Here in Chapter Two, [the Buddha] provides a commentary on his own earlier teachings, looking back on the teaching of what he had taught long ago, accounting for it, and almost renouncing it. Central to this retelling is the claim that had befuddled Śāriputra and the other arhats: that the apparent division of the Buddha’s teaching into three vehicles was the Buddha’s “skillful means” that lead ultimately to the one buddha vehicle. In the words of the great Chinese exegete Zhiyi, the Lotus “opens the three vehicles to reveal the one vehicle.” The sūtra’s initial declaration of this teaching appears here in the second chapter and is further elaborated in Chapters Three through Nine by means of parables and other explanations. In Zhiyi’s analysis, these eight chapters together constitute the “main exposition” section of the sutra’s first half or trace teaching (shakumon in Japanese). They may also represent the earliest stratum of the sūtra’s compilation.

In its original context, the message of the “one buddha vehicle” first articulated in Chapter Two was directed from the marginal Mahāyāna movement toward the Buddhist mainstream, that is, the majority of monks and nuns who counted themselves as śrāvakas and aspired to the arhat’s nirvāṇa. But a thousand years later, in medieval Japan, the Mahāyāna was the mainstream; that is, Japanese Buddhism was entirely Mahāyāna, and there were no śrāvakas, except those mentioned in texts. Largely through the influence of the Lotus-based Tendai Buddhist tradition, the idea that buddhahood is at least in theory open to all had gained wide currency. In Nichiren’s reading, the thrust of the Lotus Sūtra’s one-vehicle argument therefore shifts in significant ways. No longer is it about opening buddhahood to specific categories of persons previously excluded, that is, to people of the two lesser vehicles. Rather, it is about opening buddhahood as a reality for all beings, in contrast to what Nichiren deemed purely abstract or notional assurances of buddhahood in other, provisional Mahāyāna teachings. Recall that, in the Tendai tradition in which Nichiren had been trained, the Lotus Sūtra is “true” and all others are “provisional,” meaning that the Lotus Sūtra is complete and all-encompassing, while other teachings are accommodated to their listeners’ understanding and therefore partial and incomplete. For Nichiren, now in the age of the Final Dharma, only the Lotus Sūtra embodied the principles by which Buddhist practitioners could truly realize enlightenment.

[Before] examining the Buddha’s opening remarks more closely, let us consider to whom he spoke them.

One might expect that he would address his remarks to Maitreya or to Mañjuśrī, the two interlocutors in the sūtra up to this point, and both also bodhisattvas. But he speaks instead to the monk Śāriputra. In the mainstream Buddhist tradition, that is, the monastic majority, who were not Mahāyāna followers, Śāriputra was renowned as the wisest of the Buddha’s disciples. Prior to becoming a disciple of the Buddha, he met a Buddhist monk and asked him what his teacher taught. When the monk demurred, saying that he was a beginner and thus unable to explain it in detail, Śāriputra asked for a summary. The monk replied with a single verse, “Of those things produced by causes, the Tathāgata has proclaimed their causes and also their cessation. Thus the great ascetic has spoken.” Merely by hearing those words, Śāriputra achieved the first level of enlightenment, the stage of the stream-enterer. According to tradition, the abhidharma, the part of the canon dealing with technical analysis of doctrine, was first taught by the Buddha to Śāriputra. Śāriputra was also one of the few monks whom the Buddha sanctioned to deliver discourses, so that some sūtras are spoken by Śāriputra rather than the Buddha.

Śāriputra is a śrāvaka and an arhat, having achieved the profound wisdom necessary to destroy all ignorance and to enter final nirvana upon his death. In the mainstream tradition, the Buddha is also called an arhat because he has achieved that same wisdom and will enter parinirväva at death. The primary difference between a buddha and an arhat in the early tradition appears to have been that a buddha discovers the path to nirvana without relying on a teacher, while an arhat must rely on the Buddha’s teachings to do so. A buddha also possesses certain supernormal powers that an arhat may not have, but both were held to partake equally in the liberating insight that is the goal of the Buddhist path. Because Śāriputra was the wisest of the arhats, one often asked to speak for the Buddha, there should not, from the perspective of the Buddhist mainstream, be a substantial difference between the wisdom of the Buddha and the wisdom of Śāriputra; there should not be something of substance that Śāriputra fails to understand, that is, not until these first remarks of Śākyamuni in the Lotus Sūtra. In another case of inversion, Śāriputra, like Maitreya in the preceding chapter, is perplexed.