[W]hy did the Buddha not teach the single vehicle until now? This crucial question was faced not only by the compilers of the Lotus, but by early Mahāyāna teachers more broadly. If, as they maintained, the Buddha had indeed intended others to follow the bodhisattva path as he had done, then why had he not said so? Why had he instead taught the path of the two vehicles, of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas, leading to nirvāṇa? To explain this, the Lotus Sūtra returns to the scene of the Buddha’s enlightenment. It was here that the Buddha understood the nature of reality in its entirety. To offer a new vision of reality, and a new path to its realization, Buddhist authors retell the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment. This retelling has occurred over the centuries of the history of Buddhism, and it occurs in the Lotus Sūtra.

According to a well-known account, after the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, he remained in its vicinity for forty-nine days, relishing the experience and subsisting only on its power; he consumed no food during that time. He reflected that what he had realized was too profound for others to understand and that he should perhaps pass into final nirvāṇa without teaching. At this point, the god Brahmā descended from his heaven to implore the Buddha to teach, arguing that there were some “with little dust in their eyes” who would understand.

The Lotus Sūtra presents this scene, but with typical Mahāyāna excess; Brahmā is accompanied by other gods and hundreds of thousands of attendants, who entreat the Buddha to teach. And in the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s initial reluctance to teach is recast in terms specific to the Lotus itself: If he teaches the single buddha vehicle, many will reject it, causing them to be reborn as animals, hungry ghosts, or in the hells. He therefore should not teach but instead should enter nirvāṇa, that is, he should die, immediately. But then it occurs to him that he should teach something that many can accept; he should teach three vehicles, using skillful means, as the buddhas of the past had done. And, indeed, the buddhas of the ten directions immediately appear in order to endorse his decision.

In the standard version of the story, the Buddha surveys the world to determine who might have little dust in their eyes. He decides that his two old meditation teachers should be the first recipients of his teaching but then realizes that they have recently died. The next most deserving are the five ascetics with whom he had practiced various forms of self-mortification for six years, before they abandoned him for deciding that extreme asceticism is not the path of enlightenment. He discerned that they were living in a deer park near Vārāṇasī and set out to find them. When the Buddha arrived, he gave his first sermon, where he laid out the middle way, the four noble truths, and the eightfold path.

In the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha tells this story in brief. But he says that when he encountered the five ascetics, he realized that what he wanted to explain to them could not be put into words; and so, employing skillful means, he used words like nirvāṇa, arhat, dharma, and saṃgha — words that for others represent the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching. The Buddha goes on to explain to Śāriputra that now he is happy and fearless. He has set aside skillful means and teaches only the path to buddhahood. He predicts that, having heard this, the twelve hundred arhats in the audience and all the bodhisattvas will become buddhas.

Here we see the author or authors of the Lotus Sūtra displaying their remarkable rhetorical and doctrinal dexterity. They take the famous story of the Buddha’s reluctance to teach and give it an entirely new meaning. In the original story, fearing that he will be misunderstood, the Buddha hesitates to teach at all. In the retelling, it is not that the Buddha is reluctant to teach at all after his enlightenment; he is reluctant to teach the unalloyed truth of the buddha vehicle. He is quite willing to teach something less than that truth, adapted to the limited capacities, the clouded eyes, of his audience. It is only in the Lotus Sūtra that the Buddha finally conveys the full content of his enlightenment. This retelling has important implications for the narrative of the tradition. In mainstream Buddhism, the first sermon to the group of five ascetics is a momentous event in cosmic history, as the Buddha for the first time turns the wheel of the dharma. In the Lotus Sūtra, that momentous event is reduced to a mere accommodation for those whose understanding is immature. Only in the Lotus Sūtra is the Buddha’s true teaching revealed for the first time.