What Happens in the Lotus Sutra?
Unpacking the events in this famous Buddhist Scripture
DONALD S. LOPEZ JR.| SEPTEMBER 28,
2016 Lion's Roar
In his new
book, The
Lotus Sutra: A Biography, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
unpacks what may be the most famous of Buddhist scriptures,
explaining how it came to be and how its influence has grown over
centuries. Here, in Chapter 1 from that book, Lopez provides what
he calls “The Plot Summary” of the Lotus
Sutra, in plain language. Whether you’re
experienced with theLotus or
have never endeavored to read it, you’ll have a deeper
understanding of it.
The
Lotus Sūtra begins, like so many Buddhist
sūtras, with the Buddha seated on Vulture Peak. He is surrounded by
a huge audience of monks, nuns, and deities, many of whom are
named; those names include the most famous figures of the
tradition. Also present is a huge audience ofbodhisattvas.
This immediately indicates that this is a Mahāyāna sūtra, where the
bodhisattva—one who has vowed to follow the long path to
buddhahood—is extolled over the arhat,
the ideal of the early Buddhist tradition, who follows a much
shorter path to nirvāṇa.
The Buddha
delivers a discourse, whose content is not described, and then
enters a state of deep meditation. He emits a ray of light from
between his eyes, illuminating all the realms to the east, from the
highest heavens to the lowest hells. One of the bodhisattvas in the
audience—Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom—reports that he once
witnessed the same miracle in the far distant past, after which the
Buddha of that age taught the Lotus
Sūtra. He thus speculates that Śākyamuni, the Buddha of the
present age, is about to do the same.
The Buddha
now speaks, praising the wisdom of the buddhas, which he describes
as superior to that of those who follow the path of
the śrāvaka(disciple)
or pratyekabuddha (privately
enlightened) to become arhats. He goes on to say that he has taught
the dharma using skillful means (upāya) in order that the
beings of the world might overcome attachment. He addresses this
statement to one of the arhats in the audience, indeed, the wisest
of the arhats, the monk Śāriputra. The Buddha’s statement is
disconcerting to Śāriputra; as an arhat, he is “one who has nothing
further to learn.” And yet the Buddha is praising a wisdom beyond
his comprehension and using a term—skillful means—that he had not
heard before.
In the
past, the Buddha had taught three paths or “vehicles. […] However,
those paths were skillful means. In fact, there is only one path,
one vehicle: the path to buddhahood, the buddha
vehicle.
The Buddha
eventually agrees to explain what he has said, but before he can do
so, five thousand members of the audience get up and walk out—a
remarkable moment in a Buddhist text. Describing them as arrogant,
the Buddha announces that he is now about to teach the “true
dharma,” thesaddharma, which forms the first word in the
Sanskrit title of the sūtra. He explains that the buddhas appear in
the world for one reason: to lead beings to buddhahood. In the
past, he had taught three paths or “vehicles” (yāna): the
path of the śrāvaka that leads to the nirvāṇa of the arhat, the
path of the pratyekabuddha that leads to the
nirvāṇa of the arhat,
and the path of the rare bodhisattva that leads to the distant
state of buddhahood. However, those paths were skillful means. In
fact, there is only one path, one vehicle (ekayāna): the path to buddhahood, the buddha vehicle
(buddhayāna). He explains that if he had revealed this
single path from the beginning, many would have felt incapable of
following it. Therefore, he devised a skillful method to
accommodate them, teaching a shorter and simpler path, the path to
the nirvāṇa of the
arhat. Now, he is revealing that there is only one path and that
that path is available to all.
The
Lotus Sūtra is famous for its seven
parables (or eight in some versions). Four will be discussed here.
The first and most famous is the parable of the burning house in
Chapter Three. The house of a kind father catches on fire while his
children are playing inside. When they ignore their father’s pleas
to escape, he tells them that outside the house there are three
carts awaiting them: one pulled by a sheep; one, by a deer; and
one, by an ox. This promise causes the children to leave the house,
where they find a single cart, drawn by an ox. The Buddha explains
that the burning house
is saṃsāra,
the realm of rebirth; he is the father, and the children are the
sentient beings of the universe, so absorbed in the world that they
ignore its dangers. Knowing the predilections and capacities of
sentient beings, the Buddha lures them to various paths to escape
saṃsāra by offering them something that
appeals to their limited aspirations. However, this is his skillful
method. When they have set out on that path, or even reached its
final destination, he reveals that there is only one path and one
goal, far superior to what he had taught before: the single vehicle
to buddhahood.
