable. (Page 56-57)

On the great merit earned by the grasshopper.

Discussing Great Japanese Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sūtra (Dainihonkoku hokekyōkenki), completed in 1044 by the monk Chingen:

Grasshopper on a lotusOne of several anthologies of miracle tales about the Lotus, this collection includes rather standard Buddhist stories of miracle cures (a blind woman regains her sight by reciting the Lotus), divine retribution (a man who ridicules a reciter of the Lotus loses his voice), and deaths attended by heavenly fragrances, beautiful music, and auspicious dreams. In one story, a monk memorizes the first twenty-five chapters of the Lotus but, despite repeated efforts, is unable to memorize the final three. He eventually learns in a dream that in a previous life he had been a grasshopper who perched in a temple room where a monk was reciting the sūtra. After reciting the first seven scrolls of the sūtra (which contain the first twenty-five chapters), the monk rested before beginning the final roll. He leaned against the wall and inadvertently killed the grasshopper. The grasshopper was reborn as a human as a result of the merit he received from hearing the first twenty-five chapters of the Lotus. When he became a monk, however, he was unable to memorize the final three chapters because he, as the grasshopper, had died before he heard them. (Page 79-80)

On how Nichiren judged the six Buddhist schools of Nara.

He seems to have arrived at this conviction [of the supremacy of the Lotus Sūtra] through something of a process of elimination, but only after a serious survey of the Japanese sects of the day. He began with the belief that the word of the Buddha was superior to that of the various Indian Buddhist masters, such that one’s allegiance should be to a sūtra rather than to a treatise (śāstra). This immediately eliminated five of the six “Nara schools” of Buddhism, which were based on various Madhyamaka (Sanron), Yogācāra (Hossō), and Abhidharma treatises (Kusha and Jōjitsu), as well as on (in the case of Ritsu) the monastic code (vinaya). Among the Nara schools, that left only Kegon, based on the Flower Garland Sūtra, which Nichiren rejected. He already had an antipathy for Pure Land, but he was attracted to Shingon, famous for its doctrine that it is possible to “achieve buddhahood in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu), that is, during the present lifetime. He found what would prove to be for him a more compelling doctrine in the Tendai sect, which, based in part on Zhiyi’s famous doctrine of “the three thousand realms in a single thought,” proclaimed that all beings are endowed with original enlightenment (hongaku). Nichiren eventually decided that the Tendai sect, with its conviction that the Lotus Sūtra was the Buddha’s highest teaching, was the superior form of Buddhism, although he felt that in the centuries since its founding, its purity had been diluted by the admixture of other practices, especially devotion to Amitābha. (Page 82-83)

On the topic of Nichiren Shoshu.

“We recall that in Nichiren Shōshū, the dharma in the three jewels is not the Lotus Sūtra; it is the three great secret doctrines: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan.” (Page 221)

On SGI as a separate Buddhist organization

We find in the charter no mention of slandering the dharma (or the consequences of doing so), no mention of shakubuku, and no mention of the Lotus Sūtra. (Page 211)