Back in mid-December I accused Gene Reeves of a rare error and quickly apologized for my rash judgement the next day.

The subject of my debate was the status of the Buddha Sun and Moon Light before he became a Buddha in Chapter 1, Introduction. Reeves, in his book, The Stories of the Lotus Sutra said:

The fact that before becoming a fully awakened buddha Sun and Moon Light was a prince living in a palace with eight sons reveals a recurrent theme of the Sutra: the idea that what is happening now is both new and unprecedented, and has happened many times before.

Since Senchu Murano’s translation said the last Sun and Moon Light Buddha was a king, I jumped to the conclusion that Reeves was in error, only to discover that the other English-language translation don’t specify what his royal status was before becoming a Buddha, leaving the status undetermined.

Even Reeves’ translation of the Lotus Sutra doesn’t specify the status of the last Sun and Moon Light Buddha:

“Before the last of these buddhas had left his home, he had eight royal sons.

This royal status issue plays out again in Chapter 7, The Parable of a Magic City. Was Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha a prince or a king when he had 16 princes? This time Murano is silent on the issue:

Bhikṣus! At the end of the period of ten small kalpas, the Dharma of the Buddhas came into the mind of Great-Universal­-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha. Now he attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi. Before he left home, he had sixteen sons.

Reeves translation:

Monks, only after ten small eons had gone by did the Dharma of the buddhas appear before Excellent in Great Penetrating Wisdom Buddha and he could attain supreme awakening. That Buddha, before he had left home, had sixteen sons, the first of whom was named Accumulated Wisdom.

The conclusion that this time the Buddha had been a prince is suggested by the next paragraph of Chapter 7, which specifies that the grandfather of the 16 princes – the father of the Buddha – was the wheel-turning-holy-king. (Of course this presupposes that the grandfather here is the paternal grandfather and not the father of the children’s mother, who is also mentioned in the same paragraph.)

This all comes up today after I published a portion of Ichidai Goji Keizu, Genealogical Chart of the Buddha’s Lifetime Teachings in Five Periods, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 3, Page 248, in which Nichiren specifies that “The seventh chapter on ‘The Parable of a Magic City’ of the Lotus Sūtra states that the Great Universal Wisdom Buddha had been the king of a country with 16 princes before entering the priesthood.”

One thing I think everyone can agree on: This whole debate doesn’t really matter.