On Sunday, May 9, 2021, I attended the Izu Persecution Service at the Sacramento Nichiren Buddhist Church. As a result, I was unable to attend the Nichiren Buddhist Sangha of the Bay Area lecture on Chapter 7 of the Lotus Sutra, The Parable of a Magic City. Fortunately, the monthly lectures are recorded and posted on YouTube.

If I have an affinity with one chapter of the Lotus Sutra more than any other, I suppose it would be Chapter 7. After all, this is 500yojanas.org, On the Journey to the Place of Treasures.

So it is little wonder that I bristled at this slide:

Long, highly repetitive chapter? Miles and miles of unending monotony, the scenery never changing?

For more than five years I’ve made it my daily practice to read a portion of the Lotus Sutra in shindoku in the morning and then in English in the evening.  Even after more than 63 times through the Lotus Sutra, none of the Lotus Sutra is monotonous.  It was really very hard to focus on the lecture after this. In reviewing the slide deck afterward, I felt better. The summary points I would have emphasized were mostly mentioned.

But then we got to this:

First the chapter is declared boring and now the plain words of the sutra are said to have no meaning. Chapter 7 explains why the Buddha taught the lesser teachings. It was an expedient to allow those followers who could not make the full journey to the treasure of enlightenment to rest and gain strength. Those in the crowd hearing the Lotus Sutra had been hearing him for life after life since he was a śramaṇera teaching the Lotus Sutra.

Using the Ongi Kuden to explain the Lotus Sutra is like relying on a commentary for understanding instead of reading the sutra itself.

As Nichiren said repeatedly, “True practicers of Buddhism should not rely on what people say, but solely on the golden words of the Buddha.”

The Ongi Kuden is not the oral teachings of Nichiren.  Modern scholars suggest the book was actually written by Nikko’s followers  at the height of the popularity of the Tendai teaching of Original Enlightenment between 110 and 185 years after Nichiren’s death.

Yesterday I published Original Enlightenment and Nichiren as the Original Buddha, an excerpt from Daniel Mongomery’s Fire in the Lotus, explaining why the Ongi Kuden is an unreliable source of Nichiren’s teachings. The most troubling implication to me, is the extent to which Nichiren Shoshu and, by extension, Soka Gakkai have used the Ongi Kuden to reject the Eternal Śākyamuni of Chapter 16 while elevating  Nichiren to the status of Original Buddha.

In Jacqueline Stone’s prize winning book Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, she explains that such games with words were “characteristic of medieval Tendai kanjin-style interpretations: The seed surpasses the harvest; the stage of practice surpasses that of attainment; Superior Conduct, a bodhisattva, is superior to Śākyamuni, a Buddha; and Nichiren, who lived after Śākyamuni in historical time, becomes his teacher in beginningless time.”

The slide deck for the lecture included several supporting slides, one of which was this one:

This is the full text from the Ongi Kuden used earlier to say every moment is the Magic City.

To say “From the magic city to the treasure land is a distance of 500 yojanas” is nonsensical. The magic city was created 300 yojanas from the start to give a rest to those who wanted to turn back. What’s the point of changing that plain fact?

In Senji-shō, Selecting the Right Time, Nichiren admonishes his questioner: “You may ask for scriptural proofs to back up statements in later commentaries, but you may not look for proofs in later commentaries when statements in sūtras are clear.”

In a letter that discusses distinguishing the true sūtra from the provisional, Nichiren quotes Grand Master Dengyō: “Rely upon the words of the Buddha in sūtras; do not believe in what has been transmitted orally.”