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The Stories of the Lotus Sutra

Stories of the Lotus Sutra book cover
Available for purchase on Amazon

From the Introduction to Gene Reeves’ 2010 book published by Rissho Kosei-kai:

Be forwarned! This book might transform you into the kind of Buddhist who loves the Lotus Sutra and therefore deeply cares about this world. It is a commentary on the stories of the Lotus Sutra, a sutra that more than any other has been both loved and reviled. Though intended to be a companion volume to my translation of the Lotus Sutra, this does not mean that it cannot be read without the translation at hand. I think everything in this book can be understood on its own. Still, one’s understanding of the Dharma Flower Sutra will be greatly enhanced by reading the translation – or better yet by reading a Chinese version! …

During most of my adult life I have been both a teacher and a preacher, roles which I understand to be different, though, of course, teaching can be included within preaching and sometimes a little preaching may show up in a teacher. And that is what this book does, at least that is what I hope it does. I hope it will inspire at least some readers not only to understand the Lotus Sutra better but also to embrace it, at least some part of its core teaching. I hope some will be moved by it to improve their lives in some significant way. But where it has seemed relevant to do so, I have included factual information both about the text and about the subjects of the stories in the text.

I hope it will shed some light on and even open up the profound meaning of that text – which is normally known in East Asia as the Dharma Flower Sutra. (In this book I will use “Lotus Sutra” and “Dharma Flower Sutra” interchangeably.) Though any text, including the Dharma Flower Sutra, can be interpreted and understood in various ways, I believe that this text is first of all a religious text, intended primarily not to settle some dispute among monks in ancient India, or to expound philosophical doctrines, but rather to influence the lives of its hearers or readers in highly significant ways. In an important way, we might say that the text wants to teach and transform you! For that purpose to be fulfilled or even appreciated widely, it is important that the meaning and thrust of the Sutra be readily available to ordinary English-language readers. This attempt to interpret the Lotus Sutra in plain words is an attempt to have its rich meanings and significance available to a wider and widening audience.
The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p1-3

See this blog post: The Trouble with Interfaith Truth

Book Quotes

 
Book List

stories, 800years

800 Years: Faith and Understanding

In this story, the Buddha says he intends “to teach the great Dharma, to send down the rain of the great Dharma, to blow the conch of the great Dharma, to beat the drum of the great Dharma, and to explain the meaning of the great Dharma.”

This represents an interesting mix of emotional and intellectual practices. … Dharma rain … is a symbol of equality among the living, in that all the living equally receive the Dharma without discrimination or distinction.

The meaning of the conch and the drum is not so obvious. Almost certainly they are instruments used to lead an army in battle, to inspire and motivate soldiers to move forward. Similarly, those who receive the Dharma Flower Sutra in their hearts are not merely comforted by it; they are motivated to practice it passionately and to share it with others. Buddhism is in this sense a missionary religion. Here in Chapter 1 of the Lotus Sutra we can see that the Dharma is intended for all the living and that those who share it should enthusiastically share it with others. We can also think of the sound of the conch as representing the beauty of the Dharma, while the sound of the drums represents the power of the Dharma.

It is important to notice, also, that even enthusiastic teaching is to be accompanied by explanation of the Dharma. This suggests that we should not attempt to make only emotional appeals on behalf of the Dharma or treat it only as an object of faith. It is equally important that the Dharma be understood. What is both embraced and understood will have a more lasting value than what is embraced merely on an emotional basis. This is probably truer now than it was when the Sutra was composed. Today people are trained to think scientifically, rationally, and critically. For the Dharma Flower Sutra to be accepted by modern people, it has to be carefully taught and explained, and even criticized, in terms that people can understand.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p32-33
stories, 800years

800 Years: The Faith of the Teacher of the Dharma

The most important thing about [Chapter 10] is its emphasis on the Dharma teacher. Here we can see that the Sutra attempts to break through the limitations of the threefold shravaka-pratyekabuddha-bodhisattva distinction that had been prominent in earlier chapters of this Sutra and elsewhere in Mahayana Buddhism. According to Chapter 10, anyone – bodhisattva, pratyekabuddha, shravaka, or layperson, man or woman – can be a Dharma teacher.

This important point is certainly not unique to this chapter, but it is emphasized here in a special way: it is not only great bodhisattvas, great leaders, or great people who can teach the Dharma and do the Buddha’s work, but very ordinary people with even a limited understanding and even of limited faith can join in the Buddha’s work, if only by understanding and teaching a little. The point is, of course, that you and I can be Dharma teachers.

