The twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra have usually been divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the historical dimension, what happened in Shakyamuni’s lifetime. This is the historical Buddha seen through our ordinary way of perception. In this dimension, Siddhartha Gautama was born, grew up, left home to seek spiritual truth, practiced and attained great realization, and became the Buddha. He shared his realization and taught the Dharma for the rest of his eighty years of earthly life and then passed into nirvana. Vulture Peak is a real place in India, and you can still go and visit the site where Shakyamuni delivered many of his greatest teachings.

The second part of the Sutra deals with the ultimate dimension. The ultimate dimension shows us the existence of the Buddha on a plane that goes beyond our ordinary perception of space and time. This is the Buddha as a living reality, the Buddha as the body of the Dharma (dharmakaya). In the ultimate dimension, birth and death, coming and going, subject and object, don’t exist. The ultimate dimension is true reality, nirvana, the Dharma realm (dharmadhatu), which is beyond all such dualisms.

Why does the Lotus Sutra have these two dimensions? It is because this Sutra has such a profound message that it cannot be delivered any other way. That message is that everyone has the capacity for Buddhahood. If we only recognize the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, we may feel that since we were not fortunate to live in the time of Shakyamuni, there is no one to testify to our potential Buddhahood here and now. But we do not have to go back 2,600 years in order to hear the message that we too can become a Buddha. We need only to listen very carefully to the message of the Sutra and recognize the Buddha of the ultimate dimension who affirms our capacity for Buddhahood.