Monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen, gods, dragons, satyrs, centaurs, ashuras, griffins, chimeras, pythons, humans and nonhumans, minor kings, and holy wheel-rolling kings, and others are all addressed by the Buddha in Chapter 1. What we should understand from this is that Buddha Dharma is not only for Buddhists, not only for those people who are good, and not only for human beings. Even gods and other heavenly creatures come to hear the Buddha’s teaching.

There is an important truth here. While the Lotus Sutra, like any book, is very much a human creation, its significance goes beyond the human. The range of concern, in other words, is not limited to the human species, but extends to all the living. In part, this sense of cosmic importance is a reflection of the rich Indian imagination at the time the sutras were being compiled. People simply assumed that the world was populated with a rich variety of what we regard as mythical beings.

This imaginative vision urges us to reach out beyond what our eyes can see and our hands can touch, to understand ourselves as being significantly related to a much larger universe that is located in and transcends ourselves, our families, countries, and even species. It is a vision that urges us to imagine ourselves as part of a vast cosmos in which our own lives are important.

The title of Chapter 28 of the Lotus Sutra can reasonably be translated as “Encouragement of Universal Sage Bodhisattva.” There is widespread agreement among translators about the term “encouragement” in this title, but not about the name of the bodhisattva, in Sanskrit known as Samantabhadra.

In Chinese he is consistently known as P’u-hsien (Puxian) and in
Japanese, pronouncing the same Chinese characters, he is known as Fugen. The first of the two Chinese characters in the name means “universal” or “universally.” It is the same character as that found in the title of Chapter 25 of the Dharma Flower Sutra, the chapter on the Universal Gateway of Kwan-shih-yin Bodhisattva. In both cases, this universality has not so much to do with being everywhere as with being open or available to everyone.

The meaning of the second character in the name of this bodhisattva is more problematic. It clearly can mean “virtue” or “virtuous,” and most often does. Thus, the name has been rendered as “Universal Virtue” or “Universal Good.” And since to be virtuous is to be worthy, one translator has used “Universally Worthy.” The character in question can also mean “wise” or “wisdom.” And so the name has also been translated as “Universally Wise.” In an attempt to combine virtue and wisdom in a single term, like one other translator of the Lotus Sutra, I think “Universal Sage” is the most appropriate name in English, as a sage is normally both virtuous and wise. The excellent translation of the Lotus Sutra into modern French also uses “Sage.”

For the first fifteen centuries or so of its life, Buddhism was almost exclusively a religion of monastics, usually supported by laypeople. Initially it was exclusively a society of male monks, who separated themselves from ordinary life and responsibilities by leaving home to follow the Buddha. The Buddha himself abandoned his home and family in order to pursue an ascetic life. For the most part, monks do not have a lot of interest in family life; it is after all what they have abandoned.

In the Dharma Flower Sutra we have three parables that have to do with fathers and sons. In all of them no mother and no women appear at all. So it is very interesting that we find in Chapter 27, nearly at the end of the Lotus Sutra, a family drama, the story of a king named Wonderfully Adorned, his wife, and their two sons.

The two elements that have been lifted out of this story and widely used for various purposes are the idea that calling the name of the Bodhisattva will be sufficient to save one from any kind of difficulty and the idea that Kwan-yin [World-Voice-Perceiver Bodhisattva] takes on a great variety of forms or bodies.

Nikkyo Niwano of Rissho Kosei-kai said that Chapter 25 is the most misunderstood chapter of the Lotus Sutra. What he meant by this is that, properly understood, bodhisattvas are not gods from whom we should expect to receive special treatment, even in times of great trouble; bodhisattvas should be models for how we ourselves can be bodhisattvas, at least some of the time. In the Horin-kaku Guest Hall at the Tokyo headquarters of Rissho Kosei-kai there is a very large and magnificent statue of the Thousand-armed Kannon. In each of the hands we can see an implement of some kind, tools that represent skills that can be used to help others. When Founder Niwano first showed that statue to me, he emphasized that it should not be understood to mean that we should pray to Kannon to save us from our problems; rather, we should understand that the meaning of Kannon’s thousand skills is that each one of us should develop a thousand skills for helping others.

That the title figure of this chapter’s story is named “Wonderful Voice,” or perhaps “Wonderful Sound,” is another curiosity of the Lotus Sutra: absolutely nothing is said about his voice or sounds. “Wonderful Body” would be more appropriate, as his wonderful body is described in some detail: some forty-two thousand leagues tall, radiant and brilliant, powerful, pure gold in color, with eyes the size of lotus leaves, and a face as beautiful as millions of moons together. But there is not a word about his voice!

Why does Medicine King Bodhisattva travel around in this world of suffering? This is the question with which the chapter begins. He does so because he wants to help all those in need, and over many lifetimes has prepared himself to do so. We too, the story of Seen with Joy by All the Living suggests, can bring comfort and satisfaction to those in need by embodying the Dharma Flower Sutra in our own lives, that is, by being Dharma flowers.

Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra tells a story about previous lives of Medicine King Bodhisattva, when he was a bodhisattva called Seen with Joy by All the Living, a bodhisattva who burned his whole body as a sacrifice to a buddha and later burned just his arms as a sacrifice to a buddha. It then praises the Dharma Flower Sutra and those who follow it.