Thus the Buddha tells Medicine King Bodhisattva that if anyone wants to know what sort of living beings will become buddhas in the future, he should tell them that the very people before him, that is, all sorts of people, including very ordinary people, will become buddhas.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p125-126
stories, 800years

800 Years: Faith in the Care of Buddhas

[I]n Chapter 28 of the Dharma Flower Sutra, Universal Sage becomes the vehicle for specifying the four conditions necessary for acquiring the Dharma Flower Sutra. Three of these are matters of action, things we do or can do. At least to some extent we can choose to plant roots of virtue, choose to join those who are determined to be awakened, and choose to be determined to save all the living. The first of the four, on the other hand, is quite different. Being protected and kept in mind by buddhas is not something we can choose; rather, it is more like a gift. Faith, at least in one of its dimensions, is the trust and confidence that we are always under the care of buddhas.

Being under the protection and care of buddhas does not mean that no harm can come to us. We should know that even with the protection of buddhas, the world is a dangerous place. Shakyamuni Buddha, we should remember, was harmed more than once during his teaching career and probably died from food poisoning. We can never entirely escape from a whole host of dangers, including disease, aging, crime, and war. What the Lotus Sutra teaches is not that we can be completely free from danger, but that no matter what dangers we have to face, there are resources, both in ourselves and in our communities, that make it possible for us to cope with such dangers. By having faith in the Buddha, doing good by helping others, genuinely aspiring to become more and more fully awakened through wise and compassionate practice, and by extending our compassion not only to our family and our friends but to all living beings, the dangers we face will recede into the background. They will not go away, but we will not be dominated by them.

To have faith in the Buddha is to take refuge in the Buddha. It means that embodying the Buddha in our everyday lives is our highest good. This is to live in faith, to trust life itself. Such faith is not a license to stupidly do dangerous things, but it does make it possible to live an abundant life, without undue fear or caution, even perhaps in the eyes of the world to be a little foolish. This is part of what it means to be in the care of the buddhas.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p299-300
stories, 800years

800 Years: Faith in Oneself

At a meeting some time ago of the International Buddhist Congregation in Tokyo, a young woman described how, dissatisfied with the faith in which she had been raised, she had searched among Christian and Buddhist traditions for an appropriate faith for herself, finally discovering with some joy the importance of having faith in herself. We might think that faith in oneself is not enough. And indeed it isn’t. But it is an important beginning. The poor man in this story was not able to become a functioning contributor to his family and society until he gained some respect for and confidence in himself.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p69
stories, 800years

800 Years: Faith Beyond Calculations of Ability

In ancient India placing one’s hand on the head of another apparently was a sign of trust. Clearly something like that is intended here – but perhaps something more is involved. Though not in this chapter, in various places in the Dharma Flower Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha has said that he is the father of this world. Further, bodhisattvas are regarded as children of the Buddha. There is, in other words, a kind of familial relation, a relation of affection between the Buddha and bodhisattvas. Here, the placing of his hand on the heads of bodhisattvas indicates that the relationship is not only one of trust in a formal sense but displays a religious faith which goes beyond calculations of ability and such. Just as in early chapters of the Sutra he has assured shravakas of becoming buddhas, here the Buddha assures bodhisattvas that they can do the job that needs to be done.

The bodhisattvas, in turn, assure the Buddha that they will indeed carry on his ministry of spreading the Dharma. In other words, the relationship of trust between the Buddha and the bodhisattvas is a mutual one, based on personal assurance. The Buddha assures the bodhisattvas that they can do what needs to be done and they assure him that they will do it.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p 234-235
stories, 800years

800 Years: Living Faith

Faith is not faith if it is only believed, or only felt; it must be lived. One must strive to become a buddha by being a bodhisattva for others, which means nothing more and nothing less than embodying Buddha Dharma by helping others in whatever ways are appropriate and in whatever ways one can.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p309
stories, LS32, d31b

The Perfection of Skillful Means

Just as Buddhism breaks with conventional traditions, the Dharma Flower Sutra sometimes breaks from Buddhist traditions. Almost everywhere they are mentioned, including in other parts of the Lotus Sutra, there are six special bodhisattva practices, often called “perfections” from the Sanskrit term paramita, because they are practices through which bodhisattvas should try to perfect or improve themselves.

Though they have been translated in other ways, the usual six are: generosity in giving; morality, sometimes understood as following commandments or precepts; patiently enduring hardship; perseverance or devotion to one’s goals; meditation or meditative concentration; and wisdom. To these six a seventh is added in this chapter – the practice of skillful means.

On the one hand, it is appropriate that the practice of skillful means is added to the normal bodhisattva practices. Among other things, it makes clear that the use of skillful means is not, as some have said, something that can be done only by a buddha – but indeed by any Dharma teacher. Here it is made abundantly clear that use of skillful means is a practice of all who follow the bodhisattva path.

