Buddhism for Today, p40What is most impressive in this chapter is the immeasurable value of the Buddha’s mental powers. Vividly expressed in the story of the last Buddha Sun Moon Light is the fact that Sakyamuni Buddha, who knew that the time of his entering nirvana was approaching, was determined to leave the most important experience of his enlightenment to posterity. However, we know that at that time his body had grown very weak from illness and old age. In spite of this fact, he began to preach the vast and profound Law of the Lotus Sutra, the strongest, most positive, and most affirmative teaching of his life. We must bow down before the greatness of his mental power and the depth of his enlightenment. And we must not forget that his mental power came from his great compassion for the yet unborn people of later times.
Category Archives: d2b
Nirvana Is Quiescence
Buddhism for Today, p32The law “Nirvana is quiescence” teaches us that we can completely extinguish all the sufferings of human life and obtain peace and quietude when we destroy all illusions. How can we reach this state? The only way is to realize the two laws “All things are impermanent,” and “Nothing has an ego.”
The reason we worry about various kinds of sufferings is that we forget that all phenomena in this world are impermanent, that all things continuously change according to the law of cause and effect; we are deluded by phenomena and influenced by considerations of immediate gain or loss. If we study the way to buddhahood and by practicing it realize the truth of the impermanence of all things, we become able to attain a state of peace and quietude in which we can never be swayed by shifting circumstances. This is the state of “Nirvana is quiescence.”
The Power of Impermanence
Buddhism for Today, p29-30When we look back upon the evolutionary process that gave birth to life on the earth, which was originally filled only with melted lava, metals, gas, and vapor, and how lifeforms divided into plants and animals, the latter evolving gradually through insects, fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals, and finally into man, we realize also that wood, stone, metal, and all other substances in the world have the same ultimate ancestors as ourselves. We can regard all plants, birds, and beasts as our kin. We then feel a natural gratitude to plants, insects, fish, birds, and beasts. If we feel grateful to these creatures, how much more deeply thankful should we be for our parents and grandparents, our nearest kin, and for the spirits of other ancestors! We come to understand this clearly and feel it deeply.
Truly all things in the universe are related; what can we say when human beings in this world are not brothers to one another? They oppose each other, hate each other, attack each other, even kill each other. This is not what man’s life was intended to be. The reason that we do not realize this truth is because we are overwhelmed by the changes that impinge on us directly and are blinded by considerations of immediate gain and loss. If all men could see clearly the Buddha’s teaching that all things are impermanent, they would be awakened from such illusion and could realize a peaceful and correct way of life in this world.
Shaking Up Conventional Hierarchies
Two Buddhas, p42-43In response to Maitreya’s question about why the Buddha has illuminated the worlds, Mañjuśrī responds that he has seen this happen before. That is, he remembers something that Maitreya does not, suggesting that the power of his memory to encompass distant space and time — one of the markers of enlightenment in Buddhism — surpasses even that of Maitreya. It also suggests that Mañjuśrī has been cultivating the bodhisattva path far longer even than Maitreya, who was said to be but one lifetime away from achieving buddhahood. This is but one of many moments in which the Lotus Sūtra reverses conventional hierarchies by revealing hitherto unimagined expanses of the past.
The Inversion of Authority
Two Buddhas, p44-45The bodhisattva Varaprabha [Wonderful-Light Bodhisattva], the teacher of Dipamkara [Burning-Light Buddha], was Mañjuśrī in a previous life, meaning that a bodhisattva in the audience of the present buddha was, at least at one time, superior to this previous buddha. And the bodhisattva who is honored by the mainstream tradition as the future buddha, Maitreya, turns out to have been his least worthy disciple. The inversion of authority with which the Lotus Sūtra proclaims its priority here not only makes the best of bodhisattvas the least of bodhisattvas, but also explains what happened in the distant past to make it so. In Mañjuśrī’s response we also encounter the first instance of a device that occurs in many Mahāyāna sūtras but which is employed most famously, and most head-spinningly*, in the Lotus: self-reference. In this, the first chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, Mañjuśrī explains that in the distant past, the buddha Candrasūryapradipa [Sun-Moon-Light] taught the Lotus Sūtra.
*This is one of many, many reasons why this book gets only a Two-Star rating from me.
Nichiren’s Understanding of the Lotus Sūtra’s Title
Two Buddhas, pPage 48-50This introductory chapter marks a convenient place in the present study to say more about Nichiren’s understanding of the Lotus Sūtra’s title.
First, we might consider the individual words that make up the title. Myō has the connotations of “wonderful,” “marvelous,” and “inconceivable.” The use of this character in the title was Kumārajīva’s innovation; an earlier translation by Dharmaraksa (230?-316) uses shō (Ch. Zheng), meaning “true” or “correct.” Fayun (467-529), an early Chinese commentator on the Lotus Sūtra, took myō (miao) to mean “subtle” as opposed to “crude” or “coarse.” Zhiyi argued that myō has both a relative and an absolute meaning. From a relative standpoint, myō, denoting the perfect teaching, is superior to all others, which by comparison are incomplete. But from an absolute standpoint, myō is perfectly encompassing; there is nothing outside it to which it could be compared. This reading laid the groundwork for later understandings of the Lotus Sūtra as both superior to, and at the same time inclusive of, all other teachings.
