According to the Mahāvastu, a biography of the Buddha in the Lokottaravādin Vinaya, the bhāṇaka (memorizer of the sutras) was classified as a musician (gandharvika), together with jugglers, court bards, actors, dancers, athletes, wrestlers, singers, etc. The early Mahayana scriptures, however, looked on the dharma-bhāṇaka (preacher of the Dharma) as the transmitter of Mahayana, and forbade that he be slighted or ridiculed. The fact that the chapter of the Lotus Sutra entitled “A Teacher of the Law” (Dharmabhāṇaka-parivarta) sets forth the five kinds of practice for the dharma-bhāṇaka and the three rules of preaching shows that the dharma-bhāṇaka had been entrusted with the transmission of the Lotus Sutra.

As we have seen in the chapter called “Tactfulness,” advocates of the Lotus Sutra did not set out to deny the doctrines of the two vehicles that had already been preached; rather, they affirmed the value of each of the three vehicles (Ch., k’ai-ch’uan hsien-shih or k’ai-san hsien-erh) by embracing them all within the One True Vehicle as expedient means. The various motifs in each chapter concerning receiving and keeping the Lotus Sutra are the sermons based on the experience of faith chanted and transmitted by the various dharma-bhāṇakas, and the texts of the Lotus Sutra we now possess are the recorded forms of these.