Since one of the sixteen practices is making offerings to the Sutra, a kind of worship, it may be useful to discuss the difference between worshiping an idol (or statue) and worshiping with the help of an image, or worshiping through or before an image. Among many Protestant Christians, as in the Bible, idolatry is vigorously condemned. It is understood to be worship of a false god, something that is not God. Virtually all Buddhists, on the other hand, make a great deal of use of physical objects in both personal and public worship. Most prominent among these, of course, are buddha statues and, in Mahayana Buddhism, statues of famous bodhisattvas, especially Kwan-yin/Kannon, Maitreya, Manjushri, and Samantabhadra – all of whom are prominent in the Lotus Sutra – and Kshitigarbha/Ti-tsang/Jizo (who does not appear in the Lotus Sutra). But it is not only such statues and paintings that are used in worship – the Lotus Sutra itself, in physical form, has often been treated as an object of worship in East Asia.

To worship an idol itself is to confuse one’s ultimate object of worship or devotion with some physical thing. One morning my wife and I went to the Great Sacred Hall of Rissho Kosei-kai in Tokyo. As Rissho Kosei-kai’s main object of worship and devotion, a wonderful statue of the universal or eternal Shakyamuni Buddha dominates the main hall. Inside of this statue is a copy of the Threefold Lotus Sutra in calligraphy inscribed by Founder Niwano. But we did not worship either the statue or its contents. Before, through, and with the help of the statue that was in front of us, we paid our respects to the Buddha who is everywhere. This does not make the statue any less important, indeed it makes it truly more important, for it can lead us to the truth – something that worshiping the statue itself could never do.

[I]n Chapter 10 there are several variations of the formula for five practices and many more throughout the Sutra, usually with five or six different practices being listed. By my count, at least sixteen such practices are cited in the Sutra, though never all in one place. Not all of them are entirely different perhaps, but they are different enough to be represented by different Chinese characters in Kumarajiva’s translation and therefore in my English translation.

Here are the sixteen practices with regard to the Sutra: to hear, receive, embrace or uphold, read, recite, study, memorize or learn by heart, remember it correctly, understand its meaning, explain it, teach it for the sake of others, copy it, honor it, make offerings to it, put it into practice, and practice the Sutra as taught or preached. What I want to portray with this list is that the Dharma Flower Sutra is richer and much more complex than standard formulas sometimes suggest. The reduction of the sixteen to a standard five is a useful device for aiding our learning – nothing more. By using a variety of such lists, even in the same chapter, we are being taught, I believe, to be flexible and open-minded when reading or studying the Dharma Flower Sutra.

Whether the list of such practices be five or seven or sixteen, these are practices that can be done by anyone, including you and me, and they can be done just about anywhere. They certainly are not the end of Buddhist practice, but they can be used as skillful means, as useful and important steps in the direction of the life of a true Dharma teacher or bodhisattva.

We can, of course, understand the three phases [of the Dharma] not as an inevitable sequence of periods of time, but as existential phases of our own lives. There will be times when the Dharma can be said to be truly alive in us, times when our practice is more like putting on a show and has little depth, and times when the life of the Dharma in us is in serious decline. But there is no inevitable sequence here. There is no reason, for example, why a period of true Dharma cannot follow a period of merely formal Dharma. And there is no reason to assume that a period has to be completed once it has been entered. We might lapse into a period of decline, but with the proper influences and circumstances we could emerge from it into a more vital phase of true Dharma. A coming evil age is mentioned several times in the Dharma Flower Sutra, but while living in an evil age, or an evil period of our own lives, makes teaching the Dharma difficult, even extremely difficult, nowhere does the Dharma Flower Sutra suggest that it is impossible to teach or practice true Dharma.

[I]t is sometimes said that the Lotus Sutra offers an easy way to awakening, and that this is why it has been so popular throughout the history of East Asia, and, judging by the large number of fragments that continue to be found, probably it was once popular in India and Central Asia as well. But is the way of the Dharma Flower Sutra so easy?

This matter is a little complicated, because, as is so often the case with this text, two things are asserted that seem incompatible on the surface. On the one hand, it teaches that anyone and everyone can be, and to some degree, no doubt, has already been, a Dharma teacher and bodhisattva for someone else. We can say that all have planted seeds of becoming a buddha, or that they have entered the Way of becoming a buddha. In Chapter 10 we are told that if anyone rejoices even for a single moment from hearing even a single verse of the Sutra, he or she will attain supreme awakening. Please notice, however, that it does not say “has” attained supreme awakening, but “will.” What is between the hearing of a single verse and the attainment of awakening is, at least normally, a great deal of effort and work. As we have seen, the treasure we seek is at once both near and very distant – and what the Sutra teaches here is that even a single verse can plant a seed, a starting point for entering the Way. Like any seed, the seed and the bud that springs from it have to be watered and nourished in order to grow, flower, and bear fruit.

[W]ith “bodhisattva” being associated in our minds with such great ones as Maitreya and Manjushri, it may be very difficult for us to believe that we are capable of being bodhisattvas. We are too young, we may think, or too old or too stupid or too tired or too lazy or too selfish or too something else to be a bodhisattva! It’s impossible, we may feel. This is where Chapter 10, and the idea of the teacher of the Dharma, comes in. It may be hard for me to believe that I can be a bodhisattva, but not as difficult to believe that I might be a good man or good woman who is able “even in secret, to teach to one person even one phrase of the Dharma Flower Sutra” and, therefore, be an emissary of the Buddha, one who does the Buddha’s work. In other words, Chapter 10 gives us what may be perceived to be a more attainable goal.

What’s more, the gender gap so often prevalent in Buddhist texts is broken through here. Not only buddhas, but all of the famous, great mythical bodhisattvas are male, almost always dressed as Indian princes. But “any good son or good daughter,” the text says, who privately explains even a phrase of the Sutra to a single person is a messenger of the Buddha, one who does the Buddha’s work.