Starting what will be at least two cycles through my 32 Days of the Lotus Sutra practice tied to the new book Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, I’ve got lots to say.
First, I’m constantly reminded that this is not a Buddhist text but instead an academic text about Buddhism. Grin and bear such slights as:
Two Buddhas, p36As we shall see, the Lotus Sūtra is obsessed, perhaps above all, with its own legitimation, with an almost palpable anxiety to prove that it was spoken by the Buddha. That obsession is evident from the first three words of the Sanskrit text: evam mayā ‘rutam, ” thus have I heard.”
or this:
Two Buddhas, p47Roughly a thousand years after the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, in an entirely different cultural sphere, the Buddhist teacher Nichiren maintained that now in the time of mappō, the entire sūtra was encompassed in its daimoku or title, and that chanting the title was the chief practice of the Lotus Sūtra for the present era. “Whatever sūtra he expounded,” Nichiren wrote, “the Buddha assigned it a title expressing its ultimate principle.” Today we know that the historical Buddha did not preach, let alone name, the Lotus Sūtra, but the idea that a sūtra’s title embodies its essence was well established in Nichiren’s time.
And I’m just going to ignore the declaration that the “early Buddhist tradition” will be called “mainstream Buddhism,” the choice of modern scholars, we’re told on Page 37. Mahāyāna is not mainstream? Seriously?
But that is not to say I haven’t found nuggets worth picking up and putting in my pocket.
Take for example the discussion of what “mainstream” Buddhists would be shocked by in the first chapter, Introduction.
Two Buddhas, p44There is much to ponder here [in Mañjuśrī’s recollection of time long in the past], as the Lotus Sūtra makes a powerful claim for its own authority. The sūtra, which no one has ever heard before, is not new. In fact, it is very old, so old that it has been all but forgotten. It was taught many eons ago, by a buddha so ancient that his name does not appear in the standard list of the previous buddhas. The only familiar name in the story is Dipamkara (16), the first buddha in the list of twenty-five buddhas of the past, according to the Pali tradition.
In that tradition, it was at the feet of Dipamkara that Sumedha, the yogin who would one day become Śākyamuni Buddha, vowed to follow the long bodhisattva path to buddhahood. It was Dipamkara who prophesied that Sumedha would become a buddha named Gautama. Hence, the first buddha known to the collective memory of the tradition was the last son of the last buddha Candrasūryapradipa [the Buddha Sun-Moon-Light in Muran’s translation] to become enlightened. This means that the story told by Mañjuśrī is about events in a past so distant that no record of them exists. In other words, prior even to the time of the buddha Dipamkara, under whom the buddha of our world, Gautama or Śākyamuni, first took his bodhisattva vows, another buddha, Candrasūryapradipa, taught the Lotus Sūtra. Furthermore, Candrasūryapradipa was Dipamkara’s father, placing him in a position of authority, both in age and in lineage, to the first buddha named by the tradition. The Lotus Sūtra is therefore older than any teaching previously known.
And this description of how the shaking of the worlds in Chapter 1 is linked by Nichiren to the devastating quakes of his time:
Two Buddhas, p52Nichiren was initially moved to remonstrate with government authorities by the suffering he had witnessed following a devastating earthquake in 1257. It was then that he composed and submitted his treatise Risshō ankoku ron, his first admonishment to persons in power. Initially he saw that earthquake as collective karmic retribution for the error of neglecting the Lotus Sūtra. But over time it came to evoke for him the shaking of “the whole buddha world” (5) in the “Introduction” chapter presaging Śākyamuni’s preaching of the Lotus. Thus the 1257 quake assumed for him a second meaning as a harbinger of the spread of the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, the teaching for the Final Dharma age. “From the Shōka era (1257-1259) up until the present year (1273) there have been massive earthquakes and extraordinary celestial portents,” he wrote. “… You should know that these are no ordinary auspicious or inauspicious omens concerning worldly affairs. They herald nothing less than the rise or decline of this great dharma.” Just as the quaking of the earth had presaged the Buddha’s preaching of the Lotus Sūtra, a violent earthquake had preceded his own dissemination of the sūtra and the practice of chanting its daimoku. This is but one example of how Nichiren read the events of his own life and times as mirrored in the Lotus Sūtra.
It looks like I’m going to have pockets full of nuggets when this journey is complete.