As you teach or share Buddha Dharma, you may want to devise your own list of bodhisattva practices. I once gave a talk about the eleven practices of the Lotus Sutra. If I were doing that talk again today, I would have to make it a list of twelve. The point is that the Lotus Sutra encourages us to adapt the Dharma and our ways of teaching it creatively, in accord with what is most likely to be useful in our own place and time.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p292-293
stories, LS32, d21b

The Buddha Is Always Available To Us

When the Dharma Flower Sutra says that the Buddha is somehow embodied or represented in all directions throughout time and space, it is not claiming that the Buddha is somehow beyond time and history – in fact, it is saying something that is nearly the opposite: namely, that no matter where we go, whether on foot or by spaceship, and no matter when in our lives, whether celebrating our eighteenth birthday or lying on our deathbed, there is no place and no time in which the Buddha is not available to us.

The father returns home after the children have been shocked into taking the medicine and have recovered. children are able to see him once again. By taking good medicine, the Dharma, people are able to see the Buddha, even though he died some twenty-five hundred years ago. To incorporate the Dharma into one’s life is to be able to see the Buddha. The Buddha can be found in anybody and anything at all. This is what it means for the Buddha to be universal: he is to be found whenever and wherever we look for him.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p 206-207
stories, LS32, d32b

The Flowering of Buddha Dharma

The Dharma Flower Sutra, in my experience, is a wonderful flowering of Buddha Dharma. Whenever I pay close attention to some passage in it, something I had never seen before is revealed to me and I learn from it. But it is also a book that arose in a particular historical context and was composed and translated within particular social settings. It is not entirely free from error, or at least not free from perspectives that we now regard as deficient or even morally wrong. In saying that followers of the Lotus Sutra should not associate with butchers or those who sell meat, with those who raise animals for their meat, or with those who hunt, the Sutra is reflecting values embodied in the Indian caste system, in which such people were despised.

Rather than taking such a view literally, we can understand it to be an exhortation to think carefully about whom we associate closely with. And this consideration brings us back to the third of the four conditions discussed earlier – the idea that we should be most closely associated with a group of people who are determined to follow the bodhisattva way as best as they are able. Having gained the strength that comes from meeting the four conditions and encountering Universal Sage Bodhisattva on his white elephant with six tusks, we need to have no fear of associating with butchers, ranchers, or hunters, or even with pimps. For it is the compassion of the Buddha, modeled for us in the Dharma Flower Sutra by Kwan-yin, the Regarder of the Cries of the World, that will encourage us to be rooted in the suffering and misery of this world, shunning no one. And for some followers of the Dharma Flower Sutra at least, this might mean, not only not avoiding those who are despised by the society in which we live, whether they be a racial minority, or a minority identified by disease or mental illness, or some other despised group, but actively being with and supporting such people.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p308-309
stories, LS32, d32b

Respecting Those Who Embrace the Lotus Sutra

It is written that terrible things – leprosy, missing or bad teeth, ugly lips, a flat nose, squinty eyes, deformed hands and feet, body odor, severe illness, and so on, often for many generations – will come to those who expose the faults of followers of the Sutra. (LS 397—98) This passage is often used by the Sutra’s detractors to show that the Lotus Sutra is extremely intolerant. But we should be careful about this. At least a couple of things need to be said.

One is that the context makes it clear that what is being talked about primarily is not evil-doers but followers of the Lotus Sutra. The passage concludes with, “Therefore, Universal Sage, if anyone sees someone who receives and embraces this sutra, they should get up and greet them from afar, as if they were paying reverence to the Buddha.” The purpose of the passage is not, in other words, an attempt to describe consequences of evil actions; rather, it is to urge that special respect be given to those who embrace the Sutra.

Second, the passage does not point to supernatural intervention or action to punish evil-doers. It is not about literal punishment at all. At most, it should be taken to mean, again, that actions have consequences. Thus, just as planting good seeds is likely to produce good results, planting rotten seeds by doing bad things is likely to have bad results.

Having said this, perhaps we should also take a quick look at an earlier passage, one in which it is said that those who follow the Dharma Flower Sutra not only will no longer be attached to worldly pleasures, they will have no liking for scriptures of non-Buddhists or other jottings, nor ever again take pleasure in associating with such people or with other evil people, be they butchers or those who raise pigs, sheep, chickens, and dogs, or hunters, or pimps. The common thread here, of course, has to do with profiting from the sale of flesh, animal or human. It shows that some Buddhists have taken very seriously the prohibition against killing or profiting from killing and, in this case, prostitution.

The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, p307-308