According to Zhiyi’s parsing, Chapters Two through Nine of the Lotus Sūtra comprise the main exposition of the “trace teaching,” or shakumon, the first fourteen chapters of the Lotus Sūtra. These chapters assert that followers of the two “Hinayāna” vehicles can achieve buddhahood. For the sūtra’s compilers, this message subsumed the entire Buddhist mainstream within its own teaching of the one buddha vehicle and extended the promise of buddhahood to a category of persons — śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas — who had been excluded from that possibility in other Mahāyāna sūtras. In Nichiren’s day, however, the idea of the one vehicle, that buddhahood is in principle open to all, represented the mainstream interpretive position, and his own reading therefore has a somewhat different emphasis. For Nichiren, the sūtra’s assertion that even persons of the two vehicles can become buddhas pointed to the mutual possession of the ten realms and the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment, without which any talk of buddhahood for anyone, even those following the bodhisattva path, can be no more than an abstraction. The revelation of this universal ground, he said, especially in the “Skillful Means” chapter, constitutes the heart of the shakumon portion of the Lotus. Nonetheless, he regarded Chapter Two through Chapter Nine, the main exposition section, as having been preached primarily for the benefit of persons during the Buddha’s lifetime. The remaining chapters, Chapter Ten through Chapter Fourteen, which constituted the remainder of the trace teaching, he saw as explicitly directed toward those who embrace the Lotus after the Buddha’s passing, and therefore, as having great relevance for himself and his followers.

Nichiren’s fierce insistence on the sole efficacy of the Lotus Sūtra has not endeared him to modern scholarly commentators, who have often dismissed him as narrow and intolerant. Yet another aim of our volume is to show how Nichiren’s reading of the Lotus Sūtra made compelling sense in the context of his received tradition and his understanding of his own time; it illustrates how much can be at stake in the interpretation of scripture. Through his example, we demonstrate how what Lotus followers regard as an ancient and timeless revelation came to be deployed in a specific time and place – thirteenth-century Japan – in an effort to understand, and to transform, that time and place. Focusing on Nichiren allows us to provide a kind of case study of how an ancient Buddhist text was appropriated by someone in a very different historical and cultural context to address questions undreamed of by the sūtra’s compilers.

Unlike Saichō, … Nichiren did not ground his own argument that all can attain buddhahood in claims for universal suchness, a term that occurs only rarely in his writings but, rather, in the mutual inclusion of the ten realms. This doctrine also renders irrelevant Hossō and Kegon claims that the Lotus Sūtra should be ranked below the Explanation of the Intention or Flower Garland sūtras because the parable of the wealthy man and his impoverished son, on which the Tendai hierarchy of Buddhist teachings is based, was spoken by śrāvakas. Nichiren wrote, “The four śrāvakas expressed their understanding, saying, ‘The most magnificent jewels have been obtained without being sought or awaited.’ They represent the śrāvaka realm within ourselves.” Central to Nichiren’s understanding was the idea that, because the ten realms are mutually inclusive, if beings of one realm can attain buddhahood, so can those of any other. In his reading, the initial chapters of the Lotus Sūtra open buddhahood not merely to previously exduded śrāvakas, but to all beings.

For Nichiren, convinced as he was that only the Lotus Sūtra leads to liberation in the mappō era, preaching exclusive devotion to the Lotus was not dogmatic self-assertion, but a compassionate act of bodhisattva practice. Whether others accepted the Lotus Sūtra or rejected it, telling them of its teaching would implant the seed of enlightenment in their minds and thereby enable them to establish a karmic connection to the sūtra that would someday allow them to realize buddhahood, whether in this lifetime or a future one.

[A]fter Zhiyi’s time, through the efforts especially of Zhanran and the Korean scholar-monk Chegwan, the Tiantai school gradually developed a model that divides the Buddha’s teaching career into five periods that span fifty years. According to this model, the Buddha began by preaching the Flower Garland Sūtra (Avatamsaka Sūtra), a highly advanced doctrine directed solely to bodhisattvas. None of the śrāvakas in the assembly could understand it and were struck dumb, just as the impoverished son was terrified when first forcibly approached by his father’s attendants. Seeing that the Flower Garland teaching was beyond his auditors’ capacity, the Buddha then backtracked and for twenty years preached the āgamas, … emphasizing the four noble truths, the twelve-linked chain of dependent origination, and the goal of nirvāṇa — that is, the teachings sometimes disparaged as the “Hinayāna.” This period corresponds to the wealthy man hiring his son to sweep manure for twenty years. In the third period, seeing that his followers were maturing, the Buddha preached the vaipulya or introductory Mahāyāna teachings such as the Vimalakirti Sūtra, which criticize the one-sided emphasis on emptiness and detachment found in the āgamas and instead extol the way of the bodhisattva. This corresponds to the son having “free access to his father’s house” yet still living in his own humble quarters. In the fourth period, the Buddha preached the prajn͂ā or wisdom teachings, which integrate all of his teachings up to that point in the two discernments of emptiness and wisdom by which bodhisattvas both uproot attachment and act compassionately in the world. This corresponds to the wealthy man entrusting the care of his fortune to his impoverished son. Then finally, in the fifth period, during the last eight years of his life, the Buddha set aside the coarse and incomplete provisional teachings of the preceding four periods and preached the perfect teaching that opens buddhahood to all. This teaching is represented by the Lotus Sūtra, and — in the Tiantai reading — restated in the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, said to have been preached just before the Buddha’s passing. This corresponds to the father, now approaching death, publicly acknowledging his son and bequeathing all of his wealth to him. In this way, the parable of the wealthy householder provided a basis for grasping the entirety of the Buddha’s teachings as integrated into a single, comprehensive chronological and soteriological agenda, by which he sought to gradually cultivate his followers’ capacity until they were mature enough to receive and accept the message of the one buddha vehicle.

By Nichiren’s time, educated people were often familiar with these stories, and the Lotus Sūtra’s message that all could attain buddhahood was widely accepted — although how that buddhahood was to be achieved and how long it might take were subjects of debate. Nichiren himself sometimes alludes to these parables in advocating the daimoku as the path of realizing buddhahood in the present age, but he rarely dwells on them at length.

Nichiren makes only limited reference to the parable of the burning house that occupies most of this chapter’s narrative. In a few passages, he refers to the great cart drawn by a white ox metaphorically as the vehicle that will carry Lotus Sūtra practitioners to “the pure land of Vulture Peak,” that is, the realm of enlightenment, or as a war chariot that he rides in a great dharma battle between true and provisional teachings. He does not provide an extended discussion of the parable itself. Rather, as we go through these initial chapters of the Lotus, we will see how Nichiren drew out the significance of other passages that might not seem central to the sūtra’s narrative but that assume considerable importance in his reading, a reading that was shaped by the sūtra’s reception history, by his contemporary circumstances, and by his own perspective.