Since one of the sixteen practices is making offerings to the Sutra, a kind of worship, it may be useful to discuss the difference between worshiping an idol (or statue) and worshiping with the help of an image, or worshiping through or before an image. Among many Protestant Christians, as in the Bible, idolatry is vigorously condemned. It is understood to be worship of a false god, something that is not God. Virtually all Buddhists, on the other hand, make a great deal of use of physical objects in both personal and public worship. Most prominent among these, of course, are buddha statues and, in Mahayana Buddhism, statues of famous bodhisattvas, especially Kwan-yin/Kannon, Maitreya, Manjushri, and Samantabhadra – all of whom are prominent in the Lotus Sutra – and Kshitigarbha/Ti-tsang/Jizo (who does not appear in the Lotus Sutra). But it is not only such statues and paintings that are used in worship – the Lotus Sutra itself, in physical form, has often been treated as an object of worship in East Asia.

To worship an idol itself is to confuse one’s ultimate object of worship or devotion with some physical thing. One morning my wife and I went to the Great Sacred Hall of Rissho Kosei-kai in Tokyo. As Rissho Kosei-kai’s main object of worship and devotion, a wonderful statue of the universal or eternal Shakyamuni Buddha dominates the main hall. Inside of this statue is a copy of the Threefold Lotus Sutra in calligraphy inscribed by Founder Niwano. But we did not worship either the statue or its contents. Before, through, and with the help of the statue that was in front of us, we paid our respects to the Buddha who is everywhere. This does not make the statue any less important, indeed it makes it truly more important, for it can lead us to the truth – something that worshiping the statue itself could never do.

Awakening is more a road than a destination, more a commencement than a conclusion – a responsibility as much as an achievement. To enter the Buddha Way is not a matter of attaining some great height from which one can boast or look down on others. It is to enter a difficult path, a way. At the end of this parable, the children are very happy, as they have received a gift much greater than they expected, perhaps greater than they could have imagined. But we must not imagine that receiving the gift is the end of the matter.

We can say that their lives and their difficulties – that is, their responsibilities – have now really only just begun.

Kwan-yin is not only a symbol of compassion, she is compassion, so that wherever compassion can be seen, Kwan-yin can be seen. Kwan-yin is not some god looking down at the world from a distance but the Buddha’s compassion embodied in the actual world of quite ordinary men and women.

Tradition also says that we should understand that we ourselves should embody Kwan-yin, that if, for example, we concentrate on Kwan-yin or recite the Kwan-yin chapter, we can open ourselves to compassion, not to some abstract compassion from a distance, but to actually embodying compassion by being compassionate in our own lives and behavior.

In a way, the interdependent character of this world is also shown in the greetings that Wonderful Voice Bodhisattva brings to Shakyauni Buddha: “World-honored one,” he says:

Are your ailments and troubles few? Is your daily life and practice going smoothly? Are the four elements in you in harmony? Are the affairs of the world tolerable? Are living beings easy to save? Are they not excessively greedy, angry, foolish, jealous, and arrogant? Are they not lacking in proper regard for their parents? Are they not disrespectful to novice monks? Do they not have wrong views and inadequate goodness? Are their five emotions not out of control? (LS 366)

Here we can clearly see that the same Buddha who can illuminate the entire universe, the same Buddha whose land this is, the same Buddha who provides us with infinite opportunities to experience joy in service to the Dharma, this same Buddha is far from all-powerful or utterly independent in the fashion of both Indian and Western gods. This is a buddha who is supremely interdependent, one who both serves all others and at the same time is dependent on all others. This Buddha needs bodhisattvas, and needs ordinary human beings to be bodhisattvas in order to accomplish the Buddha’s work of saving all the living.

That is why Wonderful Voice Bodhisattva can take on the form of a buddha. He can become the Buddha for anyone who needs saving grace to come to them in the form of a buddha.

Over and over again in the Dharma Flower Sutra we are encouraged to “receive, embrace, read, recite, copy, teach, and practice” the Dharma Flower Sutra. Thus, the fact that Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva did not read or recite sutras is quite interesting. I think it is an expression of the general idea in the Dharma Flower Sutra that, while various practices are very important, what is even more important is how one lives one’s life in relation to others. The references to bodhisattvas who do not follow normal monastic practices, including reading and recitation of sutras, but still become fully awakened buddhas indicates that putting the Dharma into one’s daily life by respecting others, and in this way embodying the Dharma, is more important than formal practices such as reading and recitation.

The Dharma Flower Sutra … is action-oriented. At the end of Chapter 16 we are invited to perfect our buddha bodies. The Sutra, in other words, is as much concerned, perhaps even more concerned, about what we do with our hands and feet as it is with what happens in our minds. This is not to say that what happens in our minds is unimportant. It is exceedingly difficult to imagine a peaceful world without there being peaceful minds. But I think it would be a great mistake to assume that, at least for the Dharma Flower Sutra, the end or goal of Buddhism is some kind of experience of being enlightened or awakened. For the Lotus Sutra, the goal is the way itself, the way of awakened action – the practice and the way of the bodhisattva, one who is becoming a buddha through taking on whatever forms are needed to help others.

While today we can regret the fact that early Buddhists failed to challenge the assumption that a buddha must always have a male body, it is not surprising that this was simply assumed in this story of the dragon princess.

It is an incorrect representation of the story, however, to claim that the Sutra “insists” on such a transformation. What is insisted on is the claim that “even” a girl can become a buddha. Since by definition buddhas are male, the story simply says in one brief phrase that her body was transformed into that of a male during the process of her becoming a buddha. There is no insistence. It is simply assumed to be a necessary step in becoming a buddha.

[I]n Chapter 10 there are several variations of the formula for five practices and many more throughout the Sutra, usually with five or six different practices being listed. By my count, at least sixteen such practices are cited in the Sutra, though never all in one place. Not all of them are entirely different perhaps, but they are different enough to be represented by different Chinese characters in Kumarajiva’s translation and therefore in my English translation.

Here are the sixteen practices with regard to the Sutra: to hear, receive, embrace or uphold, read, recite, study, memorize or learn by heart, remember it correctly, understand its meaning, explain it, teach it for the sake of others, copy it, honor it, make offerings to it, put it into practice, and practice the Sutra as taught or preached. What I want to portray with this list is that the Dharma Flower Sutra is richer and much more complex than standard formulas sometimes suggest. The reduction of the sixteen to a standard five is a useful device for aiding our learning – nothing more. By using a variety of such lists, even in the same chapter, we are being taught, I believe, to be flexible and open-minded when reading or studying the Dharma Flower Sutra.

Whether the list of such practices be five or seven or sixteen, these are practices that can be done by anyone, including you and me, and they can be done just about anywhere. They certainly are not the end of Buddhist practice, but they can be used as skillful means, as useful and important steps in the direction of the life of a true Dharma teacher or bodhisattva.

Taking interpretation of this parable [of the jewel in the robe] further, the idea of being given a great treasure is not only an individual matter, but something that can be applied to human beings as a whole. The treasure is the earth, the natural environment and resources that we have inherited. Human beings have been given not only buddha-nature, but all of nature itself. The Buddha (the reality of the world) is basically generous and supportive of human life. We have inherited an incredibly rich earth. With it we are given an enormous opportunity to do good. The question is, will we recognize and appreciate how valuable this treasure is, and, if we do, how will we use this treasure given to us?

Perhaps humanity as a whole is like the poor man in the parable – still stumbling around without realizing that we have such a treasure. Perhaps humanity as a whole needs to wake up to see not only the wonderful treasure that is in us but also the wonderful treasure that is all around us.