Having added the “missing” portion of the Lotus Sūtra’s Chapter 5, The Simile of Herbs, I’m continuing my Office Lens housecleaning with quotes I saved from Gene Reeves’ Translator’s Introduction to his 2008 translation of the The Lotus Sutra.
Today’s quote ties nicely to the Buddha’s statement in Simile of the Clay Pots: “O Kāśyapa, there are not three vehicles. There are only beings of severally different modes of conduct, and for that reason three vehicles are designated.”
While the three ways [Pratyekabuddhas, Śrāvakas and Bodhisattvas] can be understood as two, they can also be understood as representative of many ways. “Ever since I became a buddha,” Shakyamuni says at the beginning of chapter 2, “I have used a variety of causal explanations and a variety of parables to teach and preach, and countless skillful means to lead living beings.” The reason the Dharma is so difficult to understand and accept is that a great many teaching devices have been used, among them both the metaphor of the three vehicles and the reality underlying the metaphor, the three different approaches themselves. What makes everything clear, says the Buddha, is an understanding of the one vehicle of many skillful means now being revealed.
While the Lotus Sutra rejects the extreme of pure diversity and the consequent danger of nihilism through use of the one vehicle as the unity in purpose of the many skillful means, it also clearly rejects the opposite extreme of complete unity in which diversity disappears or is relegated to mere illusion. Here diversity is not lamented but regarded as a necessary consequence of the fact that living beings and their situations are diverse. And it is celebrated as the way in which a diversity of people can share the Dharma. Even when the sutra describes a future paradise, it includes shravakas as well as bodhisattvas; the diversity of approaches never disappears. In this sense, as in many others, this sutra teaches a “middle way,” here a middle way between utter diversity and sheer unity.
The infinite variety of ways of teaching have the one purpose of leading all living beings to pursue the goal of becoming a buddha, a goal that everyone without exception can reach, though the time may be very long and the way far from smooth or easy. (Reeves, p12-13)