Nichiren said that myō has three meanings. The first is to open, meaning that it opens the meaning of all other sūtras. “When the Buddha preached the Lotus Sūtra, he opened the storehouse of the other sūtras preached during the preceding forty-some years, and all beings of the nine realms were for the first time able to discern the treasures that lay within those sūtras,” he wrote. Second, myō means “perfectly encompassing; each of the 69,384 characters of the sūtra contains all others within itself. “It is like one drop of the great ocean that contains water from all the rivers that pour into the ocean, or a single wish-granting jewel that, although no bigger than a mustard seed, can rain down all the treasures that one might gain from all wish-granting jewels.” And third, myō means “to restore to life,” meaning that it revives the seeds, or causes, of buddhahood in those who have neglected or destroyed them.
Renge means “lotus blossom,” and the Sanskrit puṇḍarīka indicates a white lotus. Lotuses grow in muddy water to bloom untainted above its surface and thus represent the flowering of the aspiration for awakening in the mind of the ordinary, deluded person. The lotus plant also produces flowers and seedpods at the same time. To Chinese Tiantai patriarchs, as well as medieval Japanese Tendai interpreters, this suggested the simultaneity of “cause” (the nine realms, or states of those still at the stage of practice) and “effect” (the buddha realm or state of buddhahood), meaning that all ten realms are mutually inclusive. Nichiren draws on the analogy of the lotus to stress his claim that the Lotus Sūtra enables the realization of buddhahood in the very act of practice. As he expressed it: “The merit of all other sūtras is uncertain, because they teach that first one must plant good roots and [only] afterward become a buddha. But in the case of the Lotus Sūtra, when one takes it in one’s hand, that hand at once becomes a buddha, and when one chants it with one’s mouth, that mouth is precisely a buddha. This is just like the moon being reflected on the water the moment it rises above the eastern mountains, or like a sound and its echo occurring simultaneously.”
The last character, kyō, means “sūtra.” Kyō in the title of the Lotus Sūtra, Nichiren said, encompasses all the teachings of all buddhas throughout space and time. Namu, which prefaces the title in chanting, comes from Sanskrit namas, meaning “reverence,” “devotion,” or “the taking of refuge.” Ultimately, Nichiren took it as expressing the willingness to offer one’s life for the dharma. Nichiren made clear, however, that the significance of the daimoku does not lie in its semantic meaning. The daimoku, he said, is neither the text nor its meaning but the intent, or heart, of the entire sūtra. He defined it alternately as the seed of Buddhahood, the father and mother of all buddhas, and the “three thousand realms in a single thought moment in actuality… .”
Pocketing nuggets found along the way
Starting what will be at least two cycles through my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra practice tied to the new book Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, I’ve got lots to say.
First, I’m constantly reminded that this is not a Buddhist text but instead an academic text about Buddhism. Grin and bear such slights as:
Two Buddhas, p36As we shall see, the Lotus Sūtra is obsessed, perhaps above all, with its own legitimation, with an almost palpable anxiety to prove that it was spoken by the Buddha. That obsession is evident from the first three words of the Sanskrit text: evam mayā ‘rutam, ” thus have I heard.”
or this:
Two Buddhas, p47Roughly a thousand years after the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, in an entirely different cultural sphere, the Buddhist teacher Nichiren maintained that now in the time of mappō, the entire sūtra was encompassed in its daimoku or title, and that chanting the title was the chief practice of the Lotus Sūtra for the present era. “Whatever sūtra he expounded,” Nichiren wrote, “the Buddha assigned it a title expressing its ultimate principle.” Today we know that the historical Buddha did not preach, let alone name, the Lotus Sūtra, but the idea that a sūtra’s title embodies its essence was well established in Nichiren’s time.
And I’m just going to ignore the declaration that the “early Buddhist tradition” will be called “mainstream Buddhism,” the choice of modern scholars, we’re told on Page 37. Mahāyāna is not mainstream? Seriously?
But that is not to say I haven’t found nuggets worth picking up and putting in my pocket.
Take for example the discussion of what “mainstream” Buddhists would be shocked by in the first chapter, Introduction.
Two Buddhas, p44There is much to ponder here [in Mañjuśrī’s recollection of time long in the past], as the Lotus Sūtra makes a powerful claim for its own authority. The sūtra, which no one has ever heard before, is not new. In fact, it is very old, so old that it has been all but forgotten. It was taught many eons ago, by a buddha so ancient that his name does not appear in the standard list of the previous buddhas. The only familiar name in the story is Dipamkara (16), the first buddha in the list of twenty-five buddhas of the past, according to the Pali tradition.