The
Buddha explains that the burning house
issaṃsāra, the realm of
rebirth; he is the father, and the children are the sentient beings
of the universe, so absorbed in the world that they ignore its
dangers.
This
inspiring revelation is followed by a grim description of the fate
that awaits those who reject
the Lotus
Sūtra and who disparage those who follow it.
After they die, they will be reborn in hell, and when they are
subsequently reborn as humans, they will suffer all manner of
maladies.
The
Buddha’s revelation of the single vehicle causes the great arhats,
beginning with Śāriputra, to request prophecies of their future
buddhahood, something that all bodhisattvas must receive to proceed
on the path to buddhahood. They explain that up until this point,
they were unaware that they were worthy to follow that path,
illustrating this with the parable of the prodigal son who leaves
home, during which time his father amasses great wealth. When the
son eventually returns, he feels unworthy to claim his birthright,
and his father must employ a series of stratagems to convince him
of his destiny.
The
Buddha’s skillful means are illustrated yet again with the parable
of the conjured city. Here a group of travelers set out on a long
journey in search of treasure, led by a guide. They become
discouraged along the way and decide to turn back, but the guide
tells them that there is a city just ahead. After they have rested
in the city and regained their resolve, the guide tells them that
he had conjured the city and that the treasure lies ahead. Here,
the Buddha is the guide, and the treasure is buddhahood. If the
Buddha had explained from the outset how long the path to
buddhahood was, many would not seek it. He therefore inspires
beings to seek the nirvāṇa of the arhat. Yet, when they reach it, he explains that it is
an illusion and that the true goal lies ahead.
Woven
throughout the sūtra are what might be called strategies of
legitimation. The Buddha recounts numerous stories from the far
distant past, before past events described in the earlier
tradition. These accounts describe the Lotus
Sūtra being taught long ago in distant
universes, with the members of the ancient audience, including the
Buddha while he was a bodhisattva, now appearing in the present. If
the Lotus Sūtra was
taught long ago, it cannot be a modern innovation, something that
Buddhism has traditionally condemned. Also found throughout the
sūtra are various prophecies and promises of the glories that await
the devotees of the Lotus, even if that devotion takes such simple
forms as reciting a single verse of the sūtra, offering flowers to
the text, or just joining one’s hands in reverence. Those
beneficent admonitions are sometimes paired with warnings, and not
only of the fate that awaits those who fail to acknowledge that
the Lotus Sūtrais the word of the
Buddha. In Chapter Ten, for example, the Buddha warns that devotees
of the Lotus will face
mockery and disparagement after he has passed into
nirvāṇa.
Chapter
Eleven contains one of the most fantastic (in the original sense of
that word) scenes in Buddhist literature. The traditional structure
that houses the relics of the Buddha is
the stūpa (from which
the English wordtope derives), a large
mound. According to the traditional account of his final days, the
Buddha instructed his disciples to cremate his body and place his
remains in a stūpa. Over the course of the history of Buddhism in
India, such reliquaries became increasingly elaborate, taking the
form of the pagoda in East Asia and
the chedi in
Thailand.
As the
chapter opens, a massive stūpa, miles high and miles wide, emerges
from the earth and floats in the air above the assembly. A voice
inside is heard praising the Lotus
Sūtra. At the request of his disciples, the Buddha rises into
the air and opens the door of the stūpa to reveal not relics but a
living buddha, named Prabhūtaratna, who explains that he vowed long
ago that after his passage into nirvāṇa, wherever the Lotus
Sūtra is taught, his stūpa would
appear there. He then invites the Buddha to sit beside him. This
image of two buddhas seated side by side inside a stūpa would be
widely depicted in Buddhist art over the centuries. Among the
doctrinal revelations that this scene intimates is that a buddha
does not die after he passes into nirvāṇa.