Like the Sutra as a whole, this chapter has had enormous impact on East Asian Buddhism. Many will remember the sight of Vietnamese monks burning themselves to death in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, beginning with the monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963. It has been said that these monks and nuns used their bodies as torches to illuminate the suffering of the Vietnamese people so that the world might see what was happening in Vietnam. Theirs was an extremely powerful message. And it is a fact that the story and pictures of Thich Quang Duc burning himself were soon seen all over the world. And within a few months the regime of President Diem was overthrown and his anti-Buddhist policies ended.

A great many Chinese monks right down to the middle of the twentieth century followed the practice of burning off one or more of their fingers as a sign of dedication and devotion. Until very recently, virtually all Chinese monks and nuns, and I believe those in Vietnam as well, when receiving final ordination, used moxa, a kind of herb used in traditional Chinese medicine, to burn small places on their scalps, where the scars usually remained for life. This ritual burning was taken to be a sign of complete devotion to the three treasures – the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

While deeply sympathetic with those who show such great devotion by sacrificing their bodies by fire, it is not a practice I can recommend to anyone. It is much better, I believe, to sacrifice our bodies through dedicated work, in a sense burning our bodies much more slowly. Since Chapter 23 is naturally read as advocating self-immolation, it has been my least favorite chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one that I some times wish had not been included. And yet the last part of the chapter contains some of the most beautiful aphoristic poetry in the Dharma Flower Sutra.

In the Dharma Flower Sutra, bodhisattvas, especially those appearing in the last eight chapters, including [Never-Despising] bodhisattva, are intended to be models for us, at least to some degree. I do not mean that we are supposed to behave exactly like any of these bodhisattvas, especially not like Medicine King Bodhisattva in Chapter 23, who burns himself. But these bodhisattva stories are clearly intended as examples having to do with the conduct of our own lives.

So what is being taught in this story? Most people, I believe, never, or at least nearly never, despise other people. We might occasionally meet someone we do not like, but we do not usually go arounddespising others. But all of us, all too often I believe, do in fact speak and act in ways that are disrespectful of others. Usually, I suppose, this is not deliberate or intentional; but arises from being careless or busy or self-absorbed or just ignorant of what may create feelings of being belittled in others. So never being disrespectful is a serious challenge for each of us. And that, I believe, is what this chapter intends to teach us – that we should always and everywhere respect other people, all other people. This means finding the good in others, even if, as in the case of Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva, they are throwing sticks and stones (or worse!) at us.

In an important respect, [Chapter 16] of the Sutra is a continuation and culmination of a story found in Chapters 11 and 15, and it needs to be understood in relation to them. In Chapter 11 Shakyamuni is portrayed as the Buddha of all worlds. In order that the whole body of Abundant Treasures Buddha may be seen, Shakyamunl assembles buddhas from all over the universe. As we have seen, these other buddhas are in some sense representatives of Shakyamuni Buddha. They can be called embodiments of Shakyamuni Buddha. Thus it is clear that Shakyamuni Buddha is represented or present in the vast expanse of space.

In Chapter 15 Shakyamuni is portrayed as having been a buddha for countless eons: Shakyamuni says that the many, many bodhisattvas who emerge from below the earth have been taught by him over countless eons. Here the Buddha is present in a vast expanse of time. “Thus, since I became Buddha a very long time has passed, a lifetime of innumerable countless eons of constantly living here and never entering extinction.” (LS 293)

That chapter ends with Maitreya Bodhisattva and others wondering how someone who has been living and teaching for only a few decades can be the teacher of countless bodhisattvas who lived ages and ages ago.

In Chapter 16, all of this is brought together in the teaching that Shakyamuni Buddha is the one Universal Buddha, the Buddha of all times and places, one whose life is extended indefinitely both spatially and temporally, from the extremely distant past into the distant future and in all the directions of the vast universe.

In [the Parable of the Priceless Gem in the Top-Knot], we are told, the jewel kept in the king’s topknot represents the Dharma Flower Sutra. Here the symbolic meaning of “jewel” is quite different from that in the story in Chapter 8 of the “hidden jewel,” where the jewel symbolizes the potential that lies dormant within all living beings to become awakened. The main point here, once more, is to describe symbolically the relationship between earlier forms of Buddhism and the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, and to explain why the Dharma Flower Sutra was not taught earlier. Here, the Dharma Flower Sutra is seen as the crowning achievement of the Buddha and Buddhism. The Buddha has given many gifts and treasures, many sutras, many practices, and so on, but there is one that stands above all the others – the Wonderful Dharma Flower Sutra.

It is important, however, to see here that the earlier or “lesser” rewards really are, first and foremost, rewards. There is no suggestion that the earlier teachings of the shravaka way are wrong or bad or even misleading. Just as in the very first parable in the Lotus Sutra, the parable of the burning house, it is by pursuing the three small vehicles that the children are led to the great vehicle; here too there is no hint of going from bad to good, or from wrong to right, or from false to true. It is the case that the Dharma Flower Sutra proclaims itself to be better in some sense than other sutras, but this is a relative difference. The holy wheel-rolling king rewarded his soldiers with all sorts of good and valuable things before deciding that one was worthy of the jewel in his topknot.