A Chinese/Japanese term often used for “introduction” is more literally “entrance gateway.” And while that is not what the first chapter of the Lotus Sutra is called, that is exactly what it is. It is a gateway through which one can enter a new and mysterious world, an enchanting world – a world of the imagination.

The setting, the opening scene, is on Holy Eagle Peak. This Holy Eagle Peak is not off somewhere in another world. It is a real place on a mountain in northeast India. I was there a few years ago. But as well as being an actual, physical, and historical place, the Holy Eagle Peak of the Dharma Flower Sutra is a mythical place.

The place we visited, the geographical place, is like a ledge set on a steep mountainside, perhaps three-fourths of the way up the mountain. Above and below it, the mountain is both steep and rough, not the kind of place where anyone could sit and listen to a sermon or lecture. And the ledge itself would not hold more than three dozen or so people at a time.

In the Sutra this little place is populated by a huge assembly, with thousands of monks and nuns and laypeople, eighty thousand bodhisattvas, and a large number of gods, god-kings (including Indra, King of the Gods), dragon kings, chimera kings, Centaur kings, ashura kings, griffin kings, satyrs, pythons, minor kings, and holy wheel-rolling kings. Already, just from the listing of such a population, and there is more, we know we have entered a realm that is special, even magical.

We do not know much about the Indian origins of the Lotus Sutra, but we can be reasonably confident that it was produced in northern India by monks, and it is very likely that many of its first hearers and readers would have known perfectly well that Holy Eagle Peak was in actuality much too small for the kind of assembly described at the beginning of Chapter 1. We are to understand from the very beginning, in other words, that this is a story, not a precise description of historical events, but a mythical account of historical events. It is meant not just for our knowledge, but for our participation. It invites us to use our own imagination to participate in the Sutra’s world of enchantment.