Women play
minor roles in the Lotus. Among the many arhats to whom the Buddha
offers prophecies of future buddhahood are two nuns: his
stepmother, Mahāprajāpatī, and his wife, Yaśodharā. The most famous
scene involving a female occurs in Chapter Twelve, in which the
bodhisattva Mañjuśrī introduces an
eight-year-old nāga princess
(often depicted as half human, half snake) and says that she will
attain buddhahood. When Śāriputra disputes this, saying that women
have five obstructions that prevent their attainment of buddhahood,
the nāga princess instantaneously achieves buddhahood, but only
after first turning into a male.
Billions of
bodhisattva had arrived from other universes to witness the stūpa
that emerged from the earth. At the beginning of Chapter Fifteen,
they volunteer to remain in this world to preserve and promote
the Lotus after the
Buddha has passed into nirvāṇa. The Buddha politely declines, saying
that there are sufficient bodhisattvas from his own world for the task. At that point, another remarkable
scene occurs, as billions of golden bodhisattvas emerge from
beneath the earth. When the bodhisattva Maitreya asks who these
bodhisattvas are, the Buddha explains that they are his disciples,
whom he placed on the path to buddhahood aeons ago. Maitreya is
puzzled by this because he knows that the Buddha only achieved
enlightenment forty years ago.
It is at
this point that the Buddha makes the second great revelation of
theLotus Sūtra (the first being that
there is only one vehicle). In the next chapter, the Buddha
explains that the world believes that he was born as a prince, left
the palace in search of enlightenment, practiced austerities for
six years, and achieved buddhahood near the city of Gayā. In fact,
he achieved buddhahood incalculable aeons ago, and the life story
that is so well known is yet another case of his skillful means; he
was enlightened all the time, yet feigned those deeds to inspire
the world. Not only was he enlightened long ago, his passage into
nirvāṇa is not
imminent. His lifespan is immeasurable: “I abide forever without
entering parinirvāṇa.”
This
occasions yet another parable, that of the physician father. The
sons of a physician have taken a poison that has driven them mad,
such that they refuse to take the antidote that he prepares. He
thus leaves the city and has a messenger return to tell his sons
that he has died. The shock of the news returns them to their
senses, and they take the antidote. The father then returns home.
Here, the Buddha is the father. If the beings of the world knew
that he would always be available to teach the path, there would be
no urgency to their practice. By pretending to pass into
nirvāṇa, the Buddha
causes them to see that the world is a place
of distress that must be escaped. In reality, however, this world
is a buddha field, a pure land. As the Buddha says, “Although my
pure land never decays, the sentient see it as ravaged by fire and
torn with anxiety and distress. … To the deluded and unenlightened
I say that I have entered nirvāṇa, although in fact I am really
here.”
The
remainder of the sūtra is devoted to enumerating the many benefits
that await those who honor the Lotus
Sūtra and the sad fate that awaits those who
disparage it. Although the sūtra has twenty-eight chapters, it
appears to end with Chapter Twenty-Two, when the Buddha exhorts his
disciples to spread the teaching, after which they return to their
abodes. As will be discussed in the next chapter, scholars
speculate that this was the final chapter of an earlier version of
the Lotus, with the last six chapters
being interpolations.
Several of
those chapters seem to be designed to promote the worship of
bodhisattvas mentioned in early chapters, two of whom deserve
special mention. The first
is Bhaiṣajyarāja (Medicine King). The Buddha
explains that as a bodhisattva in a previous life, he honored a
previous buddha by ingesting oils, soaking his robes in oil, and
setting himself on fire, with his body illuminating billions of
worlds for twelve hundred years. As we shall see in chapter 3,
monks in China would follow his example, their bodies burning for
considerably shorter periods.
Although
Chapter Twenty-Five is regarded as an interpolation, it is in many
ways the most famous chapter in the Lotus
Sūtra, widely memorized and circulated independently. It is
devoted to the most famous bodhisattva in Buddhism, Avalokiteśvara:
the “Lord Who Looks Down” in Sanskrit, rendered as the “Perceiver
of the Sounds of the World” in Chinese, with both versions of the
name suggesting his compassion in responding to those in need.
Here, the salvation that he offers is not only spiritual but also
physical, rescuing those who are drowning, attacked by demons,
beset by bandits, and thrown in prison. If a woman is childless, he
will provide a child. This bodhisattva has the power to appear in
any form. As we shall see in chapter 3, there are many stories of
Avalokiteśvara disguising himself to benefit those in
need.
