The acceptance of the Lotus Sūtra as the foundational scripture of Buddhism in several Buddhist schools, perhaps most notably the Tiantai School founded by Zhiyi (538-597 CE), endowed the text with doctrinal authority and helped lead to its popularization in East Asia, despite the fact that the text did not achieve such power of influence in South Asian Buddhist cultures. By analyzing important passages of the Lotus Sūtra and considering the reception and usage of the scripture in the Tiantai School, my general goal is to establish the original polemical purpose of the text and understand why the text garnered such importance and authority in the course of its transmission into East Asia. Specifically, this essay argues that the discursive-rhetorical formation of the Lotus Sūtra, which initially places the text in a more specific, limited tradition of South Asian Buddhist polemics, was particularly useful in developing structural taxonomies of doctrinal knowledge (panjiao) in Chinese Buddhism.
Though this essay is not primarily concerned with establishing the original authorship or date and place of composition of the Lotus Sūtra, I nevertheless find it necessary to begin with a brief discussion of the Lotus Sūtra’s textual history. Unfortunately, the textual history of the Lotus Sūtra before being translated into Chinese, first in 255 CE and later in a much more popular version by Kumārajiva (trad. 344-413 CE) in 406, remains mysterious. While scholars seem to agree unanimously, based on philological study and analysis of veiled cultural referents in the text, that most of the sūtra was composed and compiled before the second century in northwest India, there is insufficient documentary evidence to substantiate more exact claims as to when the text was composed, where, or in what language.[1]
Using only this meager information, however, two important general conclusions can be reached regarding the Lotus Sūtra. First, because the earliest Chinese translations appeared by the middle of the third century, researchers can reasonably assume that the translators were working with reliable source material. The Chinese translations may, in fact, be closer to the original text of the Lotus Sūtra than the later Sanskrit versions that researchers have more recently discovered. Second, if the Lotus Sūtra was composed between the first and second centuries, as most scholars have indicated, then this conveniently places the composition of the text contemporaneous to the emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The text, therefore, should be read as a preliminary articulation of this major shift in Buddhist practice, and as such is entrenched in the context of intra-Buddhist polemical debates that erupted following the emergence of the Mahāyāna movement. These two critical insights into the Lotus Sūtra provide the modern reader with enough historical background to commit to a critical analysis of the text.
The basic discursive-rhetorical structure of the Lotus Sūtra is revealed in its second chapter, “Expedient Means,” in which the historical Buddha gives an extended discourse on the Law (dharma). The famous parables that follow it (as well as the less famous chapters extolling the virtues of preaching, reciting, and venerating the text itself) can only be understood after one grasps the basic premises of this chapter, which can be neatly summarized in two contrasting teachings about the law. At the opening of the chapter, the Buddha proclaims, “The wisdom of the Buddhas is infinitely profound and immeasurable. The door to this wisdom is difficult to understand and difficult to enter,” and only bodhisattvas are capable of understanding and practicing the true Law of the Buddha.[2] This statement emphasizes the profoundly recondite nature of the Law, yet it also functions as a pre-emptive defense against part of the sūtra’s imagined readership, which would likely include adherents of the so-called “lesser” vehicles. The Lotus Sūtra maintains that those who fail to understand it are merely deluded by lesser teachings or their own hidden malevolence.[3]
Despite this defensive, possibly elitist posture that the text assumes at the opening of the chapter, the Buddha then goes on to make an equally bold but now universalistic gesture:
The original vow of the Buddhas
was that the Buddha way, which they themselves practice,
should be shared universally among living beings
so that they too may attain this same way.[4]
In marked contrast to the monastic emphasis among the southern schools of Buddhism, the Lotus Sūtra argues that everyone, regardless of institutional affiliation, is capable of practicing the religion and attaining Buddhahood.
These two statements, equally important for Mahāyāna Buddhism’s soteriological mission, are nevertheless in tension with each other: on the one hand, the true teaching of the Buddha is seen as impenetrable to the majority of practicing Buddhists, while on the other hand, the Buddha is obliged to convey this teaching to all sentient beings. The first assertion depends on the ineffability of the dharma to explain the incongruities between the Lotus Sūtra doctrine and the earlier scriptures in the Pali canon, while the second assertion would seem to depend on the dharma’s accessibility to uphold a new advance toward universalism. This tension finds resolution in the doctrine of upāya or “expedient means,” which claims that Buddhas of the past, present and future without exception use “countless numbers of expedient means, various causes and conditions, and words of simile and parable in order to expound the doctrines for the sake of living beings.”[5] In this model, which reconciles the text’s universalistic language with its contextual grounding in Buddhist polemics, the teachings and doctrines in their multiplicity are revealed to be merely provisional measures, rhetorical facades designed to captivate listeners and draw followers toward a deeper, more meaningful “encounter” with the dharma.
Notes
[1] See Burton Watson, Introduction to The Essential Lotus: Selections from the Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and Tsukamoto Keishō, Source Elements of the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Integration of Religion, Thought, and Culture (Tokyo: Kosei, 2007).
[2] Burton Waton, trans. and ed., The Essential Lotus: Selections from the Lotus Sutra, 1.
[3] Ibid., 24: “When evil persons in ages to come / hear the Buddha preach the single vehicle, / they will be confused, will not believe or accept it, / will reject the Law and fall into evil paths.”
[4] Ibid., 19.
[5] Ibid., 9.
