The Buddha’s Brilliant
Deception
In the Lotus Sutra, he
reveals that there is not a threefold path to liberation, but one
way. Chandrahas Choudhury reviews “The Lotus Sutra” by Donald S.
Lopez Jr.
Chandrahas Choudhury Dec.
22, 2016 The Wall Street Journal
Every morning at thousands
of Buddhist shrines in Japan—and at the Nichiren Temple in Queens,
N.Y., the Rissho Kosei-Kai Center of Los Angeles, and the
Daiseion-Ji temple in the small town of Wipperfürth, Germany—there
rises the chant “Nam myoho renge kyo.” These five syllables don’t
sound so lyrical in translation—“Glory to the wonderful Dharma of
the Lotus Flower Sutra”—but for those who utter them they proclaim
the enduring mystery, wisdom and salvific power of one of the most
important and ancient books of Buddhist teachings, the Lotus
Sutra.
The lotus, which roots in
mud, rises up through water and raises its beautiful petals towards
the sky, is the most ubiquitous of Buddhist motifs, an image of the
ascent from the morass of worldly desires and suffering to beauty,
peace and virtue. Sutra comes from the Sanskrit word “sutta” or
“thread,” meaning a set of thoughts or aphorisms on a given subject
(as in the Kama Sutra, a treatise on love and courtship). Since
there is no written record of Buddhist doctrine from the time of
the Buddha, the canon of Buddhist literature brims with hundreds of
such sutras which purport to reveal his true teaching.
The Lotus Sutra has a
special place in this canon. A lively if often confounding grab bag
of parables and proclamations told in both prose and verse, it is
rich in narrative pleasure and contains more braggadocio than a
Donald Trump speech. (“The Buddha is the king,” we read at one
point, “this sutra is his wife.”) Indeed, many scholars trace its
self-promotional tone back to the era of its composition, when it
had to establish itself within a crowded market of religious texts
and sects in India. The nature of the Lotus Sutra’s influence is
taken up by the scholar of Buddhism Donald S. Lopez Jr. in the
latest in Princeton University Press’s excellent series on the
“lives of great religious books.”
As with so many religious
works from antiquity, the Sutra has a history shrouded in
uncertainty. Even its authorship is a mystery. By the time it was
composed in Sanskrit early in the first millennium, the Buddha had
been dead for 500 years. His striking message, at once austere and
compassionate, offered a vision of liberation resolutely free of
mythological content. The Buddha’s eerily convincing diagnosis of
the nature of human suffering and the way to transcend it had
achieved a wide currency in India and had extended to China and Sri
Lanka. But Buddhism had begun to break up into sects over divergent
interpretations of the teaching.
The major schism was
between the Hinayana and the Mahayana. The Hinayana school stressed
the importance of monastic life as the only real path to
liberation. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, was much more
worldly even in its quest for transcendence. Its hero was not the
“arhat,” or the being who has attained nirvana, but the
“bodhisattva,” the enlightened person who perceives the truth but
stays behind in the world to help others across to the far shore of
peace.
The Lotus Sutra is a
classic—and cacophonous—Mahayana text. The book unfolds as a series
of dialogues between the Buddha and his followers, many of them men
of great spiritual prowess themselves. The text slowly and artfully
builds to a revelation: that of the “saddharma,” or true dharma.
The Buddha reveals to his interlocutors that the “threefold path”
that he teaches in other texts—a somewhat arcane theory of
different streams of learning and discipleship that open out paths
to liberation—is actually something of a deception.
In truth, there is only a
single Way. But “this Dharma is indescribable / Words must fall
silent.” (A very lucid account of the possible nature of this
vision, which the Buddha says cannot be formulated in language, can
be found in Heinrich Zimmer’s 1952 book “Philosophies of India.)
The Buddha is so far gone, he explains, that had he taught such a
difficult doctrine, he would have made himself clear to precisely
nobody. Instead, he used the path of “skillful means” to set people
off on the path to transcendence, preaching to each person
according to his estimate of their capacity for
enlightenment.
With this master stroke,
the Lotus Sutra makes the goal of liberation at once more
mysterious and more practicable (and, conveniently, knocks out
other sutras competing for the attention of the faithful). The
ultimate goal, so elusive, seems almost unattainable, but this
makes every teacher a student and every student part of a great,
throbbing chain of learning. Indeed, following the Buddha, any
teacher must think seriously not just about knowledge, but the
right way to transmit it. In this way, the Lotus Sutra makes itself
indispensable not just as a teaching, but as a tool of pedagogy. As
Mr. Lopez writes: “Perhaps the central teaching of the Lotus Sutra
is to teach the Lotus Sutra.”
The allure of Buddhism
eventually faded in the land of its birth, where Hinduism was too
vivid and well-established to give way to this more introspective
ideology. But the Lotus Sutra and other key texts gradually took
root in others lands and languages. To the raft of entertaining
characters found in the text itself—peasants and princes, initiates
and religious masters, the Buddha as both truth-teller and
deceiver—Mr. Lopez’s book adds a cast of historical figures across
two millennia united only by their passion for the book, including
the 13th-century Japanese monk Nichiren, whose fire-and-brimstone
message declaring all other Buddhist texts but the Lotus Sutra to
be heretical earned him a long incarceration on a lonely island,
and Gustave Flaubert.
The author focuses on two
especially interesting figures, both of them translators. The
first, the Buddhist monk Kumarajiva, lived in eastern India in the
4th century, and had the misfortune of being taken hostage by an
invading Chinese general. Over long years as a prisoner, he picked
up enough Chinese to translate the Lotus Sutra for the benefit of
the Chinese emperor, already a devout Buddhist. Thus the Sutra took
root in China, and spread slowly through the Far East.
Just as fascinating is the
story of how the book arrived in the West. The Sutra was among a
large cache of Buddhist manuscripts sent early in the 19th century
to the French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf by Brian Hodgson, an
enterprising young officer of the British East India Company.
Burnouf immediately set to translating it, noting among other
things the book’s “discursive and very Socratic method of
exposition.” His French version, published posthumously in 1852,
made its way across the Atlantic, where it was picked up and
circulated in translation by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
Transcendentalists, who regularly published scriptures from Asia in
their magazine, the Dial.
Mr. Lopez’s book shows us
that translators are the unsung heroes of religious, as much as
literary, history. Here he has serviced the text with yet another
sort of translation—this one to a general audience.
The Lotus Sutra is a
rejection, observes Mr. Lopez, of the kind of nirvana “that is a
solitary and passive state of eternal peace.” Rather, we are all
travelers on a long road, even the enlightened ones among us; we
cannot see through to the end right from the start and must begin
with small acts of compassion and caring. The inspiring message of
the Lotus Sutra is that buddhahood is immanent in all of
us.