I was introduced to Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s book, The Lotus Sutra: A Biography, through a review published in the Summer 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly that I found on LionsRoar.com.

Paul L. Swanson’s review concludes: “In short, this book is a biography of a book, one that admits in its final pages that one cannot ultimately answer the question of what that book really is. It is a challenge that Lopez leaves with the reader.”

That was enough to prompt me to purchase the University of Michigan professor’s contribution to Princeton University Press’ Lives of Great Religious Books, “a series of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world.”

And, having read Lopez’s book, I think Swanson missed the point Lopez makes at the conclusion. Here’s what he says:

But where, in the end, is the Lotus Sūtra? It is a text marked with fissures and cracks, like the earth split by a rising stūpa, like the earth rent by bodhisattvas emerging from beneath the soil. Is it a fractured whole, or is it assembled fragments? Perhaps it is a puzzle that can never be put back together, leaving just its name. Nichiren wrote, “Now in the Final Dharma age, neither the Lotus Sūtra nor the other sūtras are of use. Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō alone is valid.” We recall that in Nichiren Shōshū, the dharma in the three jewels is not the Lotus Sūtra; it is the three great secret doctrines: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan.

And so the Lotus Sūtra that we have been seeking seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was never there. This text that seemed to lack any particular doctrine, this text that never seemed to begin, has become a source of short phrases (such as kōsen rufu, “wide propagation”) invested with meanings that would have been incomprehensible to its authors, as is so often the case with sacred texts. Among some of its modern adherents, we are left with something as vague (though laudable) as world peace.

Perhaps we have become those strange beings mentioned in Chapter Seven, called lokāntarika, “those between the worlds.” Perhaps it is time to return to the text, to live in the darkness of the fissures that seem to scar it. By returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra (as the sūtra itself exhorts us to do), by exploring its cracks and fissures, those of us who, in the words of the sūtra, have been living in “the dark places between the worlds, where the rays of the sun and the moon have been unable to penetrate”, may recognize each other as the many different readers of the many different readings of the Lotus Sūtra and say to each other, “How is it possible that sentient beings have suddenly appeared here?”

“By returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra…” That’s the only message worthy of concluding a “biography” of the Lotus Sūtra.

As a postscript I want to delve into Lopez’s quote from Chapter 7: The Parable of the Magic City. I did not recognize it at first since in Senchu Murano’s English translation of the Lotus Sūtra it looks like this:

The Buddha said to the bhikṣus:

“When Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, five hundred billion Buddha-worlds in each of the ten quarters quaked in the six ways, and all those worlds, including those intercepted from the brilliant rays of light of the sun and the moon by the neighboring worlds, were illumined [by great rays of light], and the living beings of those worlds were able to see each other for the first time. They said to each other, ‘How did you appear so suddenly?’

Lopez’s quote comes from Leon Hurvitz’s “Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma,” which is an English translation of Kumārajīva’s Chinese with additional material taken directly from Sanskrit. This is the same portion of Chapter 7:

The Buddha declared to the bhiksus: “When the buddha Victorious Through Great Penetrating Knowledge attained anuttasamyaksambodhi, in each of the ten directions five hundred myriads of millions of buddha worlds trembled in six different ways, and in the intervals between those lands, dark and obscure places that the glorious light of the sun and moon could not illuminate were all very bright. The living beings within them were all enabled to see one another, and all said: ‘Why has this place suddenly produced living beings?’

Making explicit that the universe without a Buddha is “dark and obscure” – the intervals between Buddha worlds – helps reveal what enlightenment means for the universe.

I am currently on my 39th trip through Senchu Murano’s English translation. I’m looking forward to taking up Hurvitz’s “Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma” for a cycle or two and gaining further insight “by returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra.”