In that tradition, it was at the feet of Dipamkara that Sumedha, the yogin who would one day become Śākyamuni Buddha, vowed to follow the long bodhisattva path to buddhahood. It was Dipamkara who prophesied that Sumedha would become a buddha named Gautama. Hence, the first buddha known to the collective memory of the tradition was the last son of the last buddha Candrasūryapradipa [the Buddha Sun-Moon-Light in Muran’s translation] to become enlightened. This means that the story told by Mañjuśrī is about events in a past so distant that no record of them exists. In other words, prior even to the time of the buddha Dipamkara, under whom the buddha of our world, Gautama or Śākyamuni, first took his bodhisattva vows, another buddha, Candrasūryapradipa, taught the Lotus Sūtra. Furthermore, Candrasūryapradipa was Dipamkara’s father, placing him in a position of authority, both in age and in lineage, to the first buddha named by the tradition. The Lotus Sūtra is therefore older than any teaching previously known.
And this description of how the shaking of the worlds in Chapter 1 is linked by Nichiren to the devastating quakes of his time:
Two Buddhas, p52Nichiren was initially moved to remonstrate with government authorities by the suffering he had witnessed following a devastating earthquake in 1257. It was then that he composed and submitted his treatise Risshō ankoku ron, his first admonishment to persons in power. Initially he saw that earthquake as collective karmic retribution for the error of neglecting the Lotus Sūtra. But over time it came to evoke for him the shaking of “the whole buddha world” (5) in the “Introduction” chapter presaging Śākyamuni’s preaching of the Lotus. Thus the 1257 quake assumed for him a second meaning as a harbinger of the spread of the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, the teaching for the Final Dharma age. “From the Shōka era (1257-1259) up until the present year (1273) there have been massive earthquakes and extraordinary celestial portents,” he wrote. “… You should know that these are no ordinary auspicious or inauspicious omens concerning worldly affairs. They herald nothing less than the rise or decline of this great dharma.” Just as the quaking of the earth had presaged the Buddha’s preaching of the Lotus Sūtra, a violent earthquake had preceded his own dissemination of the sūtra and the practice of chanting its daimoku. This is but one example of how Nichiren read the events of his own life and times as mirrored in the Lotus Sūtra.
It looks like I’m going to have pockets full of nuggets when this journey is complete.
The Omen for the Preaching of the Lotus Sūtra
Among all the Buddhist scriptures preached by the Buddha there is no sūtra which does not mention the trembling of the earth in six different ways. However, the shaking of the earth in six ways when the Buddha was about to expound the Lotus Sūtra was so striking that the living beings who gathered to listen to Him were all startled and it moved Bodhisattva Maitreya to ask what was happening, prompting Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī to answer. This shows that the omen for the preaching of the Lotus Sūtra was much greater and longer than the omens of other sūtras that the question concerning it was more difficult to respond to. Therefore, Grand Master Miao-lê states in his Annotations on the Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra, fascicle 2, “Which Mahāyāna sūtra does not have the omens such as a crowd of living beings gathered together like a cloud, emitting of light from the forehead of the Buddha, the rain of flowers from the heaven, and trembling of the earth? However, they have never caused such a great concern as this.” This means that every sūtra has a preface before preaching the main discourse, but no preface is accompanied by such great omens like those that accompanied the preface of the Lotus Sūtra.
Zuisō Gosho, Writing on Omens, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Volume 6, Followers I, Page 122
The Greatest Omens
Grand Master T’ien-t’ai states in his Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra fascicle 6, “It is said in a secular society that a cobweb is an advance notice of a happy event and chirps of a magpie foretell the arrival of a traveler. Even such trifle matters in the secular world are foreshadowed by an omen, how much more so the advent of the Buddhist Dharma. Based on worldly matters, we can conjecture the profound truth of Buddhism.” Thus, the Buddha showcased the greatest omens that had never been seen during the more than 40 years in His lifetime when He expounded the theoretical section of the Lotus Sūtra.
Zuisō Gosho, Writing on Omens, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Volume 6, Followers I, Page 122
Daily Dharma – April 20, 2019
Always seeking fame and gain,
He often visited noble families.
He did not understand what he had recited,
Gave it up, and forgot it.
Because of this,
He was called Fame-Seeking. But he [later] did many good karmas,
And became able to see innumerable Buddhas.
Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva sings these verses in Chapter One of the Lotus Sūtra. They are part of a story he tells about Fame-Seeking Bodhisattva (Gumyō, Yaśaskāma). This shows that each of the innumerable Bodhisattvas who are helping us to become enlightened use different ways of reaching people. Even those enmeshed in the suffering of self-importance, who use this Wonderful Dharma to make themselves seem superior to others, simply because they are leading others to this teaching, they too are creating boundless merit.
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